Eve of Christmas Eve

I'll try to blog later but for now here is day 23 of the Hubble space picture Christmas countdown.

Wish I had started this earlier

Today someone at work showed me this web page that counts up to Christmas days using Hubble pictures. Here is the link and here is todays picture.

One down! 200,000 to go!

Since my wife has already blogged about our great adventure into the great unknown, I decided to blog about a problem I finally solved with my monopoly game. (Note, I only solved one of my many many problems I will have to solve.)

I was assigned to write a monopoly program and use a SQL database in the solution. Well, the important thing of this assignment was to not have a working game, but to write all of the documentation and to have a good amount of work be put into the game. Well one of the problems I ran into was deleting players from the game at the conclusion of a game. I would have to go in and manually delete them after each game. This was not a viable option if I ever wanted to produce this game. But after many many MANY hours I finnaly figured it out.

Now, just some background information, I have an SQL database called PlayerData where I store all the player's data in the game. The primary key in the database is TurnNum. Each player is assigned a TurnNum of their turn in the game. This may cause a problem in the game later. If player 1 goes bankrupt, then he should leave the game. I'll have to decide later on what I'll do then, either delete player 1 and reassign the player numbers or automatically skip players who have gone bankrupt. But anyways, I finally figured out how to delete the players from the PlayerData database. SqlDataSource1 connects to the PlayerData database.

SqlDataSource1.DeleteCommand = "DELETE FROM [PlayerData] WHERE [TurnNum]='1'";
SqlDataSource1.Delete();

So, what it does is change the SQL delete command from "DELETE FROM [PlayerData] WHERE [TurnNum]=@TurnNum" and assigns it to delete player one in the game.

This whole thing was rather frustrating to figure out, but that is the headache of computer programming. I thought I could just use the SqlDataSource1.Dispose() function, but the failed to do anything.

Oh, and just to close this blog, I would like to make sure you all know that I am NOT a nerd!

Lunch break

So I decided to write a quick little blurb during my lunch break today. Mostly because I was going to post last night but never got around to it. Some of the guys at work read this comic called xkcd and as I was looking at some of the comics I ran across this one.

Well, this got me to thinking. Our child is going to be due in February, so there is a chance that it might be born on groundhogs day. I don't think momma will find it very funny if our kid plays this joke on us.


This one is for the nerds out there. (of which, I am NOT one)

I promise! I'm not a nerd!!!

Ok, this is bad, but for the second day in a row, I'm going to talk about something nerdy. This is a game guy at work told me about. It's a pretty fun physics puzzle game where you get a ball or block from one square to another only using some gears and branches and these water power things. You'll have to check it out for your self. It's called fantastic contraptions and this is one of my designs to solve one of the levels. I like it because you at first think that some of the balls I used in it are extra, but in the end I need all three of them to solve the level. (Here is a screen shot for the lazy. Also, I think this post needed a picture.)


Also, the results of the poll are in and it decidedly spoke in favor of my brother to start blogging. Unfortunately my brother doesn't care what the results are. He decided that the results were bogus and so he doesn't need to listen to the results. If you would like to, you can leave a comment for him since he does read this blog, and tell him yourself that he should get a blog. Or I could post his email and let you email yourself. I think I'll wait on the posting of the email address.

Really funny!!!!

This is a you tube video a guy at work sent out. It's really funny.



This is starting to scare me because I seem to be finding so many nerdy things either funny or cool. I was also going to talk about the web site the same guy showed me earlier call fantastic contraptions. I think I will talk about it in a later post. But I'm leery to do so because it will make me look like a nerd, and as all of my friends I quite aware, I am NOT a nerd! Oh well, watch and enjoy.