A couple of weeks back we had some birds move into the walls of the house.

See, we’ve got two dormers on the front of the house and just under the eave overhang on each side of the dormers where the dormer meets the main roof (so four places), the builder didn’t actually finish the siding… so there were four places wide open for small creatures to move in. Apparently this is very common, at least in this area.

Anyway, I was working in one of the rooms upstairs and I heard this scratching noise. Going outside and looking up, I could see all sorts of nest-makings coming down the roof out of the hole in the siding.

I ended up having to call a guy and he came in, got all the bird stuff out of the walls, and blocked up all the holes with metal screen. I’d have done it myself, but our roof has a really steep pitch and, frankly, I am not a handy person and have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll pay someone else to risk their neck and do it right any day of the week.

If you ever get in that situation and you’re in the Portland, OR area, well… first, I’m sorry, because that sucks. Second, the guy I called was Ed Belding from Evergreen Pest Management - (503) 925-9752. Great service, reasonable prices, and he does more than just birds. Give him a call, he’ll hook you up.

Now to address the bathtub that’s started a spiderweb crack upstairs…

Titanium "One Ring"My wedding ring is a titanium version of the One Ring from Lord of the Rings. I like it quite a bit, but it was a real pain to get - the only place you could find them was this German web site which seems to have disappeared since we bought it. Plus, the black finish is beautiful but it scratches given a little effort so you have to be careful. (Metal doorknobs can be problematic if they turn hard, for example, so you have to be pretty mindful of what you’re doing.) Sort of lame considering I was going for nigh-indestructible.

Anyway, in the event I have to re-order, I found a couple of options. Boone Titanium Rings has a good general selection and will let you submit custom artwork to create your own laser-etched titanium ring. Now, that’s cool and all, but I think the one I’ll go with will be a tungsten carbide diamond-etched “One Ring” from Forever Metals.

Tungsten carbide "One Ring" from Forever Metals.

I admit a lot of ignorance when it comes to jewelery and metals and such, so I didn’t really fully understand the differences between hardness and durability between titanium and tungsten carbide. There’s an educational page on the Forever Metals site that explains tungsten carbide and its benefits. Things like “scratch-proof” and “four times harder than titanium” show up there, which makes it perfect for me.

Of course, Jenn got all worried about what happens in an emergency and the doctors can’t get the ring off your finger so they have to cut off the finger instead. I thought I was already hosed with the titanium ring, but apparently you can cut titanium with almost any tool that will cut steel, including a Dremel. As for tungsten carbide, Forever Metals claims:

Tungsten carbide ring can be removed by a medical professional. Rings made of extremely hard materials, like tungsten carbide or ceramic, can only be removed by cracking them into pieces with standard vice grip style locking pliers. Standard ring cutters will not work.

So I’m not screwed and shouldn’t lose a finger as long as the medical professional helping me has a pair of vice grips. I have to assume the medical field has figured this one out. Or maybe I should get one of those MedicAlert bracelets that says, “Don’t cut off my finger, just get some channel locks.”

[Corteo [Soundtrack]](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I5XDUQ?ie=UTF8&tag=mhsvortex&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000I5XDUQ)On Friday, Jenn and I went to see the new traveling Cirque du Soleil show, Corteo.

Wow.

I’ve seen several of the Cirque shows:

• Mystère (twice)
• KÀ (twice)
• Alegría
• Dralion
• Saltimbanco
• Varekai

Each show has its own feel and I have liked all of them. Mystère holds a special place in my heart for being the first Cirque show I ever saw. KÀ struck me with its size and story. Dralion had a very original style. All of that given, across shows you will generally see some acts reused. The hand-to-hand, amazing as it is, shows up a couple of times. The aerial straps, beautiful to watch, also show up in a few places. Not so in Corteo.

Corteo felt so fresh, so new, that I couldn’t help but leave the show feeling happy and invigorated. Everything was so amazing, so crazy, so cool, I’d have to say Corteo is my favorite of all the shows I’ve seen. It was easily worth the price of admission and I’d see it again in a heartbeat.

I had never seen any of the acts before (with the exception of the aerial straps, which still felt very new) and it included one of my favorite acts, “Crystal Glasses and Tibetan Bowls,” a sampling of which you can catch on the Cirque TV show, Solstrom. I liked them all, but if I had to choose, I think I liked the chandeliers and the helium dance the best.

If Corteo comes to your city, go, and feel alive again.

I’ve been going over my RSS feeds this morning and I found a bunch of cool things that I’ve been forwarding to my team. Helpful tools, articles that explain tough concepts… good stuff. As I was doing that, I kept thinking, “Oooo, I should bookmark this so I can find it again later.”

That’s when it hit me, and I’m sure I’m not the first to arrive at this one:

Bookmarks are worthless.

I was thinking about it and with some very small exceptions I can’t actually remember the last time I visited a site based on bookmarks. Generally speaking, Google is my bookmark anymore (and not in a “Google Bookmarks” way). If I need to find something, I just search for it. Chances are the resource I would have bookmarked before has been superceded by some better, newer resource anyway. If it’s really good, I might blog it so I can tell people about it, but even by doing that, I’m contributing to the PageRank of the resource so if I go search for it again, it’s still on Google. Or, barring that, I can search my own site for the link I posted and get it there.

The only real exceptions to this are internal sites - stuff like the expense report system or the PTO request form that I might use a lot but aren’t in Google and aren’t right on the intranet home page. Other than that, I think I’m going to clean out my bookmarks - I don’t need ‘em.

While working on some Windows Workflow projects I was having some trouble getting ExternalDataExchangeServices to raise events. In searching for an answer, I came across this wiki that has the beginnings of some good material. I think the Windows Workflow community might want to contribute to efforts like this because, frankly, WF can be hard.

Incidentally, the reason my events weren’t getting raised was found right on the wiki: I was raising an event from a service where the event arguments were serializable but the sender was not. Everything has to be marked [Serializable], even the sender. Sounds obvious now, but let me tell you what a pain that was to try and track down.