They [not 'They', but the weathermen] are saying we should expect up to 10 more inches of snow tomorrow - It's hard work hauling around rolled snowballs - as evidenced by my son taking a break here:

Me at the Piano: I practice playing the piano now and again - I'm not much of a player, but I like to sit and fiddle from fake books - I can fake a song by tri-chording and sustaining and playing the melody, and it's an enjoyable little side-trip on the road of life. Recently I've learned to play 'Piano Man' by Billy Joel - one of my favorite artists. Click the pic for bigger version.

Found on: Bread and Roses: "Bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now." Ok - I'll play this game...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C. /"

FrontPage extensions are both a blessing and a curse as any IIS web server admin/developer will tell you. On one hand, FrontPage is good at handling web sight management, fixing links, etc, etc... on the other hand, managing permissions can be a dicey affair, and hand-jamming permissions on the server to do what you want can screw up your FrontPage web (requiring reinstall cycles galore). GoDaddy's service attempts to stop the user from screwing up his FrontPage webs by not allowing you to hand-manage permissions on a FrontPage Extensions enabled hosting account...
BUT (the catch) if you're using Interdev or Visual Studio .NET, and you don't have FrontPage, you're out of luck! You need VS.NET to manage your ASPX files, and your code, etc, but you'll also need FrontPage Explorer (ONLY comes with FrontPage, mind you) to manage your directory permissions. Almost enough to make you want to become a php developer instead.

Welcome Googlebot! Since I moved the site off of Tripod, I've been waiting for the Google bots to pick up the new site address and start re-indexing my site. Looking at my logs today it appears that Google's bots are busily analyzing my site again - so, welcome robots ;)

Check your variable names: I was coding some ASP to track sessions to see how people surfed through my site (or if they even did) and I used a Session variable to store some information. In the Global.asa file under Session_OnEnd I put in some code and it wasn't working. I left it alone last night and came back to it later today. It turns out that I used different variable names to store the data than to retrieve the data. Same 'contextual' name, just stated in a different manner. So, lesson for the day is 'check your variable names'.
In other news, know that the Response.Redirect directive stops processing your ASP code right then and there, so if there's any code that needs to execute, it needs to be executed before the Redirect. I had incorrectly assumed that Response.Redirect would just write out a redirect to the user, and continue processing the asp file, but I learned that it doesn't when I tried to do a Session.Abandon afterwards, and the Sessions weren't closing out on the server.

Clicks for the sake of Clicks? The more I look at all of the referral programs, the more I am drawn into the referral programs that offer 10,000 and 15,000 free hits just for signing up. To whet my appetite I joined one that promised 10,000 free hits - Raginhits, it's called. When you sign up and add your URL, you can apply your free hits right away and start getting traffic to your site - you can even choose only 'manual clicks'. Hrmmmm, wait a minute? They have an auto-clicking option? You can earn credits just by leaving a browser open cycling through sites automatically? What's the quality of those clicks? I might as well buy time on Cable TV at 3:30AM, on the TV Guide channel, no less. More people might pay attention to that than to a browser they just left open for the sake of it?
Quickly, I assigned my credits to manual mode surfers only. Perhaps one will stop by my site and like it enough to stick around. Don't know if I'm going to sit and earn credits there, though. Most every site I get sent to is yet ANOTHER click-for-credit/cash site. So, I don't think my time is well spent.
The one thing I've enjoyed so far about BlogExplosion and BlogClicker is that it feels more community oriented. I read about other people's lives, and they come here and read my random nonsense. I've even personally connected with a few of them by email. It's pleasant, and it's what I wanted out of my blog - personal contact - not impersonal advertising hype. If you have a blog, I'd suggest these latter two programs (links on the left under Thanks...). Talk at you later.

Home to some of the most useful software on the planet - and it's free, no less - Sysinternals Freeware is for the System Administrator that has almost everything. Their newest release is a rootkit detector for Windows. It will find hidden registry keys and files that may provide the hiding locale for hidden bugs on your system. A rootkit is installed software that hides from virus scanners and the like, and gives administrative control (root in Unix terms) to the programs it's running. The 'kit' means that it's a utility with multiple skills, and is installed all at once by hackers to attempt to take over your machine and hide itself from detection. My favorite software they distribute, however, is Process Explorer - it lets you get into the nitty gritty's of the processes running on your machine, and can help you debug some of the nastiest problems if you know what to look for. I highly recommend this site.

You know - the moon is an ugly thing when viewed close up. I took this picture at 1/1250 shutter with a 300mm tele (off-hand) - F/5.6 with the camera set to ISO 400 - cropped out all the black sky to make the photo 640x480. (Click for full size)