Jeremy Zongker

02/27/2007

Jeanette IMed me at work today to let me know I had a package sitting on the porch. I told her to open it and inside was three copies of a Japanese (could be Chinese, one of those "ese"es) version of the ADO.NET 2.0 book I wrote part of. It's kind of funny because most of the text is in Japanese, but every 10th word or so is in English and all the code is in English. It must be really hard being a programmer in a country where they don't speak English.

Hopefully I won't start getting hundreds of 12 cent royalty checks I have to sign. :-) Is there anything Seinfeld didn't cover?

Twin Sister?

02/18/2007

Remember that espisode of Seinfeld where George was dating the female version of Jerry? While working on the Dirt Motorsports website last week I discovered the female version of myself. http://www.worldofoutlaws.com/sprint/drivers/Becca%20Anderson.aspx Some coworkers of mine pointed her out to me and I was all prepared to argue she looked nothing like me until I saw the picture. That's just creepy.

Our Trip to OKC

08/29/2006

We took a day trip to OKC last Saturday just to get out of the house for a day. We went to the Ominplex during the day and to Remington Park at night. If you haven't been before the Omniplex is primarely an interactive science museum. They have an aviation and photography section too. Katrina had a blast there playing with all the different exhibits. Her favorite was the shadow wall. It flashes a strobe light against screen that then glows for the next few seconds except where your shadow was. We spent about four hours there before they closed and kicked us out.

They also had a planetarium that normally cost extra but they were including in the museum admission the day we went. It was pretty neat, but I wasn't as impressed as I thought I'd be. It was really just a static image of the night sky with an announcer pointing out constellations. I noticed they hadn't gotten around to taking Pluto out of their model solar system outside the planetarium yet.

After the Omniplex we drove half way across town to eat dinner at our usual place (Fazoli's), and then back to go Remington Park which is immediately next door to the Omniplex. I'd never been to a horse race before so wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but considering I spend about half my time at work on a horse racing website I figured I'd at least check it out. It was pretty entertaining. I wouldn't want to go every night, but we might go back once or twice a year.

I was really impressed that it didn't cost anything at all to go, both admission and parking were free. They even had free pop. I was also impressed that they had open seeting just a few feet away from the track and we were able to stand right at the finish line. It started raining after the first race ran so we went inside to watch the rest of them. They have second floor indoor seeting that overlooks the track.

Between it being dark out, sitting about 50 yards from the track and the horses running pretty fast most of my pictures turned out blurry (going to have to get yet another new lense). Here's a few that turned out. Kind of...

I got a new lens for my camera

06/26/2006

Katrina got me a new lens for my camera for Father's Day. I absolutely love it! It's a 70-300mm lense made for taking close up photos. It has almost 4 times the "zoom" of my current 28-80mm lens. The main reason I wanted it no so much for the zoom, but to be able to take pictures at poorly lit events. At both Jeanette's concert and the rodeo we went to a lot of the pictures turned out blurry. That's because when you zoom in, you're not taking in as much light so the shutter needs to say open longer. When you're taking a picture of something that's moving, this causes pictures to turn out blurry. This is a wider lense that can take in more light and take the same picture in less than half the time. I haven't been to any other indoor events to try it out yet, but I did play with it some last weekend. Here's two pics I got.

Netvibes is awsome

06/06/2006

After years of using Google as my home page I have finally switched to netvibes.com. Netvibes is a portal site like the thousands of other portals I can't stand, but this one is very well done. There's no advertisement on the site, there are quite a few modules you can add to you page, it has a very "clean" look to it, and best of all it supports tabs for multiple pages of content.

Of course I wouldn't totally give up Google. The first module I added to my page on each tab is for Google search. It's also the first time I've really used RSS feeds on a regular basis, just because I didn't like other readers, so I have all the content I watch on a single page now. The web bookmarks are nice just because you can have them with you on any computer.

My absolute favorite features are the task list and the notepad though. I have a very hard time keeping track of all of my tasks and this gives me a very convenient way to write them down and mark them off. Since it supports multiple tabs I can have a single log in that I use at work, on my laptop at home that I use for doing my side work, and on my main pc. I just switch tabs based on what I'm working on. Any time I'm at work and remember something I need to do when I get home, I just flip tabs and write it down, and vice-versa.

I have to say the only thing I don't like about it, is that it's French. :-) It's the best, if not only good thing to come out of France since french fries. It's definitely worth checking out. You can use it without creating an account, it just stores a cookie on your box. You loose the benefit of being able to access it from anywhere if you do though.