Blogisphere

I've Changed

2011-03-10T12:39:00.003-06:00

I was looking at my blog after a long period of absence and realized I have changed. My portrait should be lot different.

For the past few months, I have been going to WeightWatchers and am down almost 50 pounds. The first place you see my change is in my face.

Food - Summer - Food

2010-08-18T09:28:00.003-05:00

Last year, I was at a job fair “meet and greet,” and found this lady who knew some of my friends. We got to talking and I found she was a freelance food columnist.

One thing led to another and I was interviewed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch one morning a month ago. The article appeared this morning.

Scare-Ware

2009-09-22T20:48:00.002-05:00

My friend called me the other day with a computer problem. Seems his 2 month old laptop suddenly had 46 viruses that Kaspersky could not find.

Digging around on the web, I find that the hardware manufacturer probably put this thing on when it was built. All so somebody panics and pays for junk they don’t need or want.

National Meatloaf Appreciation Day

2008-11-26T10:31:00.002-06:00

It may sound icky to you, but I am a sucker for meatloaf. Last week, friends and I went to a new restaurant. I saw the special was meatloaf and closed my menu. When the server arrived my friend looked at me and said, “he will have the meatloaf.” End of story!

Imagine my surprise to find out there is a National Meatloaf Day. OK, it was declared by a website and not the president; but what the heck.

This morning, I found the perfect meatloaf to serve for Thanksgiving. It had cranberries in it.

My Excel Site

2008-10-30T21:10:00.002-05:00

If you have been watching the transformation of my http://xl.barasch.com site for a while, you may have seen the new URL show up; http://www.AlansOfficeSpace.com.

I don’t just do Excel anymore. I expanded to Access VBA and SQL solutions. Some of the early solutions look fairly simplistic to me now but will have to wait until I have time for big time editing.

Election Time

2008-10-30T21:04:00.002-05:00

I have been watching the election run-up on http://www.electoral-vote.com/ and now I am anxious for it all to be over. I was thinking last night that I would like to start my own party and call it “None-of-the-Above.”

Check back after November 4^th.

Smartphones

2007-10-10T11:23:00.000-05:00

Just got my Cingular 3125 and starting to get the hang of it all. Really like how it syncs with Outlook. Now to get Outlook and Thunderbird to sync as well.

Checked out the Windows Mobile website … think I want to try to write some applications for hand-helds.

Warning to Commenters

2006-07-21T08:52:00.000-05:00

You may think it is cute to leave comments on my blogs that are essentially an advertisement. I will not give you advertising space. When I find ads or offensive comments, they are immediately removed.

FavIcon from Pics

2006-07-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

How often do you find a site that is offering a service that you say, “Wow! Why didn’t someone think of this sooner?”.

I built a FAVICON a couple years ago but realized lately that I had the syntax for displaying it all wrong. I did a Google for favicon and found FavIcon from Pics.

What is so cool is that I can create a picture (simpler is better) in my favorite graphics application and upload to them for an immediate conversion. Now when you go to my main site, your browser displays my stylized A in the address and if you save the Favorite, in the list.

National Atlas

2006-07-20T10:24:00.000-05:00

My whole life I have been fascinated by maps. I think it started when my parents gave me a globe and atlas while I was still in kindergarten. The National Atlas has such things as GIS layers of territorial acquisitions, election results, places, nighttime lights, etc..

Now if you are a total map freak (like me!), you will love a list of links to Anonometric maps. I'm still looking for a wall map of St. Louis that I like.

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

2006-05-24T14:13:00.000-05:00

Were you like me? You got the email that you were anxiously awaiting to find out that you had been accepted as a ßeta tester for Office 2007 yesterday. Like Jensen here, Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog; I immediately began downloading the various files.

Between Office, Outlook and Project (all applications that I support), the download was over 700 MEG.

Tonight I will install and surely will have a report for you.

Foreign Exchange Rates/Currencies, Key Cross Rates and Currency Converter - MarketWatch

2006-05-10T11:08:00.000-05:00

I have often been fascinated by the fluctuations in Foreign Exchange. I am not so bold as to trade in currency like some friends do but found this web page interesting: Market Overview: Foreign Exchange Rates/Currencies, Key Cross Rates and Currency Converter - MarketWatch. It is cool how it constantly updates.

Larry's Project Dev Blog

2006-05-04T06:45:00.000-05:00

I casually mentioned to my manager that I had taught a class on MS Project at a previous job. Next thing I know, I am agreeing to teach a seminar to a bunch of our managers.

Here I am searching for the crazy answers at Larry's Project Dev Blog; need to learn quickly how to write Project VBA.

Did I mention that the class I previously taught was on version 3.0 and was 14 years ago?

