I threw together a quick tip that I posted to MSD2D about how to integrate user presence information into web parts. I saw a couple of the stock Microsoft parts doing this and thought it would be good to use for some of our web parts since we also take advantage of the Live Communications Server internally. One good application of this: I wrote a web part that displays a list of the current WSS site administrators (so users know who to contact to get more than just reader permissions) and threw their presence info in there so if someone wanted to request permissions or ask a question, it was right there for them.

I’m thinking I should put together a series of articles talking about how to build that “list site admins” web part. It’s actually not as easy as you might think, since you have to run the part as an administrator rather than as the currently logged in user, and then it gets trickier still if you try to use the same web part on a WSS site that resides underneath a SharePoint Portal Server “My Site” (because of the way administrators are set up there).

I’ve finally received a new batch of 34 properties to look at from my realtor. Based on location and features, I’ve narrowed it down to 8, and that includes the two that Jenn and I already agreed we wanted to see. We may narrow it down further; I’ve let a couple slide through that are slightly farther south than what we want, but they’re in brand new neighborhoods, so we’ll see. I know I may be opening myself up for something bad neighborhood-wise, which is not going to fly.

We’ll look at those online tonight and then tomorrow when we see the realtor we’ll tell him which ones we’re interested in. I don’t want to spend all damn day driving around willy-nilly - I’m very much a get-in-get-out sort of person.

I’ll have to remember to measure the TV so we can see where it might go in some of these places.

On my way to work today, I was passed by a FedEx truck that was moving like something on the Autobahn. The guy was weaving in and out of rush hour traffic like an expert race car driver and passed by like the rest of traffic was standing still.

I was utterly impressed. It makes me want to ship something FedEx. For what it’s worth, the guy was driving an Overnight Delivery truck. I kind of wonder if he personally drove the packages across the country for their next day deliveries. At a speed like that, I could believe it.

(All you people wondering how Santa can deliver billions of presents in one night - he gets that FedEx guy to drive.)

I’ve got a very slight cold and went to bed last night after a healthy dose of DayQuil (we didn’t have any NyQuil). I slept better last night than I’ve slept in, like, a month. Love it.

Of course, I’m dead tired this morning.

I went and traded in my previously viewed copy of Bad Boys II at the Hollywood Video store I bought it at a couple of days ago because DVD X Rescue couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m running a test on the new copy I got now - it’s already gotten farther than the last copy.

Can anyone tell me why ginger ale is always so expensive at the store? Every other 2-liter product on the market can be on sale for $1, but the ginger ale is always like $2.50. Why is that? Is the demand so high that it never needs to go on sale? Bah.

I went a couple of days ago to the video store and bought a couple of previously viewed DVDs. I got them home and saw that a couple of them had some scuff and scratch marks on them.

The thing is, while they have a year long warranty, I may not get to watch every single minute of all of the special features and everything right away. How do I tell how readable the disc is without having to watch every second of the movie? And then, what happens if later down the line, the discs become too scratched to read anymore? Am I out of luck?

Not so - I picked up a copy of DVD X Rescue by 321 Studios. They license technology from Arrowkey (or look awfully similar to the Arrowkey software package CD/DVD Diagnostic). DVD X Rescue has the ability not only to analyze a messed up disc and retrieve data, but also to analyze messed up video DVDs and retrieve data from them.

Got a bad DVD that your player doesn’t like? Pull the movie off and burn it to a new disc so you can watch it again.

The reason I got it, though, is it has a “readability test” such that you can put discs in and see whether you’re going to get errors when you try to play them. No longer do you have to watch 20 hours of extra features to see if it skips - run it through this media tester and away you go.

Just went to Progressive to pay my six-month bill and found that my insurance was $300 lower for this six month period than it was for the previous period. Woohoo!