Yes, I know. It’s been a while. Well, too long. Holidays and such were BUSY BUSY BUSY. And then … well … I don’t know. But yes, I am still alive and kicking. :-)

Quick update on upcoming stuff:

• Houston TechFest is tomorrow!! Houston tech community uber-conference is happening after being rescheduled due to Ike. If you haven’t registered, you can still show up … you just won’t get a T-shirt. The whole community evangelism team will be on hand and we’ll also have a ton of kewl stuff to give away … including Rock Band 2 and a Lego Mindstorm robot!!
• Dallas MSDN Developer Conference is on Monday. This is the very last of the MSDN Dev Con series. There’s still time to register also!
• South Houston .NET User Group is, after a delay due to (once again) Ike, is getting rolling with their first meeting on February 4th at the Clear Lake City – County Freeman Branch Library. I’ll be speaking there … doing an introduction to unit testing with C#.

So … what’s been happening with me during all this silent time? Besides being busy with work, holidays and all that stuff, the biggest thing was that I had Lasik done. It’s really cool … I’ve gone from not being able to see the big “E” on an eye chart (was just a fuzzy mess) to having 20/15 vision. It’s almost surreal being able to see so well after wearing glasses since 3rd grade and contacts since freshman year of high school. It was quick, easy and, best of all, painless. I was back up and running just fine the very next day. Another thing of not (on a more personal level, that is) is that I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my personal system to an AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core … with 8 GB of RAM as well. It’s fast. I really don’t know (yet) what to do with all of it …

Finally … for those looking for CSK 3 news … none yet, but keep an eye here. :-)

I'm heading out for a ride with a buddy (another geek) this coming Sunday AM, July 13th. We're probably going to head out to Sam Houston Nat'l Forest, where it's an overall nice ride with some good twisties.

If you are in Houston and interested in joining up, please do. We'll be meeting at about 7:30 AM at the IHOP at Spring Cypress and 249.

And what, exactly, does air conditioning have to do with my shoulder? Yes, I did ask that. It seemed amusing at the time but then, I was also in some amount of pain.

As you can probably guess, that happened to me. How? Well, stupidity is really the root of it. Was making a U-Turn on my bike and slowed down too much. Hit too much brake, I believe. Well, if you’ve ever ridden a bicycle or a motorcycle, they behave much the same when when they aren’t going. They fall. And so … my bike fell over on the left side and I fell with it. Hit the road pretty hard on my left shoulder. My head also hit the street, but I was wearing my helmet so that just felt like a little bump. I was also wearing my jacket, which has padding and protective armor. On the shoulder, even, but it’s more towards the top of the shoulder rather than the side. Still, the jacket prevented me from getting any road rash at all.

That said, my shoulder hurt. A lot. And it had no strength at all. So … off to the hospital I went. I didn’t think that anything was broken, but I did think that I had a dislocated shoulder. Not quite. Turns out that a shoulder separation is different. You can read about it here but, in short, it’s when the junction of the clavical (collarbone) and the scapula (shoulder blade) are separated. And mine just happens to be a Grade 3 separation. A dislocation involves the humerus (upper arm bone) coming out of the socket.

It’s getting better now … when I went to the ER, I couldn't move my left arm much without some pretty serious pain. Taking off my t-shirt was tedious, to say the least. Now, while I still have a good deal of soreness, I can move my arm almost all around without too much pain. Lifting or anything that requires any amount of strength, however, still hurts.

Here’s a shot from my XRay.

You can see the collarbone sticking up … even up to produce a lump on my shoulder. Doc says that I’ll have this forever unless I get surgery … and the surgery is optional at this point and would mainly be done for cosmetic reasons. So I’ll pass. 

As you can see, I've updated the look of this here little blog o' mine. I know it's not quite perfect and I'm sure some of y'all out there would do a much better job of making it pretty, but I think it's not too shabby for a graphically-challenged programmer-type such as myself. It's still using dasBlog, of course, and I still have a bit to do before it's completely finished ... I want to add some additional graphical decorations and need to do some work on the admin stuff ... but it's mostly there. I also need to add some more blogs to the blog roll.

I would like to thank a couple of folks for inspiration:

• Ben Scheirman: His presentation at the Austin Code Camp seemed to make me think that I could actually pull this off using CSS only for the layout. And also provide some tips. Additionally, I examined (in detail) the layout and CSS for www.dasblog.info, which he designed. So ... after some 10 years or so of using tables for layout, I'm finally moving past them.
• Joshua Flanagan: I pretty much took the <fieldset> idea for the individual blog items from his site design.
• John Forsythe: I started with his DirectionalRedux theme for dasBlog. It is somewhat unrecognizable now, but it did provide the base. And a lot of it really didn't change much.
• The whole dasBlog team, of course!

Some notes on the trials and tribulations ...

You saw, I'm sure, the issue that I came across if my previous entry. If not, well, go check it out then!

That said, the templating engine for dasBlog, while powerful was, IMHO, somewhat difficult to work with ... no editor design support. While I do use HTML view for my markup, I still like the designer views. That's pretty minor though, considering the functionality and flexibility provided by dasBlog.

Now, I am using Framework 3.5 for the AJAX support and the AJAX Control Toolkit. However, I found that enabling the search highlighting feature of dasBlog blew that up (at least that's what it looked like). So I turned it off. While it was somewhat difficult to figure out, it's really not that big of a deal.

Overall, most of the real trials and tribulations were all my fault ... I'm just graphically challenged and that's that. Ensuring that the site looked OK in both IE and FireFox was fun ... each one has it's own little quirks ... but I'm sure that's not a surprise to any of you. There will be additional updates in the future but, for now, I'm going to start Memorial Day weekend by blowing something up. Virtually, of course! ;-)

Well, I just finished creating a resource in MSDN Code Gallery.  If you haven't checked this out yet, you really need to. All kinds of goodness up there. It looks like is running the CodePlex engine (and it probably is) but without a lot of the functionality of CodePlex.  Of course, it has a different goal and purpose. CodePlex is for complete projects and provides a collaborative environment for developers to build Open Source applications. Code Gallery, however, just has code snippets and other useful stuff that you can add to your projects.

So ... this resource that I created ... it's not published yet, so you can't find it. However ... I will be adding code samples from this blog up there so that you can download them easily for inclusion in your projects. When I get that done ... and that should be in the next week or two ... I'll post the link to it here and will also have a link on links at the right.