.: Archives :. .: Frequented Links :. » Stand To Reason » CNet News » SlashDot » Church of God, Exeter » Weblogs » Daypop » blogdex » Scripting News » Scobleizer » Talking Moose » Greg Franklin » Joshua Allen » Steve Vore » Larry Staton » Evan Williams » James Snell » Bill Lazar .: Family :. » Kim Fahrni » Jerry Fahrni » Lori Fahrni .: Friends :. » Richard Caetano » Jim Hainline » Paul Harrington » Chris Hopkins » David Cole » Daved Kuns » Carlos Escobar » Cass McNutt » Ben Padilla » Tim Torian » Chris Edwards » Justin Stolle » S. Douglass Gilman » Michael Murray .: Misc. links :. » Visalia First Assembly » Heart of the Valley » The Great Valley » City of Exeter » Downtown Visalia » City of Visalia » Kaweah Oaks Preserve » Movie Times » State of California » Softball - 2001 » ThinkGeek Wish List » Upheaval .: Web Dev Stuff :. » The Web Standards Project » Zeldman » Eric Costello » HTML Validator » CSS Validator .: Development Stuff :. » Central Cal Developer's » Visio on MSDN » MSDN » C/C++ Users Journal » Got Dot Net? » Scripting News » FatBrain » CheezyPing .: What I do :. » Visio

Friday, October 05, 2001 [12:21 PM] This story proves there is still love in this world. Read it, you won't be disappointed. [10:07 AM] Howdy do... I had lunch with some good friends yesterday and finally got to meet Mr. Cass McNutt. Good fella. According to Richard he's a big thinker, modeling type. So this is just for you Cass... Yesterday Visio was given a pretty favorable review by Extreme Tech. The modeling tools are going to be a part of the high end VS.Net. So go tell all your modeling friends to take another look. They might be surprised by what they find. :-) Back to it... Thursday, October 04, 2001 [5:22 PM] More Manila... Richard has Manila fever. I don't know how you cure it, but I don't think I'm going to try! :-) This is wicked cool stuff. Everyone should have a Manila server in their home! Richard wrote a Frontier script to grab traffic information right from a page. That's pretty darned sweet! Anyway check the script out, along with the results here. Add it to your site, all it really needs is an edit control so you can type in the roads you'd like to get information on. Could be useful if you live in California, especially somewhere with traffic problems! Cool stuff! [3:53 PM] Meetings and such... Scoble: "weblogs at work would quickly fill up with junk." I don't agree with that. Anyway, most company's emails are full of junk. Most companies spend way too much time in meetings that are full of junk. Amen... Meetings are, of course, necessary. But they should be short and sweet. If they take longer than ten minutes and they have to be held in a meeting room then you might as well just shoot me. Now don't take that statement too seriously, but you get the point. Just shutup and write code for heavens sake! I'm having a great day, howz about you? No seriously I am. :-) [9:07 AM] Good Morning... Last night we; Richard, Daved, Chris, and myself, worked on our new Manila hosting site. Boy-o-boy do we have a ways to go. There's a ton of power under the Manila hood but with that power comes complexity. It has an outline metaphor which is good, but it's just too darned difficult to find what you're looking for. You'll find that with any complex system. That's ok. We'll figure it out. :-) Once it's up and running folks should have multiple options to suite their hosting needs. We're going to give away some free accounts, I've mentioned that before, but it's not all for free. The lowest priced site should fit into any budget. Daved is the man responsible for the pricing we'll see what he comes up with. The good thing about Manila is that is completely scriptable and includes a TON of pre-built scripts to do lots and lots of stuff for you. We're going to have to write a little script to update the DNS server automagically but that shouldn't be too difficult. Heck, if we dig into it a bit more we'll probably find a script that already does what we want. :-) All-in-all it's coming along. It's taking a lot longer than we wanted it to but it's coming together. Stay tuned... Wednesday, October 03, 2001 [1:36 PM] How true it is... When Microsoft purchased Visio Corporation everyone in the company was freaked out about multiple things. Losing their job was the biggest of course but after that came the fear of Microsoft culture creeping into the workplace. I was just reading this story and it made me think of how much Visio "the division of Microsoft" has changed in the past couple of years. Microsoft has treated me fairly, very fairly. There are some things I love about it and some things I don't really care for. One thing is their corporate culture. They don't have one, that is, unless you count a University campus mentality as a corporate culture. Visio's offices are in downtown Seattle near Pike Place Market. Seattle is one of my favorite cities. It has everything one could ever want in a city, just like San Francisco or New York only a bit smaller. Folks that work at Visio care about the city and what it means to work there. The city is woven