The Iron Yuppie

Why when I hit Shift-N for new folder does it NOT open the new folder for reading? What do they think I'm going to do with it? And why, when a folder is expanded, will it not jump to the next folder, only the next feed? This is irritating.

Good things about MS products recently:

Live Writer continues to impress me. No tool comes close in ease of setup and ease of use... except I still can't figure out why I'm having problems uploading images. Oh well.

Exchange/Outlook now auto parses the "To:" line so when I create a rule, the DL is auto-populated in the "When a message is sent to:" drop down list... nice work!

Bad:

Contacts in Outlook are a mess. It's much much harder than one would think to combine contacts together when you have dupes. And the integration with Windows Messenger is a blessing and a curse... great, I have all those random people I responded to in my contact box, but there's virtually no information about them. And in the process of trying to clean them up, somehow it broke the link between that and Windows Live Messenger and now the process of recreating all those IM contacts is incredibly painful. Ack!

In my endless search for a decent blog aggregator, my friend suggested I give bloglines a try. He was right, it feels a lot better.

However, continual commentary by Scoble, support for exactly the right hotkeys and the ability to easily rename a whole bunch of feeds into something that makes sense to me makes Google Reader the new winner for me. Just FYI, those hotkeys are:

• J = next post
• cntrl + N = next folder
• cntrl + P = previous folder
• spacebar = scroll post
• shift-spacebar = reverse scroll post

Of course these things are just as hidden as in bloglines. In the help file? Gimme a break.

D

I've always been fascinated with the IRA and the troubles (as the Brits refer to them). There's a particularly interesting, although likely the book is fairly biased to Michael Collins, still should be interesting.

 

Wow, I can't believe I missed this site before... http://wtfsrsly.com

There is some absolutely priceless stuff on there.

Example? INSANE scenes from "The Wicker Man". I realize this stuff is out of context, but holy cow that's an insane movie.

I've been doing some coding on the side, and the first thing I do whenever I run into a problem or question is type as much of the original error text into a search engine. So I was chugging along recently, and I was looking at the SQL Profiler, and saw a lot of 'exec sp_reset_connection' in there. I was wondering if I was doing something wrong, so off I went to live.com (http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=sql.server.profiler+exec+sp_reset_connection&src=IE-SearchBox):

• Search: "sql.server.profiler exec sp_reset_connection"

1 result.

• Microsoft SQL Server - Examining SQL Server Trace Files - SQLTeam.com

• sp_reset_connection. If you're using connection pooling you'll see lots ... P3 int set @P3=1 declare @P4 int set @P4=1 exec sp ... What's New in SQL Server Profiler 2000 (sqlmag.com) on 5/2/2001

Uh oh, maybe it's time to alter the search terms. But that brief sentence after the stored procedure name looks promising. Let's go to the video tape!

Examining SQL Server Trace Files: http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=24658

If you're using connection pooling you'll see lots and lots of calls to sp_reset_connection. Typically you'll see one before each SQL batch or stored procedure. ODBC and OLEDB use this to reset a connection before it's "passed around" in the connection pool. Gert Drapers has a good description of what sp_reset_connection resets. Basically I'd just ignore this in the trace (which is what I do in ClearTrace).

Wow. Exactly what I wanted.

For the curious, I also ran it against Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=sql.server.profiler+exec+sp_reset_connection&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1) and came up with 7 results, with the above link being the first. Odd part is that none of the rest of the links answered any of my questions and in fact are just distracting.