A few hours ago, Emma sent this email out to our friends:

After long thought and a lot of heart searching, George & I have decided to take in a family from Louisiana. We are now starting to look for someone who can help us make arrange­ments to get people here. Meanwhile, we need anyone who wants to volunteer to help us clean out our basement and fix it up to house people. We have a guest room on our first floor, but we also need to rearrange the entire house to allow us to add 4-6 people to our lives for up to the next year.

At …continue.

On Saturday 10th September 2005, over 8,000 people will par­tic­i­pate in the Northwest AIDS Foundation Walk. I will be one of them, as I have been every year since 1992.

To sponsor me, please visit my Donation Page.

I had originally signed up to march with Team Microsoft. Then we in BiNet Seattle decided to form a team. Please join Team BiNet Seattle: we’d love to have you.

It’s been more than 20 years since AIDS was first recognized. AIDS is still wreaking dev­as­ta­tion in Africa and Asia, and affecting many in the U.S. Although the new protease inhibitors are helping many people in the West, the AIDS epidemic is far from …continue.

I’m a command-line dinosaur. Vim (Vi IMproved) is my favorite text editor. And I write quite a few little batch files.

Here are a few useful tricks that work with cmd.exe on Windows XP.

REM
REM "Tue 06/14/2005" -> "06/14/2005"
REM
for /f "tokens=2"              %%i in ("%DATE%") do set MDY=%%i
REM
REM "06/14/2005" -> "2005-06-14"
REM
for /f "delims=/ tokens=1,2,3" %%i in ("%MDY%")  do set 

I’m taking a beginner’s drawing class at North Seattle Community College. Today, we started on per­spec­tive. We began by watching a 45-minute video by David Hockney, where he contrasts three paintings: a Canaletto painting of Venice, and two Chinese scrolls painted 70 years apart.

The Canaletto is a classic two-point linear per­spec­tive painting. Both of the Chinese scrolls show trips by the emperor along the Grand Canal. The first one, by Wang Hui, is 27 inches high and 72 feet wide! It uses multiple per­spec­tive to show scenes, in a manner that is strange to my Western eyes. Hockney demon­strates how effective it is. For example, he shows a corner where …continue.

On Saturday, I bought Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at CostCo. On leaving, the checker told me that I had bought the 887th copy at the store. This was 1pm, three hours after opening, so they were selling at the rate of five per minute.

I started reading it last night. After two chapters, when I had seen far too many references to earlier books that I didn’t recall, I decided that it was time to re-read the earlier books. I’m a fast reader, but I don’t retain material very well.

In the first chapter of the first book, I came across an ironically prophetic statement, made by Professor McGonagall as she …continue.

I’ve been a fan of both Bernard Cornwell and Patrick O’Brian for a number of years. Both are known for their historic fiction set in the Napoleonic Wars.

Cornwell has written 20 books about Richard Sharpe, a rough and ready British Army officer, up from the ranks. Cornwell excels at writing battle scenes, capturing the smells and sounds, the noise and confusion, the blood and the gore. Some of them were turned into a TV miniseries in the mid-1990s, with Sean Bean as Sharpe.

O’Brian wrote 20 novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy. The Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander was based on a couple of the books.

I recently …continue.

For the last three years, I’ve been involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, an amateur group that does readings of Irish literature, par­tic­u­lar­ly the works of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Our big event every year is Bloomsday, June 16th, com­mem­o­rat­ing Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. It’s a tale of a Jewish everyman, Leopold Bloom, wandering through Dublin one day, and of the young writer (and Joyce’s alter ego), Stephen Dedalus. We’re working our way through the book, reading a chapter or two each year. In this, our eighth year, we’ll be reading Chapter 11, Sirens, at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington, …continue.

It may be old-fashioned, but I still find printf (and sprintf and _vsnprintf) incredibly useful, both for printing debug output and for generating formatted strings.

Here are a few lesser-known formats that I use again and again. See MSDN for the full reference.

I’ve set up a new personal blog at www.georgevreil­ly.com/blog. I’ll be posting non-technical stuff there and I’ll be cross-posting on technical matters to Weblogs @ ASP.net. Here’s how I ended up running dasBlog on the new blog.

In the spring of last year, I attempted to install both .Text and dasBlog on my XP Pro laptop. I failed, signally, to get either one working. The details have mercifully faded with time, leaving me only with a residue of frus­tra­tion.

I’ve been meaning to put some photos of mine up on the web for a while. A week ago, I went to download nGallery, as I remembered hearing good things about it in the …continue.

This is my third blog. I’ve had a technical blog at Weblogs @ ASP.NET for the last year, and a defunct blog at EraBlog for another year.

I’ve been meaning to set up a blog at my personal website for a while, one that allows me to post about anything that I feel like. Posting about non-technical matters is dis­cour­aged at Weblogs.asp.net.

So here it is. (Assuming I’ve set it up correctly) I will be cross-posting technical posts to weblogs.asp.net. Other posts will appear here ex­clu­sive­ly.