I have been chatting up the #GoogleGSO thread this morning after hearing the JoshInTheBox Google Song on 1075KZL this morning.
Play it here:

It seams like there is a lot of discomfort around how the city of Greensboro is handling the marketing campaign to try and lure Google into our town. First they abandon their 1,400 follower twitter account in order to create a new branded one instead of simply using a hash-tag, and then they pay $10,000 for RLF to build a wordpress site, which is Google’s competitor for blogspot. when there already where good standing grass roots movements like http://www.google4gso.com/, and the twitter hashtag #GoogleGSO on twitter.

I hope we get it, it would mean a lot to our community but if Greensboro as a city is going to make these kind of basic mistakes on a marketing campaign we made need to look for better business leaders to help us next election season.

One thing I will give them credit for is the google crate… that is awesome

Thanks
David Bates

Stolen from Donna

Thanks for reading
David Bates

As the title suggests someone very close to me passed away last week. My grandmother Doris Jones died on Feb. the 23rd. Her health had been declining for several years and she really started to decline in health about 3 months ago. She died from complications from COPD a very harsh disease that bassically renders your lungs useless.

My G’MA as we lovingling called her was someone I greatly admired and loved. She helped to raise me and was there for me during every event of my life. She will be missed greatly.

Her funeral was held over the past three days and was fitting. Her friends and family where beside of her and she was laid to rest beside of her husband Charlie Jones (POP’s) I had created a video tribute to her and will try to post it here over the next couple of days.

I would like to thank all of you who sent cards, flowers, visited, and even tweeted to me to help me through this time.

Goodbye G’MA and may God be with you.
David Bates

I use twiterholic.com for grading my tweets, the facebook tool seamed to work great as well.

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

Dang, First Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, and Blogspot. When will we be able to stop these guys? Not only that but they seem to always attack DNS except for the denial of service attack on twitter. I just hope for our sake it is not a group of people and just one hacker so we can shut them down.

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

This seems exactly like the kodak patent. Kodak patented a way to view photos taken on a screen which is commonplace and a required feature on every camera device. Almost all camera companies pay some royalty to Kodak for use of this technology. This doesn’t seem odd to me as five years ago a newsfeed was not a common item and social media was barely beginning. I think it is smart of Facebook to do this and will ensure their longevity in the marketplace

Originally posted as a comment
by dlbates
on The Next Web Network using DISQUS.

Ducky has been pronounce dead at 6:00PM his departure from this world was a lot of fun for me. The wife shuttered when she saw the videos, it was great. If you don’t know the story that led me to kill Ducky you need to read this post first. Ducky died from gas and fire that was lit with a toilet paper fuse. I recorded the whole thing for your viewing pleasure and you can watch the videos below… BTW there is an explosion that made my wife shake when she knew I was the one holding the camera


Ducky’s Setup:

Ducky Demise Part 1 “Lighting the Fuse”

Ducky Get’s Blown Up!

Or watch him die, your choice.

Story:

I came home the other day and my wife informed me that the downstairs toilet was stopped up. This was strange to me because I had just remodeled the downstairs bathroom and put a 3″ pipe from the toilet to the sewer so I had never anticipated it becoming stopped up. Curiously I went at the toilet with a plunger and after about 30minutes had no success. Now we have been potty training my son Daniel and he is fascinated by the toilet we have caught him trying to play in it and even trying to wash things in it but he has yet to master the art of the potty. So instinctively I started to assume that he had throne a rag down in the toilet and that must be what is causing the stop-up. I told my wife my thoughts and she agreed so the next day I went to my Mom’s to retrieve my arsenal of toilet tools including a 25′ snake and a plunger that looks more like a bicycle pump that is supposed to build up pressure and push objects through. The snake would only go a little ways down and would stop dead and the special plunger was no help either so I decided that the problem must lie further down the pipe and took the toilet up from the floor. I continued to try and snake the pipe itself and it went through it just fine… So now my curiosity was up and I turned the toilet on its side and was shocked when I saw a rubber ducky staring at me from the S-bend in the toilet. now mind you this is in the porcelain part of the toilet and was further back than my hand could reach. I tried everything snake, plunger, electric cable, close-hanger, knife, praying, water, and even dismantled the top of the toilet in the hopes it might give me better access. Nothing worked, nothing would even budge the ducky he was wedged in there. So after about three hours I gave up and tonight we have went and bought a new toilet to replace the one in our bathroom.

The Challenge to You:

Since I have no other possible ways to get the duck out and I am no longer concerned about the toilet itself I am starting to entertain very destructive ideas for the duck. They include items such as gas, M-80’s, Lead (propelled by a gun), and very large hammers as I said at the start of my post the ducks fate is in your hands you have 36 hours from the time I post this until I either dismantle the toilet gently saving the duck or he meets a of an unsavory flavor. I would like you to comment on this post or send tweets to @davidbates telling me if the duck should be saved or how he should die.

Update:
Ducky is now Dead See http://dlbates.com/DuckyDies for videos of his demise

Today I set out to figure out why I couldn’t get IIS under windows server to serve up .ASPX pages.
I had asked for a .net setup from IT and when I placed my files in the site I could not get it to serve up ASPX pages. It would serve .HTML and .ASP but not .ASPX so I decided to investigate myself. Hopefully my investigation and solution will help you troubleshoot this issue without wasting as much time as I had to. All of the steps below refer to IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.

Step one: Figure out if ASP.net is installed. You can do this several ways the quickest is to see if there is a ASP.net tab within your sites properties in the IIS Manager. Another way (and the way I chose to pursue) is to open the Control Panel and then Add/Remove Programs, and then click the Add/Remove Windows Components. Once Windows searches for installed components you will see a list. Click on Application Server and select details, this is where you should see ASP.net checked. If you don’t see ASP.net checked or if it isn’t there at all you will need to go to step two. If ASP.net is installed then skip ahead to step three.

Step two: Install ASP.net There are two ways to install ASP.net the easy way and then the way that you only do if you can’t see ASP.net in the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Windows Components section. The easy way is to check the checkbox in the Add/Remove Windows Components section and then follow the on-screen instructions. The hard way is to download the .net redistributable from Microsoft(the package linked is the 32 bit see bottom of page for X64).Install the package and then perform windows updates. This process will take 1-3 hours depending on connection speed and amount of updates needed. You will need to reboot when finished.

Step 3: ASP.net is installed but I still can’t see .ASPX pages: This can happen for several reasons and I could make you sift through thousands of google pages to figure out why, but that wouldn’t be very good of me I was getting 404 errors when trying to view an .ASPX page and this was because Active Server Pages where prohibited in Web Service Extensions. This KB Article explains why but you basically go into Web Service Extensions in the IIS manager and change Active Server Pages from Prohibit to Allow.

There we go I hope that helps you if you have a similar problem.

Thanks
David Bates

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates