My little artist

A sweet little pencil drawing by Eliza.

SNL horridly funny sketch

I skipped over an excellent Lawrence Welk intro, but I think this will be one of the popular Halloween costumes of this year. Sorry for the ads on the video, especially if you get one of the PG-13 ones I saw (boo to that, Hulu).

Software Support Rant

So, I had this issue with my coding tools (Visual Studio 2008) where I installed the software/drivers for a webcam, and a major chunk of development functionality stopped working. Unfortunately, the installation timing closely coincided with my installing a service pack.

Long story short, I submitted an issue with Microsoft, got some mixed quality of responses from their support staff, and finally they pointed me towards 3rd party apps interfering and I spent a long time tracking down the source. During the course of that, they asked about a few other third party apps that they've seen cause interference. Today, they closed my bug report as Will Not Fix.

To me, having a system where random third party apps might interfere with your internal communication is defective, and should be resolved. I guess its the benefit of being the big guy. You get to say that certain cases are not important enough to fix. Perhaps its just sour grapes because its my case they didn't fix. I highly doubt Logitech would care that their drivers are causing me to not be able to write software. So, I guess no webcam for me on my main computer.

If anyone's googling for Visual Studio 2008 debug hang and ends up here, try killing LVPrcSvr.exe.

For people reading my blog (hah!) who don't care about my whining, here's a picture of Ruby

From Ruby June Hannah

Ser-tah-fyed

Ruby is all ours, forever. Went to court today, the commissioner (judge) was so nice and it went excellently. New birth certificate will arrive in the mail after a while. A great day for us.

And then there were 6

6 Matelich's in my family. Ruby is home and, as expected, the kids are gaga for her. Things have been going nicely. Sleeping, eating, diapers. Its almost like we've done this before :)

Ruby

Hard to keep track of where I've talked about Ruby. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, email me. Court hearing is tomorrow (pray pray pray!!!!) and they're saying she'll be released Friday if all goes well. A couple more pictures in http://picasaweb.google.com/matelich/RubyJuneHannah like this one:




UPDATE: She's ours!!!!!! She will be coming home sometime in the next week. Final report will be filed in about a month, when she'll get a new birth certificate.

I went in this morning and changed/fed/took her temp. Such a sweet girl. Thank you Lord.

Barockin out

I might have to set this as the ringtone for my sister in law: go go go go obama, obama

Oh, and people on both sides of the isle can enjoy this music video

Implementing Interfaces in C++/cli

This must be such a simple topic that its hard to google for, because I couldn't find it. So, I figured I'd blog it quickly for other .NET newcomers who've been mainly doing C#.

Given IFace.cs in dll SomeInterface.dll:

namespace Some
{
  public interface IFace
  {
    void Express(string mood);
  }
}

This would be implemented like so in DogFace.h:

#using <SomeInterface.dll>
#using <mscorlib.dll>

using namespace System;
using namespace Some;

public ref class DogFace: IFace
{
public:
   virtual void Express(String^ mood); //virtual is required
};

Pretty simple, but it took me longer than I would have liked.

Moves, epilogue

Ended up not getting the property due to bad information from our mortgage chick. Oh well. So, we bought a cheapo RV!!!!!!! Yeeehaaawwwwwww. Gonna be rockin the campgrounds this summer. Pictures to come!

Me

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The Read It Paper

Today,I hope that every one's having A good day.If today is your birthday,Happy Birthday!

Today if it's your shopping day then you want to go to Albertson's,If you want to know why,it's because They have great savings if you have an Albertsons card.

Today will be most likely warm.

The Read It Paper is having a Story Contest.Due August first for First-Third graders. Please mail it to emma at mateli dot ch or leave it in the comments section. The prize is $5.

We think YOUR complements count.

New Blogger

Emma's been dying to start writing her own stuff on the internet, she's starting with making her own daily newspaper. So, watch this space for new things from her.

more on moving

Well, the last property we made an offer on was a bust, we found another cool one out by Eloika Lake, but it was only 5 acres and up on a plateau with a narrow driveway cut into the hill. The pictured plot is 20 acres of mixed grass and light woods. 13ish on one side of the road, 6ish on the other. Put in an offer yesterday, we'll see......

moves

Well, you may have noticed you got redirected to blog.mateli.ch when you visited. I've been thinking about getting a domain name for a good while now. I was going to do matelich.com, but then came up with mateli.ch. The dorkiness of it makes me happy, though matelly-dot-c-h doesn't quite roll off the tongue. I probably should get matelich.com too and have it redirect to mateli.ch or vice versa, but I'm too much of a spendthrift.

