Ok, with that out of the way, I would like to tell you about my “ticket buying experience” :

/begin ticketmaster rant

I click on “Buy Tickets” on the Blue October website, and it takes me to Ticket Master.   I see that the tickets are priced at $15 each.  Sweet!  I’ll take 2.  I select ‘2’ from the dropdown list and hit continue.

The next page shows up with a ‘shopping cart’ of sorts with my 2 tickets listed, each with an additional convenience fee attached ($5.25).  Retarded.  They might as well just make the tickets cost 20 bucks, I’d still buy them.  Oh well, so Ticketmaster is gay.  I click next.

The next page shows my ticket aquisition options.  I can pick them up at Will Call for $2.50.  Why would I ever PAY to go pick up my own tickets?  The whole reason I am ordering online is to avoid having to wait in line at the show.  So I look at the options for shipping.  Let’s see, UPS Next Day Air ($30), UPS 2nd Day ($22), UPS 3–day ($15), and that’s it.  Holy crap, they can’t just stick 2 thick pieces of paper in an envelope and MAIL them to me for about 50 cents?!?  FINE, I’ll take UPS 3–Day.  I’m starting to get VERY annoyed and plan on complaining.  I click Next.

I don’t think I have an account, so I fill in all of my information, credit card info and everything and hit next.  It says “You already have an account.  Click login to login.”  Well, why the fuck didn’t you log me in then?  So I login.  I have to enter my credit card info AGAIN.  I click next.

The next page shows my final order summary, looking like this:

OMFG!  Order Processing Fee?!?  This sounds like a banking commercial.  65 dollars for 2 $15 tickets.  That’s IT!  I close the window.  I have now wasted 30 minutes of my life and I WANT IT BACK.

I have a suggestion to the folks at TicketMaster.com :

LET ME KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO RAPE ME WITH CHARGES BEFORE I WASTE MY TIME ON YOUR SITE.  Why don’t you just charge $30 per TICKET?  In that case I would have bought them.

I’ll now be driving my ass to the local Fiesta to purchase tickets in person.

/end ticketmaster rant

Ok.  I feel better now.

Now playing: Pink Floyd - Ibiza Bar - Winamp *** 1036. Pink Floyd - Ibiza Bar

Am I the only one in the world who despises Outlook?  Just about every developer I know of uses it, and I hate it.

The only other viable option that I saw was Thunderbird, and I liked it for the most part.  Sure, it doesn’t have a calendar or task list, but most people don’t use those features anyway.

I am going to have to put away Thunderbird for good, as it likes to randomly reject my SMTP settings for no reason.  It will work fine one day, and refuse to send mail the next.  Outlook hasn’t ever complained about the settings so… 

Anyone else share my sentiments about outlook?  What other solid email clients are out there that are worth looking at?

Now playing: Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell

I’ve been struggling with some windows forms development in .NET 2.0 beta 2, and would really benefit from a good book, but there are none out!  (Chris Sells’s book is waiting on the final release, as are others…)

Anyone know of some good online resources or beta 2 books that I could pick up?

What a month in live TV.  Here are a couple amusing clips:

First, a moronic black dude claiming that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, then a moronic white dude suggesting that being black is a “condition.”

To Kanye West:  If you really want to make your point clear, maybe you should practice your rogue speech ahead of time?  You didn’t make any sense at all there.  The funniest part was Mike Meyers’ reaction.

To Wolf Blitzer:  WTF were you thinking?

Now playing: Enigma - Enigma - 12 the eyes of truth (gotterdammerung mix)

Well Houston is definitely panicked.  I didn't want to be around a mob of lunatics, so we packed up our stuff and went to Dallas via Bellville, Brenham, Temple and Waco, which turned out to be a huge success.  We made it to Dallas safely in 6 hours, which was much more desirable than the 24 hour wait on I45.

I hope everyone in Houston is safe, because it's going to be incredibly difficult to get out of the city now.  I'm glad we left when we did.

Trying to get back into the swing of things is hard.  I don’t feel nearly as motivated or focused as I did a month ago.

I know in time this will pass, but it’s tough “in the moment.”

On a brighter side, I got my omnifi installed in my car.  I’ll probably post some pictures of the installation here soon.

Now playing: Beck - Loser

My mom died last Wednesday, due to advanced ovarian cancer. She was 53. It has been quite a sad household for the past week and a half, and I don't expect it to get better anytime soon. I will really miss her.

Her funeral was on Saturday and the service was beautiful. Many people were present and I knew most of them.

My mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001 and fought it for more than 3 years before deciding to choose quality of life over longevity. Cancer is an ugly thing. I'm glad she did get a lot of good moments and memories in the past year and a half that we've been taking care of her.

Anyway, consider making a small donation to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.

During this tragedy I didn't get out much, and had no idea about Hurricane Katrina until yesterday. The Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund is in need of cash donations, and I'm glad the Buzz stepped up. They are going to try and hit $500k by the end of the day. I really respect what they are doing.  What a sad month it has been…

I have heard so many discussions (read: arguments) about which DAL method is the best and nobody ever has a clear-cut case for all solutions.  Previously I have sort of  “rolled my own” data layer, with a simple helper class and some parametrized queries.  This has slowly grown into a very lite version of the Data Access Application Block from Microsoft (which kinda makes me grin, b/c that wasn’t the intent).

The last project I started used NHibernate.  It really did make a lot of things easy, and definitely sped up development.  I was a little weary of the learning curve (which only gets steeper the more complex your schema gets), but I eventually came up with a solid solution that has held up well.  I did have to make certain design considerations using NHibernate, which I didn’t like, but I got over it.

Anyway, I get to start fresh on a new project again and I’m back at the same step:  how should I shape my data layer?  Should I use NHibernate again?  Should I use CSLA.NET?

Here’s what I am considering:

• My own hand-made DAL.
• CSLA.NET
• Use Enterprise Library (specifically the Data Access Application Block)
• NHibernate

Right now I’m leaning toward CSLA, because I think it might integrate quite nicely with a large project we currently have, where the DAL it uses (well, only about 25% of the code even uses the middle tier) is sort of primitive. (anyway, don’t get me started on this, it’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up)

My goal is to provide a boilerplate DAL that ALL of our upcoming projects can utilize effectively (large or small).  Any suggestions?