Office 12 Zone

2006-04-24T14:42:00.000-05:00

I am anxiously looking forward to Office 2007 and one of the best places to pick up info is on OfficeZealot.com. Most of the bloggers on OfficeZealot are Microsoft people with the latest, straight poop.

The Daily WTF

2005-09-28T15:13:00.000-05:00

Considering that I am up to my eyeballs in a Excel VBA coding issue, being forwarded a link to The Daily WTF finally brought a smile to my face. Every time I think I have created the perfect solution to the problem, there is a new ’gotcha‚.

css Zen Garden

2005-08-16T09:10:00.000-05:00

While preparing a presentation to the Saint Louis Web Developers Group on CSS, I renewed my interest in css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design. If you are even mildly interested in the capabilities of CSS, you need to check it out.

To the members of STL Web Dev, my presentation and notes will be available on http://webdev.barasch.com on Wednesday, 17 August 2005.

The Tech FAQ

2005-08-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, you are searching for some arcane piece of knowledge and you find a real gem. I was looking for hints on how to boost my wireless network at home and found The Tech FAQ.

Within its confines are answers in generally easy terms for all my crazy tech questions. Like, “what is Athlon-64?” or “How can I fix my wireless signal?”.

I got answers/suggestions to all these questions except why my laptop keeps dropping the signal.

Found New Hosting

2005-07-24T22:20:00.000-05:00

I have 7 domains and at least that many sub-domains. Finding a cheap and responsive place for me to host them is important. I am saving over $30 a month from the conglomeration I had before.

I realized about 3 months into the conversion that I got the right package, just not the right components. A simple phone call started the process to switch from Linux to Microsoft servers (I want to do ASP lookups).

Lenovo to Resell ClearCube Blade PCs - Yahoo! News

2005-07-11T14:04:00.000-05:00

What will they think of next? Soon we are going to need Blade Servers at home to accomodate each user.

VSTO 2005

2005-06-14T14:41:00.000-05:00

I figure that if I am going to learn Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System, I need a project to work on.

I have been building a Retirement Calculator in VBA for months. Now I am going to take the mistakes I made and translate them into VSTO.

WebServices.Org

2005-05-24T15:10:00.000-05:00

I am getting excited about Web Services. The more I read, I am anxious to get my sweaty little hands on the technology.

Two sites you need to know about are WebServices.Org and StrikeIron. I took an online seminar from StrikeIron yesterday … got to get my boss to understand the importance.

I am beginning the process to move all of my domains to a new hosting service. More coming soon.

More Details on Office 12

2005-05-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

That season has finally arrived. The next version of Office is being written and the press machine is in full swing. This article, “PCWorld.com - Microsoft Reveals More Details on Office 12”; is just one of the half dozen I have seen.

Ever wonder you designs this stuff? I found a design site with info about some of the people working on Microsoft interfaces. There is even a contest to design the next version of the Windows interface.

SQL Express

2005-05-10T07:58:00.000-05:00

I got this brilliant idea from all the webcasts I have participated in lately to convert my Missouri Postal History site to ASP.

Step one, I converted the database from Excel to Access (6700 rows by 37 columns). I normalized it into half a dozen tables. Now I think I want to up-size it to SQL Express for writing the new pages. I found sqlexpress’s WebLog and a few other pages but there does not seem to be much useful info yet.

I have been playing with the VS.NET 2005 ßeta Visual InterDev for a few weeks and really like what I see.

Microsoft Wingdings

2005-05-06T10:06:00.000-05:00

I just sat through the current round of Microsoft technology seminars. The first was on Windows Server 2003 then SQL Server 2005. The Microsoft TechNet Briefings are probably coming to your town soon. I thought it was worthwhile.

In the afternoon, I attended the MSDN presentation on Web Services, VS.NET 2005, and ClickOnce. Now that I understand the power of Web Services, I am anxious to start writing my own.

DotNetNuke

2005-04-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

One more crazy technology that I came across recently is DotNetNuke. It seems to be an ASP.NET open-source framework (sounds like an oxymoron).

Have you been to OfficeZealot lately to see what they are up to. I get so many ideas, I do not know which to try first.

Excel Web

2005-04-27T12:56:00.000-05:00

Added a new solution for an Excel menu on my website. Also added 2 new links. Found Martin Green’s cool VBA site and spent a couple hours seeing some great ideas.

Performing Web Queries in Excel 2003

2005-04-22T10:11:00.000-05:00

Found a great article about doing Web Queries; WindowsDevCenter.com: Performing Web Queries in Excel 2003

I think I still need to learn how to do my own Web Services. I want to write a dashboard for a client.

Changed Excel VBA

2005-04-22T07:51:00.000-05:00

I updated my Excel VBA page for Color Rows taking into account all the cool things I have been doing with Arrays. It is part of the toolkit I am building at the office with lots of text manipulators.

Need to look at converting the MoPo website into ASP.NET 2.0. Having 4,000 static pages is too much.