Then google has a free Google Apps for Domains setup where you get gmail to handle your email, and localized calendar, docs, etc. for your domain name. Fun stuff. The kids like getting to pick whatever email aliases they feel like in addition to their own names. Sara's holding out on using her account, but she'll break one of these days :)

If you're a matelich and want an account, let me know. I get up to a hundred. I won't be able to read your email, nor would I. I guess as administrator, I could reset your password, and get in, but you'd at least know I'd broken your trust when you went to login. Oh, and if you have any bright ideas for something to put at http://mateli.ch that would be peachy.

The other move is a bit down the line, but we're in the market for some land to build a house on in the future. Looking for 10ish acres north of Spokane. Put a long-shot offer on a site we really love today, but its contingent on them installing a well. We'll see.

ugly and distracting

Official Google Blog: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

I, for one of many, hate the new google favicon. I do not associate a lowercase blue g with google in the least. Every time I see it, I wonder what site I'm on. Bring back the big G, put it in a circle, cube, whatever. I'm find with colored backgrounds.

I even don't get all that riled up at the lack of American patriotic google images on important dates like Memorial Day and D-Day. But an ugly favicon? inconceivable!

pretty graphs

I guess I'm a sucker for interactive pie charts and line graphs. I can't get enough of my mint.com account. It makes me want to open more accounts in more places just so I can track them!

Now I got in on their Inventment account beta, and they have support for my ira, and my 401k's sites, so I can watch expectantly for the day I stop losing money in the stock market :) So, if you like wasting time finding out how much you spent on gas this month versus last month (huh, spent $50 less in may than april, wierd), try out mint.com. Too bad financial information is so personal, it'd be great fun to get some social networking going on there.

I kinda feel bad though. They look at things like how much you've got on your cards and try and hook you up with better deals, which I assume they would get a commission on. I always check them out, but ugh, too much work for too little gain. Well, I'm sure I'll find a way to financially support them at some point. Heck, I might even pay a couple bucks a month for the service.

Math geeks unite

I always planned on writing work related stuff

Bonus personal info for friends/family - we got a frog, and I discovered I dislike crickets :). I was thankful we had a dustbuster to take care of them.

Two things in working with WPF that took me a while to figure out.

First, I had a bug where _'s were going missing in a button's label. I'd read about the keyboard accelerator stuff, but it didn't occur to me because I was putting a directory name in there. Quick fix was to make a converter:

  public class NoMnemonicConverter : IValueConverter
  {
     public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
     {
        return ((string)value).Replace("_", "__");
     }

     public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
     {
        return ((string)value).Replace("__", "_");
     }
  }

Second, I was trying to put some of my common controls and some I'd borrowed from others into a single library. My generic ResourceDictionary just would not get recognized. I googled and grepped until my eyes fell out, then I found this segment to put into the library's AssemblyInfo.cs:

[assembly: ThemeInfo(
    ResourceDictionaryLocation.None, //where theme specific resource dictionaries are located
   //(used if a resource is not found in the page, 
   // or application resource dictionaries)
    ResourceDictionaryLocation.SourceAssembly //where the generic resource dictionary is located
   //(used if a resource is not found in the page, 
   // app, or any theme specific resource dictionaries)
)]

What a relief!

Oh where oh where has my little dog gone

Boohoo, somehow the front door blew open and Kevin Trevino ran away. Dex was out and about too, but made his way home. Puts a real damper on the day. Had to put "afraid of cameras" on the lost flyer because I don't have any pictures.

Math Is Cool

Emma is going to be participating in a Math Is Cool competition this Friday and is really looking forward to it. She loves her NWC Math Team tshirt. I guess there is a "big rivalry" between Northwest Christian and St. George's. She's been working really hard on it, so here's praying she takes her time and remembers all the tricks and formulas.

New Church

Well, after leaving our church last year when the pastor left, we'd enjoyed the children's program at Life Center, and Pastor Joe is a great speaker, no wonder they're so huge. The size of the baptism services and the number of people who answer altar calls is impressive.

But we always hoped John Repsold would start a new church like he'd planned, and we've been going there since it opened, Mosaic Fellowship. It certainly is different from any church experience we've had in the past. Initially, trying to attend with 3 kids was kinda painful, but we've gotten better at it, and the kids have too. They have a kids area for 5 and under, but Eliza doesn't really go for that. The biggest problem I have is that they are really focused on getting us active in the community (like we should be) and that is something we haven't made much time for*, so there's a bit of guilt there.

