Ryan J.com

I went with Sheryl to the Naptown Roller Girls their first bout of the season Saturday night.  It was surprisingly a lot of fun.  I've never been to a roller derby before so this was an entirely new experience. The action was non stop from beginning to end.  Two hours of excellent music and a great deal of fun.

They came out pretty strong in the beginning but the other team prevailed in the end.  I could see doing this again.  My only complaint being that I didn't think to bring a mat... 2 hours of sitting on concrete isn't cool.

There is a new version of Live Messenger out and it is pretty amazing.  One of the coolest features is the ability to have a client running on more than one machine and access the conversation on both.  Say you've got two boxes running in different rooms and want to be able to respond wherever you are, now you can.  You can also customize the appearance a great deal.

On to our next topic.  You know those extremely annoying advertisement features packed into Live Messenger?  Well, the new version is no exception.  Today while talking to someone at the office he mentioned finding a tool that removes these advertisements.  I had to check it out!  It is called A-Patch and is currently being distributed at http://apatch.org.  So what all can it do?  Right now, it is still in the works, since Messenger 2009 is still fairly new... but here is a list of the current features:

1. Remove Advertisement (contact list)
2. Remove What's Hot Section
3. Remove Nudge Delay
4. Disable Nudge Shake
5. Accept more than 3 file transfers at a time
6. Polygamy (Multi-MSN)
7. Shorten Status Info in Info Bar
8. Remove Advertisement (message window)
9. Remove "says" Text (english only)
10. Remove Billing Info Menus

Enjoy!

It has been a while since I have wrote... the Holidays are always a rough time. You would think I'd have more time but really since I'm going all over the place to visit with people I end up having less. I spent all of Christmas with my parents which was nice and relaxing. Dad and I saw Valkyrie on Christmas day - we both enjoyed it. Apart from that the best part was watching my nephew open the Christmas presents we brought him. He is 2 coming up on 3 soon, so he gets really excited about it and can't seem to figure out which toy to play with. I'll post some photos I took later on when I'm home after I find my camera. I seem to have misplaced it somewhere between my parents and my apartment.

For New Years JoAnn and I went to her cousin Sarah's place. We played Battle of the Sexes, drank beer and got to know one another It was rather interesting since it was 3 white guys and 3 asian women. It was the first time I met Sarah; I can tell why JoAnn looks up to her like a sister. We had a lot of fun talking about Hmong culture, social issues, etc.

The holidays were great this year... and I am totally not ready to start the daily grind up again.  I am also goign to take a class or two this semester.  That's all for now.

Over at Stephen Walther's ASP.NET blog he shares 11 useful tips/tricks that you can use in Visual Studio.  Several seem to be strictly VS2008, but I did manage to get some of them to work in VS2005... my favorite being automatically generating a property by typing "prop" and hitting "tab" twice.  Wow!  What a time saver!

Check it out...

Okay... so I may end up having to buy one of these because it is just so awesome! If it works as intended.. you can wear the Fitbit 24 hours a day and track everything from how many calories you burned to how restul of a sleep you had the night before (it tracks the tremors generated on your wrist as you enter/exit REM sleep).  VERY cool... if it works as it is meant to I can see this being pretty valuable to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  For $99 bucks (as of this writing) you buy the hardware... everything else is free.