Ken’s Blog

Nike’s recent series of Leave Nothing commercials centered on football have been great. Don’t recall the ad agency behind it but whoever they are, they’re really capturing the spirit (if not the reality) of football.

Their latest foray is “Fate” which depicts LT and Polumalu growing up to eventually meet on the playing field. It’s got a great remix of Ennio Morricone’s Ecstacy of Gold track from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The first one I saw was from a year ago that is still my favorite. It’s all about the fight to get to that end zone…the best part of football.

Hope they continue to put these suckers together for a little longer.

I don’t know how many times I’ve run into errors caused by the fact that I wasn’t paying attention to dependencies between SP’s that call other SP’s.

Got this one because I added a parameter and forgot to check for dependencies. The resulting shift of parameters (calling SPs would be one param short so it’s like they were shifted up/left by one) caused this error because the parameter that was next was an XML param:

Operand type clash: int is incompatible with xml

Never know what you’re gonna get.

UPDATE: All Web Dev content is being moved. This entry can be found here now. Be advised as this content will eventually get archived into oblivion!!!

Since I keep running into this error and it makes no sense by itself AND I spend time each time I get it to figure out what the issue is, I’m posting this sucker here for posterity.

I’m getting this error on a call to ExecuteXMLReader off the SqlClient Command object.

And…it’s a stupid mistake as you’d expect. I assigned a parameter in .Net SqlDbType.Int when it was supposed to be a SqlDblType.UniqueIdentifier. Gotta love copy and paste errors.

UPDATE: All Web Dev content is being moved. This entry can be found here now. Be advised as this content will eventually get archived into oblivion!!!

So, I saw the Max Payne film on Friday. I can’t say it made me piss my pants or anything but it definitely had a good mix of the required elements for a movie based on the Max Payne game:

1) Moody? – check!

2) Dark? – check!

3) Max looks like he could kick some ass? – check!

4) Mona Sax looks bad-ass? – check (but I couldn’t help but see Family Guy’s Meg in Mila Kunis)

5) Max’s family dies for a bad, non-random reason though you’re meant to think it’s random? – check (c’mon…that’s not a spoiler…you should’ve played the game)

6) Bullet time/slo-mo used? – ch–well, sorta.

That’s gotta be my biggest problem with the movie. This is the first game to mimick the Matrix-style slo-mo in a way that worked. You could slow down time and shoot the hell out of your enemies while they shoot at where you were. There was something like one or two scenes. It reminds me of Doom (not that I can say that was a great movie by any measure) when they had a 30 second or whatever it was bit where they filmed it like you were the main character.

Is it worth seeing? I think so. It’s a great movie if you want something moody and dark. It’s got the whole heaven and hell thing going as well so…

Oh, and if you’re a fan or otherwise liked the movie, stay through the credits!  

One stupid comment from Sen. McCain and you’d think after the news media had some fun with it (see: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), it would disappear…not so in the Internet Age. Now, it’s a full fledged commercial enterprise!

Check it out: http://www.thatone08.com/

With Presidential elections being more show than substance, you’d think that a candidate backed by the “richer” party would have better advisors…

Well, it seems Lord British finally made it to space (without blowing up on a Russian-made rocket). Dear old dad was on hand to view the spectacle though since he was still on Terra Firma, he couldn’t exactly do what he probably wanted to do: pop out of the International Space Station hatch when they docked and say “What the Hell took you so long?”

The NY Times decided it was worthy of a poke at NASA which is honestly a long time overdue. NASA threw away a great opportunity to make some serious coin by not being proactive and figuring out a way to get tourists up. Fucking idiots. I guess when you try to get engineers to run a business you just end up getting tin cans with leaks.

I wish Mr. Garriott an enjoyable 10 days (9 now) in the cramped confines of the ISS with nice doses of cosmic rays penetrating the hull.   I’m sure the view is great when you wait for that opening in the debris field.

kn