Three years ago, a friend of my family's teenage son was diagnosed with cancer, and was given fairly bleak chances of making it through the ordeal. It was a crushing blow to the family. For the full story, read the ESPN piece on Mason (he's the last story). Mason would go on to conquer the cancer inside his body, and has been cancer free for a couple of years now. Against all odds. And it was during this time that he reached out to one of my idols, Lance Armstrong...the 2 had a bit of dialogue during the ordeal, and would eventually meet in real life.

It was during one of his meetings with Lance that Mason came up with the idea for drumSTRONG, whose mission is simple: To beat the shit out of cancer, and raise awareness through drumming. Each year they've upped the ante just a little bit: The first year was 24 continuous hours of drumming, up to this year which was 26 straight hours. A secondary goal was to get into the Guinness World Record book for having the longest continuous group drumming event. I'm sure we succeeded on both fronts.

I personally committed to 10 hours of drumming over the 26 hour spread, and actually ended up doing more along the lines of 12 hours total. My hands are paying dearly this week, but that pain is outweighed by the pain that was lifted from me mentally during the event. I have posted several photos of the event in my photo gallery, and more photos/videos will be posted to the drumSTRONG site over the coming days.

I've been playing drums of some sort since I was barely walking, and have been doing formal hand percussion gatherings for almost 15 years. Unfortunately it is something I haven't made as much time for lately, but after this weekend I'm making it a personal goal to start rounding up some of the talent here in Charlotte for some formal jams. Given my background, this event was a no-brainer. In the end over 2,000 people showed up...there aren't any words that can describe what the event did for everyone who participated. It was without a doubt one of the most moving experiences of my life, and I cannot wait to do it for 27 hours next year. Thank you Mason for this amazing concept, and thank you Scott for having the tenacity to actually make it happen. You're both amazing people, and quite simply put the world needs more of you.

The image in this post is of me and my best friend 20 minutes before we hit the 26 hour mark. The skin was literally peeling off my hands at this point, but I felt no pain surprisingly. Actually in hindsight, it isn't surprising at all.

Keep. Drumming. Beat. Cancer.

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I used to mountain bike. A lot. For some inexplicable reason I stopped a few years ago when other priorities manifested themselves, but recently I decided to start up again. While I'm not horribly out of shape, I'm definitely not the rider I used to be...but I aim to change this soon as the legs start getting used to pedaling again. I never have been much of a weight lifting guy, but the muscle group I've gravitated towards working when I do lift has been legs, and that's also apparent by the sports I choose to do (cycling, skiing).

For any mountain bikers who read this blog, I ride a GT XCR 2000, although mine is similar to the one mentioned in that link in frame only; most of the parts have been upgraded to Shimano XT models, I have a minimalist style seat, and carbon stem/bars/seatpost...the bike tips the scales at about 27lbs and more upgrades for weight savings are planned. While it's an older bike, the system that GT invented, i-Drive (which stands for independent drive) is still hailed as an engineering marvel for full suspension bikes as it was one of the first designs to eliminate pedal bob and brake jacking without having to resort to unwieldy looking linkage systems which were heavy and complicated: The more moving parts a bike has, the higher the chance of failure on one of those parts. Overall it's a very fun bike to ride. See you guys on the trails!

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After a long round of thinking about the future, my short and long term goals, and my overall level of happiness, I've decided to finally head back to school to finish up my degree. For those of you who don't know, I dropped out of college my sophomore year to pursue my present career track in software development which at the time (the .com boom) was one of the better decisions I've ever made. I've always considered myself a student of life itself and love learning, so the logical progression of things was always to head back to school at some point and obtain my 4 year degree. That time is most definitely now more than ever as A) I'm not getting any younger and B) better now than later when it'll be even tougher given other life constraints.

I've been accepted to the local university here in Charlotte and will be starting up classes in mid-May. Initially I'll be doing a light course load (8 hours) since I will be of course working fulltime in parallel. I'm going back in declared as my original major: Biochemistry. At this point in my career, I don't feel that a computer science degree would do me much good, and my true passion has always been one for the science disciplines. I may also minor in something a little off the beaten path like music theory since that's my other true passion, but at this point I'm taking it one step at a time so as to avoid any type of burnout. If all goes to plan I'll obtain my degree in about 2.5 years (or as little as 2 if I bust my ass). My goal is to move on to UNC-Chapel Hill once I get the basics knocked out here in Charlotte.

I do have plans for myself after that, and there is a decent chance that it will not involve computers, at least not in the sense of writing software for them, however that's a discussion outside the realm of this post. One of my dreams has always been to attend medical school, so I'll leave it at that. It seems like a long ways off though, and no doubt intentions will change between now and then as they always do. I would never fully leave the software realm, and at the very least a degree will open up new doors within the software/IT realm that are unavailable to me sans degree. For me it's all about grabbing life by the horns and achieving all the goals that I know I'm capable of, and giving new doors an opportunity to present themselves.