into the fabric of the company itself. I love the fact that when I'm there I can walk out the door and I have a gazillion places I could go eat. I love the fact that the hotel is across the street. I love the city! Since the acquisition we've been pretty much left alone as a group. A few annoying things managed to creep into the mix. Like cheezy "posters" hung up by the elevators reminding you to do some task like a good employee. At Visio that would have NEVER happened. No cheeze allowed, thank you very much. Now we've hired a PM from across the lake. Our whole development process has been disrupted. We wern't much into writing specs as a development staff. We just did the work. That's good and it's bad, I know. Now we're spending entirely too much time talking and too little time doing. I know in the end it'll all work out just fine because this team is full of MONSTER coders. The change is just a little sad in a way. The Visio culture will be gone soon, replaced by College graduates that knew nothing of the former glory days of Visio. Sigh... It's probably only going to be a matter of time before Redmond decides the Visio development team needs to be in Redmond, not Seattle. Then all hell will break loose. The mass exodus will begin. I'm sure everyone that's been a part of an acquisition has gone through this. Becoming a Microsoft employee has been mostly good. It's just sad to see the original culture slip away. Nothing can be done about it, except wait. Wait for all your friends to leave. Then it'll be time to move on. Until then... [9:48 AM] Howdy... Last night while reading the paper I came across this cartoon that really struck home. I think it's the best description of what 09.11.01 did to the country, and the world. This is something we cannot let happen here in the US. Brother against brother is exactly how terrorism wins. Look at yourself in the mirror and see what looks back, hopefully it's not hate. On a lighter note my youngest daughter asked me how to remember the names of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. I don't remember how we got on the subject, but if you have children it's important to be able to answer these types of questions. Here's how to remember the names of the seven dwarfs. Pay attention there will be a test. There are two S's, two D's, and three emotions... Sleepy Sneezy Doc Dopey Happy Bashful Grumpy So now you too can name all seven dwarfs without too much brain strain! In the words of Tigger, T.T.F.N! Tuesday, October 02, 2001 [9:39 AM] Check this out! Richard actually hooked up a couple of sites last night as a test. Woo-hoo! :-) It's going to be real very soon! [9:10 AM] Getting closer... :-) Well it looks like Richard made Bloghouse publicly available last night. It's not real yet but it's on the net. Time to take the next step and open it up to folks! Stay tuned. Kim and I usually listen to, and watch, Good Morning America as we get ready for our day. This morning Charlie Gibson just cracked me up. He was talking to some government official, didn't catch his name, and he kept asking what our plans were for attack on Osama "Joe Momma" bin Laden and the Taliban. Like the guy is going to spill his guts and say "Well Charlie we plan to attack here at this time." The media is too funny. They want to make sure they get their cameras in position so once all hell breaks loose they're the first to capture it. Oy... Time to go earn my keep... Monday, October 01, 2001 [1:49 PM] Afternoon y'all... I just wanted to point whoever is listening to Jake Savin's home on the web, Jake's Brainpan. He's collecting some really interesting stuff related to the terrorist attack on 09.11.01. This particular story really gets you into how these radicals think, scary stuff. Thanks Jake. Here's what I'm going to look like in another thirty to forty years. :-) Until we meet again... [9:53 AM] Hey ya'll... Good Morning! This weekend was movie and music weekend at the Fahrni house. We rented Along Came a Spider, and 15 minutes. I enjoyed both movies; Kim said Along Came a Spider didn't do the book justice. I'm sure you're right, they never do honey. We also managed to sneak out to a movie Saturday night. I was in the mood for a scary movie, Kim was agreeable, so we saw Jeepers Creepers. It certainly wasn't the best choice of movies when there are so many good movies showing. It wasn't horrible; it's just not going to become a classic horror film. The story was ok but the bad guy was extremely cool! I won't talk about it so you can go see for yourself. I also picked up the new P.O.D. CD, Satellite, this weekend. This album will knock your head off! It's wonderful, if you're into that type of music. Richard was able to configure our Manila server this weekend. We're going to try to kick off Bloghouse.com this week. So if you're in the market for a new Manila site. Come by and check it out later in the week. We're going to be serving up a few free sites. They'll be limited, so once the gates are opened it'll be first come first served! :-) Build, build, build... It seems like that's all I do these days...