Now I just need to suppress the feeling that I should lead a small group :)

* We do stuff, just not enough for me to not feel a nagging feeling in my heart.

glasses

Got myself some spiffy new glasses. Silhouettes even. Haven't worn glasses since I got my radial karatotomy (and I didn't wear them much anyway). I've gotten tired of having to be 10 feet from a street sign before I can read it, so I went to get glasses. I'll post a pic when I get around to it.

Vacation Summary

Tuesday evening: fly to LAX, drive to hotel at Disneyland maingate. whee

Wednesday morning: continental breakfast - we love cheap danishes. Go to pick up pre-purchased tickets. They're expired - thanks getawaytoday. Pay $50 to update tickets, non-sarcastic thanks to disney customer service. Go have lots of fun. (see update 2)
Wednesday afternoon: Rain rolls in. LA gets more rain in half a day than they did the previous year. Talk of snow possible. We bundle up and take advantage of even shorter lines.

Thursday: Good oranges, bad danishes. Go to California Adventure - lots of Eliza friendly rides closed, but we had a lot of fun. Only a little rain. Didn't get to hit California Screamin' due to light showers though. Emma still loves Tower of Terror.

Friday: Maybe some toast instead of danishes... Hit the beach, started in Malibu, played in the sand a bit. Drove north. Walked out on the Huntington beach pier and we all saw a dolphin leap out of the waves 3 times. Made our day.
Friday evening: Tried to catch the Disneyland parade, but were late so we only caught a little. Picked up a few rides.

Saturday: Ugh, cheap danishes. Back to Disneyland for our last day. Nice weather, had a ton of fun. Headed out late afternoon to find an El Pollo Loco. Got lost. Finally found it really close to our hotel. Oh well. Yummy.

Sunday: Up early to catch our flight. Accidentally kept a key card in my pocket, that'll be an expensive souvenir. Shortly before boarding we hear Spokane is not accepting inbound flights, while they deal with a mega snowstorm. After an hour or so, they finally let us take off. We had just got our tray tables in their upright position and turned off electronics when they informed us of this little booboo and shipped us off to Portland. Being in the back of the plane, we were at the end of the customer service line to get a new flight lined up. After our 90 minute wait in line (why oh why didn't I go find a different agent somewhere to help me?) the next available flight was Monday at 8:20 PM. We took it and then went to wait for an hour for our baggage to be delivered. Finally to the hotel (which we had to pay for - weather related you know), we had dinner and went to sleep.

Monday: Got up to a real continental breakfast - bagels, belgian waffles, sausage scrambled eggs - good work Country Inns and Suites. Took Emma and Abe for a quick swim in the uncomfortably warm pool and headed to the airport to see if we could get on standby. Short story - we didn't. 3 flights went out full with us making doe eyes at the Alaska people trying to get them to give us tickets. Thank goodness the portland airport has a tv playing Boomerang all day. Flight went out late (are there Alaska flights that don't leave at least a little late?), no taxis at the airport for ages, Eliza crying because she had to wake up at 10:30 when we got off the plane, and didn't stop till after we got home at 11:15 (poor tired baby).

Then I got to wake up this fine Tuesday morning and shovel a foot of snow. Did about half of it. Enough to get the van out if Sara gets motivated to go somewhere today. Thank goodness school was out yesterday and today.

Summary - great time in california, terrible time getting home. Thanks to our friends who helped us out while we were gone.

Update: Here's a smattering of pictures
Update 2: Talked to Get Away Today, apparently the expiration date was due to the price we paid. Disney raised prices $10 a ticket after that. $10*5 people = $50.

What if...

Eliza (3 1/2) is a rather imaginative, verbal little girl. She is an incorrigible what if'er (not that I would corrige her if I could :). This morning I went in to wake her up.

Thomas: Did you sleep well?
Eliza: No *grunt*
Thomas: Did you have nightmares?
Eliza: No
Thomas: Were there squirrels in your bed?
Eliza: What if squirrels ate nuts out of my brain?
Thomas: You don't have squirrels in your brain.
Eliza: What if I did?
Thomas: Well, then it might be good to have squirrels eat them out.
Eliza: Or it might be bad. That would be silly.

"What if it did" is definitely a common phrase around here.

John Boyd

I found this article quite interesting. It describes a man driven to keep America great, who persevered against a rigid bureaucracy, and describes his successes from post-vietnam through the application of his ideas in Iraq I and II.