*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Normally when making a decision I can work through the details of it pretty quickly and come to a conclusion.  The past week though I’ve been struggling with the joy of searching for a new vehicle.  If you’ve bought something recently please share your experiences.  I’m torn and don’t see a conclusion on the horizon.

For those that don’t know I currently drive a Jeep Liberty 2002 Limited 4WD.  I bought it new in 2001 in June.  The Jeep has served its purpose very well and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a smaller SUV that is tough and rugged.  The Jeep took me to and from work from Ann Arbor to Livonia during white out blizzards when I lived in Michigan.  It pulled my boat to local fishing holes and pulled many a stuck driver from a ditch or snow bank during the ice storm a few years ago.  It also pulled a 5,000 lb payload all the way from Michigan to Mississippi several times and never batted an eye.  After I got to Mississippi a few days after Katrina it pulled up tree stumps, remove hurricane debris from the roads and hauled food and other supplies to residents in need.  All in all I have been very happy with the Jeep Liberty.  It has been one tough rugged truck that has been extremely versatile.  It also has lots of nice travel options when you want to take a long trip as we frequently did (leather, heated seats, etc).

It is time to trade though and I’m torn about what to purchase.   Should I think about rising gas prices and get a small car like a Subaru WRX STI?  Then the question is how will I tow my boat, haul my lawn mower, camper etc?  Of course I could just keep my Jeep and get a small car.  Yes, that is another road.  But then do I want to have to pay two insurances and up keep up two cars, I mean three counting the wife’s? 

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a larger SUV than my Liberty.  The reason being that when we travel with our dogs and our luggage there is only room for about 2 people in the Liberty.  We will probably be having kids soon and honestly there would be no room for them along with all the baby goo that goes along with them (diapers, bottles, etc) if I stay with the same size truck as the Liberty.

I could trade my Liberty in for a larger mid-size SUV like a Jeep Commander or a Chrysler Aspen.  I test drove these yesterday and I really liked the Aspen.  Very sharp looking, lots of features, very classy on the inside and lots of room with the third row seating.  The Commander was nice on the inside as well but the third row is relatively useless unless you have 3-7 year olds who can sit back there.  It really isn’t much bigger than my Liberty.  With my trade in value and the incentives right now on these trucks ($4500 on the commander for example) I could get away with a REALLY nice truck loaded with a fairly small payment.  The problem is gas with these though. They only get about 20 miles to the gallon.  As I think about it though that is all my current truck gets and since I don’t drive that much it hasn’t been a problem just for the record. I don’t even look at gas prices honestly.  I pull up where it is convenient and I pump.  It is what it is.

The other option is I could get a nice over the road SUV (Mirano, Mazda CX-9) but honestly I think I’d kill the thing.  These are really cars and aren’t made to get off the pavement and aren’t powerful enough to pull heavy loads.  Not that I’m rough on a vehicle but they just aren’t made to do what all I need to do as I outlined above. 

I guess these are my options.  1.  Keep the Liberty and get a car that I could zoom around town in and use the Liberty to tow my boat, camper etc.  2.  Trade the Liberty in on a larger SUV.  3.  Buy some cross over hybrid SUV and hope it holds up.  If you have time, throw your $.02 in the ring.   I’m torn.

A few days ago I posted about registering on the Twitter web site.  Since then I’ve been sending updates from my Cingular 8525 mobile phone.  Pretty easy to do when on the road.  But now, I’m back at my desk in the office and I want to Twitter from instant message but can’t because Twitter AIM bot hates me.  

When you visit the Twitter site and click on settings they give you the Twitter IM account for AIM and then a random generated string which you send to this “bot” listening on the other end.  Once you send the secret message it verifies you are you and then of course activates AIM msgs from your user account so you can “twitter” to the AIM bot.   

Like I said the Twitter bot hates me because for the past several days I’ve been getting this error message:

Today I broke down and sent a message to Twitter.com’s technical support.  Hopefully they will respond with a sense of urgency so the world….. dare I say universe can keep up with my twittering.  I am certain they will see the world is losing valuable information by me not being able to Twitter via AIM and respond soon with the fix.

In a few minutes (about an hour to be exact) I will be speaking to an entire 7th grade class about the wonderful profession of a Software Engineer.  This is one of the speaking engagements that I have been looking forward to the most for some time.  I really do miss teaching sometimes and interacting with the kids.  This is truly going to be a fun experience getting to talk to the kids about the software industry.   I’ve got my slides prepared and my demo of building a calculator ready to go!  Quicken Loans also sent a bunch of those pop-out Frisbees.  If I start to bomb, I can always resort to passing those out and I’ll be a hit. 

For those that want to keep track of what is going on today, just hit my Twitter site.  I’ll be keeping you up to date with things as they happen. 

I signed up for a Twitter account this morning so you can keep up with what is happening in semi real-time as it happens.   This is of course assuming I keep sending text messages to it and the new shiny penny factor doesn’t wear off.  I figured what the heck, go ahead and sign up now before my desired login account is taken.  The link to my Twitter account is http://twitter.com/keithelder . 

Today I’m out of the office so if you want to know what I’m up to today there you go.  Right now I’m friendless on the Twitter site and it appears that no one has any love for The Elder.  I need friends. If you Twitter and aren’t a stalker, let’s friend up!

For your RSS pleasure I created a feed burner URL of the Twitter Rss here http://feeds.feedburner.com/keitheldertwitter .

Today is trash day in the great Hub City of Hattiesburg.  While I was taking out the trash early this morning my phone rang.  It was an engineer at work calling to tell me that our web service in the test environment wasn’t responding.  I quickly threw my trash out and jumped on the situation.

My first question as I started to look into everything was “Who changed something?”.   Obviously computers just don’t stop magically working.  In my 15 years of dealing with computers there is always a reason.  I was of course told, no one changed anything.  Suuuuuuuuure.

I opened up my web browser and pointed it to the test environment, clicked on a web service call and typed in some bogus information hoping the service would fault, catch its exception and then log the error so I could see what was going on.  Instead I was greeted with this error:

System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: The entry ‘ExceptionPolicy’ has already been added. (C:\sites\myapp\web.config line 87)

This alerted me that this was an Enterprise Library error.  My initial reaction was the web.config file was misconfigured. I opened it up and and it appeared to be fine.  I decided to reset the config file to the one that was working on another test server and it still nothing.  Same error.  After redeploying the application and resetting IIS  still the same error.  Then it hit me what was happening.   Obviously the file was correct and worked on another server, something else must be inserting the exception policy somewhere.

We conference in one of the windows engineers and within a minute he said, yep, the configuration wasn’t right.  The way it was configured was the root folder of IIS was using the service and the virtual directory mappings were including itself twice.  Example:

http://testserver/myservice/service.asmx  => throwing the error above

http://testserver/service.asmx => worked fine

So you see the entire setup was misconfigured based on how we wanted things to be setup.  The windows engineer reconfigured everything and we were back in business.  Hopefully this will help someone else out in the future if you run into the same error.