The silence has been deafening around here lately, but for the most part things have been alright. We still don't know what's up with my Mother's health, and my dog has gone through yet another round of scariness (he's been diagnosed with kidney disease now, but it's manageable via special diet). My new condo is slated to be done sometime in early summer, which is the next major milestone in my life: The thoughts of finally owning my own place are amazing! Until next time.

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A very good friend of mine, Matt Brandau recently got married to a wonderful woman, and I had the pleasure of attending. Here are some photos from the festivities. It was without a doubt the most fun reception I've ever attended...Matt is a professional bassist (shameless plug, he now plays with The Old Ceremony; an amazing band out of Chapel Hill...definitely check out some of their music @ the link above) with a degree in music from UNC. All of his previous bands were in attendance and got up on stage at one point or another to perform. Hilarity ensued, and it'll be a tough act to follow whenever I get married one day.

Congratulations Matt...you guys are a beautiful couple and I'm sure you'll have a lifetime of happiness together. All of the 'core' crew is married up; my buddy Jason Dulin and I are the only bachelors left.

Sidenote: Where the heck has Jayson been lately? Taking a break from blogging. Actually, ever since I've discovered Twitter (I'm here) I've been posting there quite a bit. Definitely not a substitute for blogging, but it's been a great way to stay connected with a lot of folks I've met in the blogosphere. I've run this site for 4 years, and have close to a thousand posts, so a break was probably needed, if not earned. I'm not making any new year's resolutions such as "I plan to make X number of posts this year" because quite simply I don't know when I'll get around to regular posting again. It'll be sooner than later so definitely stay subscribed. From a technical perspective, Sharepoint 2007 has been taking up a lot of my time, so expect some posts soon about my adventures in MOSS-land.

Sidenote++: My main new year's resolution is to quit smoking. I'm getting on the cessation pill in the next week or 2, it's worked miracles for some of my family members (some of them with 30+ years of smoking history). I wish all of you the very best of 2008...something tells me it's gonna be the best year yet.

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The title of this post is a blatant rip off of nVidia's current tagline; I felt it rings more true than ever with nVidia's newest offering: Their 8800GT is out of this world when it comes to price/performance in video cards. The story behind how I got mine is more interesting than it should be though. I was fortunate enough to purchase one from MWave the day after they were released (most eTailers sold out within hours), and had it overnighted to me for the very reasonable price of about $280.00 for a card that performs better than most cards costing twice as much.

To make a long story short, the first card I received was DOA. No video signal, and Device Manager would not recognize the card. The real fun came after I pulled the card out of my machine though: I got about half a dozen blue screens in rapid succession, and was finally able to coax Vista into safe mode to start digging around and yanking out drivers. That was fruitless though; attempting to remove any type of drivers triggered blue screens as well, so I ended up having to reinstall Vista. I hate to blame this on the card itself, but all fingers seemed to be pointing that way. I've read of no other horror stories like mine on the web, so no doubt I am more the exception than the norm.

Regardless, eVGA RMA'd the card for me, and about a week later I received the replacement part. I plopped it in my machine, fired it up, and all was well. To say the card is amazing would be an understatement. I'm getting 12,500 marks in 3DMark 06, and that will increase to about 16,000 once I go SLI. DirectX 10 on Vista has to be seen to be believed: Bioshock is like a whole new game now to the point that I started over from the beginning just to see what the newly textured worlds would look like. All of the games in the Steam portfolio now offer 16xQ CSAA as an option on the advanced video setup screen. Again, the difference that setting makes is unreal, and even with all settings maxed out in every game I own, the card has experienced nary a stutter. The only game I've had issues with is the Crysis demo, which refuses to start for some reason, but I suspect that's related to running Vista x64 more than anything else. I have confidence the final release will be fine.

As stated before, most eTailers are sold out of this card until the end of this week. If you've got the spare cash and need an upgrade, I would highly recommend ordering one of these cards: It's like having an entirely new machine for a fraction of the price. Don't get suckered into buying one of the factory overclocked versions. I've maxed out the clock settings on mine via nTune and haven't had any issues.

This card should be causing ATI execs fits right now as they won't have an answering product for almost 2 months. I personally will not be going back to ATI any time soon. Fantastic job nVidia, you've gotten one of your original customers back with the release of this card.

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First off, add me as friend over on Steam Community!

If the little things in life like spending quality time with family, friends, pets, etc are important to you then I would highly recommend not purchasing the latest offering from Valve Software: The Orange Box. The majority of my weekend has been spent playing a smattering of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Of the 3, I've spent most of the time playing Portal which from a purely gameplay point of view is one of the more amazing games I've ever played. I see it as more of a proof of concept and am sure Valve will be incorporating some of the coolness factor exhibited within in future titles.

Half-Life 2 E2 is of course pretty amazing as well. It's easy to see that some portions of the gaming engine have been rewritten and registers pretty high on the coolness factor. It is simply amazing looking, and is fairly lean as well as it runs very nicely on my aging ATI 1950 Pro video card with all settings maxed out.

And then there is Team Fortress 2. I purposely waited until late last night after the dogs/girlfriend went to sleep before firing it up for the first time. I have not played the original Team Fortress, so the whole concept was pretty new to me; it took a few rounds to get the hang of the overall gameplay. Needless to say, from a playability standpoint it is one of the more enthralling games I've played recently. The Spy Class is without a doubt the most fun role to play. For a good overview of the different classes, check out IGN's "Class Warfare" primer.

If you'd like to add me as a buddy on Steam, check out my profile over on Steam Community and add me as a friend (note: I still suck at TF2, so bear with me).

I haven't even finished Bioshock yet, and am now pretty sure it'll be quite some time before I do. Thank you Valve...when my loved ones send out a search party for lack of communication with me over the coming weeks, I'll blame you guys!

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A few weeks ago at Skanska, a film crew showed up at Skanska's office here in Charlotte to shoot some footage for a then-upcoming case study Microsoft was doing featuring Skanska and the work we've done with MS PerformancePoint Server. The crew spent the entire day onsite doing interviews with various department heads and directors, as well as getting general shots around the office. I didn't think much of it until my boss informed us recently that the film they shot was going to be used at the PerformancePoint global launch in New York a few days ago. The film along with MS's case study on Skanska and PerformancePoint has now been published to the MS website, as well as the video they shot onsite (~3 minutes long). Yours truly is featured in a couple of spots in the video, thankfully in a non-speaking role. Allen Emerick is the main focus; he's our boss and he also was part of the keynote at the launch event in NYC.

Even though I don't know much about PerformancePoint from a technical perspective, it's a pretty exciting product and Skanska is already doing quite a bit with it. I don't come from a strong BI background; one of the developers who sits next to me in the office is driving Skanska's uptake of PerformancePoint (he previously worked for a enormous ISV that specialized in retail BI custom applications, so he's definitely qualified for this role), so no doubt I'll be peeking over his shoulder on a regular basis trying to get some knowledge via osmosis. One of the things I really like about Skanska is their willingness to be early adopters of MS software in large production scenarios. We get to play with a lot of big toys early on in MS's dev cycle. Just one of many perks actually.

Sidenote: I'd like to extend a huge congratulations to Robert Mills (a former colleague and good friend of mine from Microsoft) for having made it through the Skanska interview process. He'll be joining our group in a developer capacity at the end of this month. I know he's got a ton to contribute to our team and am looking forward to working with him again after all these years.

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I've been out of work this week sick (which really sucks...I don't do very well with idle time, plus I haven't been sick enough to miss work in many years), so what better time to catch up on some blogging.

We had an interesting scenario at work recently whereby we needed to dynamically attach a number of asp.net validation controls to various TextBox controls on all of our existing pages. Specifically we had written a custom validation control which would test a control to make sure it didn't contain any HTML tags (a common enough scenario). This post assumes knowledge of authoring custom asp.net validation controls, i.e. inherit from BaseValidator and override EvaluateIsValid. For anyone needing a refresher, check out this MSDN post on custom validation controls.

There are multiple ways to go about attaching asp.net validation controls to the controls they need to validate, but in the end I settled on going with a base page class that our existing base page could inherit from...you just plug in the base page and everything is automagically wired up during the page request cycle. Given that asp.net validation controls will almost always need to validate TextBox controls (more specifically, any type of control that accepts user input), all we need to do is find controls that implement the IEditableTextControl interface. Existence of this interface in the controls inheritance hierarchy means that the control supports user editing of text.

So in short, here is the plan of attack:

• Author our custom validation control, or utilize one of the built in asp.net validation controls.
• Create a base page that loops through all of the contained controls, and when a control is found that implements the IEditableTextControl interface, instantiate and attach our validation control. Recursion seems to be the best way to go about this.
• [optional] Inject a ValidationSummary on the parent page to notify the user of any failed validation attempts.

Here is the code for a base page that dynamically attaches a custom validation control called HtmlInputValidator:

public class HtmlValidationBasePage : Page

{

    protected HtmlValidationBasePage()

    {

    }

    protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)

    {

        List<Control> controls = new List<Control>();

        FindControls<Control>(this.Page.Controls, controls);

        if (controls.Count > 0)

        {

            controls.ForEach(delegate(Control control)

            {

                IEditableTextControl textControl = control as IEditableTextControl;

                if (textControl != null)

                {

                    HtmlInputValidator handler = new HtmlInputValidator();

                    handler.ControlToValidate = control.UniqueID;

                    handler.Display = ValidatorDisplay.Dynamic;

                    handler.Text = "Failed Validation for control " + control.ID;

                    handler.ErrorMessage = "Failed Validation for control " + control.ID;

                    handler.SetFocusOnError = true;

                    handler.EnableClientScript = false;

                    handler.ID = control.ID + "Validator";

                    control.Controls.Add(handler);

                }

            });

        }

        ValidationSummary summary = new ValidationSummary();

        summary.ShowSummary = true;

        summary.DisplayMode = ValidationSummaryDisplayMode.List;

        Page.Form.Controls.Add(summary);

        base.OnLoad(e);

    }

    // Recurse through all of the controls on the page

    protected T FindControls<T>(ControlCollection controls, List<T> foundControls) where T : Control

    {

        T found = default(T);

        if (controls != null && controls.Count > 0)

        {

            for (int i = 0; i < controls.Count; i++)

            {

                found = controls[i] as T;

                if (found != null)

                {

                    foundControls.Add(found);

                }

                found = FindControls<T>(controls[i].Controls, foundControls);

            }

        }

        return found;

    }

}

Of course this base page could (and should) be further extended to support turning validation on/off, or only validating certain groups of controls...the above sample is simply for sake of brevity and should serve as a starting point only.

I've always been a huge proponent of authoring a custom base asp.net page class from which the rest of your pages will inherit...it is without a doubt the easiest (and cheapest) way for you to get reusable functionality distributed to all of your asp.net pages with minimal coding effort. Their power really starts to shine in scenarios such as the one outlined in this post.

See attached file below

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We've bought a condo! Actually, we put a deposit down on it a few months ago, but things were a little dicey after the Microsoft shake up. Everything has leveled off, i.e. the new job is going swimmingly and we're forging ahead.

There is one issue with our new purchase: They haven't been built yet. Actually they just broke ground about 2 weeks ago, and construction is expected to to complete sometime next Spring so we're in full blown hurry up and wait mode. The development itself is extremely cool: Enter Celadon Greenway. I've been living in the middle of uptown Charlotte now for about 7 years; this will be the segway to our transition to just outside center city...a whopping .5 miles from where we live now. The main goal of this building project is being very eco-friendly. If everything goes as the developer plans, we'll be one of the first LEEDS certified residential complexes in the entire country. Read more about their goals here. Picture time:

This is a CG mockup of the development. There are 24 condos; ours is the 5th unit if you start counting them from the lower left hand side going clockwise (the end unit at the top of the bottom left structure). More general pictures are located here 

This is our specific floor plan. It'll be right at 1600 sq ft, and I've already laid claim to the media room, which will be known as the geek room going forward. We also got lucky and got an end unit...our side windows will face due west, so the sunsets will be nice, plus it'll be good and dark in the mornings (not a morning person).

As is to be expected we're beyond stoked. Eight months and counting.

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 My main workstation is getting on up there in age...it's about 27 months old, though the video card and processor were both upgraded within the past 6 months. I'm not really in the mood to wrangle together a completely new machine, so I've decided to go the overclocking route to try and eek out whatever performance gains I can. I've never been much of a hardware kind of guy, though I do remember the days of going through the tedious process of booting into the BIOS, increasing the FSB/Clock/etc a couple of clicks at a time, rebooting, and then running <insert benchmarking software here, usually Sandra or PCMark>. Lather, rinse, and repeat until you got the machine to crash, then back the settings down just a bit and voila...a faster running machine that only took the better part of a day to achieve. Now there are automated tools that'll do all of this straight from the Windows GUI, although my beloved nTune does not support dual core processors. Any recommendations, or should I just do it the old fashioned way?

Here are a couple of photos of some recent cooling upgrades I made to the machine (click for larger images):

The case is an Antec P160...notice that the drives face forward for easy access. They are dual 150gb Raptors. The heatsink is a Thermaltake V1; my CPU temperature dropped 10 degrees C simply by dropping that into my case. Total case weight is around 25 lbs.

This is another view of the new heatsink. It's actually extremely quiet...much quieter than the stock AMD Opteron fan that shipped with the processor.

Hopefully I'll get another year or so of good use out of this machine before I have to build a new one. Newer games are starting to stress it a little (although Bioshock runs like a charm with all settings maxed out). I'm always looking for an excuse to buy hardware though. 

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