*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Jeff Blankenburg tagged me on his “goals for 2009” list and by some weird force of the Internets I feel compelled to write my goals for 2009 down publically.  Don’t expect anything earth shattering, let me just forewarn you. 

1.  Lose Weight

The first thing on my list is to lose weight like 97% of America.  Because of my height, most people that know me today, have no idea just how skinny I used to be.  My height is 6 feet and 2.5 inches tall.  That height isn’t a world record, but I am taller than the majority of the people I run into.

Would you believe it if I told you though, that I was the same height today that I was when I was a senior in high school, yet i weighed in at 129lbs?  That’s right, I was a walking stick.  A bean pole as they say.    The reason was I so active in my younger years.  I used to ride my bike 10-20 miles /  day, worked on the farm, etc.  I may have been skinny but I was as stout as an ox and could easily throw around 150LB sacks of feed at the barn with no problem. 

Fast forward to today and let’s face it, I’m not active.  My job requires zero physical activity, zilch, nada.  As long as my brain and fingers work, I’m good.  I have to change something, get more active and also watch what I eat.

Earlier today I put a sign on my fridge that read this, in hopes that it would serve as a reminder: 

What I am not going to do is set some ridiculous two digit weight loss goal only to disappoint myself.  My first goal is to lose 10lbs.  After I reach that goal, I’ll set another goal.

2.  Pay off Debt

Every few weeks I get paid only to turn around and send it to people we owe.  As I get older it bothers me more and more that I’m not building more wealth.  At the start of the year I started reading a lot of material on debt, managing finances, retirement, etc.  The one book that really made sense to me was The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey. 

I’ve listened to Dave’s radio show in passing and he always made sense to me.  Thus starting in January we put the Total Money Makeover in action.  This plan takes both people in the relationship to buy into so it isn’t something you can go out on your own and do if you are married. 

Since I started reading more about managing money lately, it is funny how many people I have talked to about money who have said, “I don’t have any debt, all we owe is our car and our house.”.  Well, guess what, YOU HAVE DEBT! 

If you owe someone anything, it doesn’t matter what it is for, you have debt.  If you didn’t pay cash for it, you have debt.  If you are in this mindset of thinking, read Dave’s book.  He can help.

It is going to take some serious life altering changes to accomplish this but I am already seeing positive results.  It is going to take time to get to $0.00 of debt but it will be worth it.  There is a famous quote in the book that really drives home the point of living debt free.

Live like no one else so later you can live like no one else.

The point is that if you live like no one else right now (cut corners, drive an old car, slash costs, etc), later you can live like no one else because you’ll have built wealth and be debt free.  Honestly, it is a small price to pay.

3.  Fix Things Around The House

As if the first two things weren’t enough for the year, my last goal is to fix things around the house.  I have a lot of projects that I want to do and I think I can make them happen this year.  I won’t bore you with the details but here are a few things on the list:  do some re-landscaping in the yard, treat the deck, stain the front door, re-do my closet. 

It is stuff that needs to get done and while I may not get all of it done due to budgets, I am sure I can get a lot of it knocked off.

Who’s Next?

If you read this far great! Now guess what?  You are officially tagged/called out to write about your goals if you meet one of the following criteria: 

• A) you follow me on twitter
• B) I follow you on twitter
• C) we’ve met face to face
• D) you listen to our podcast
• E) you are bored and need something to blog about.

Happy 2009!

Holidays

I trust everyone had a great Holiday season.  This Christmas and New Years I felt like all I did was travel.  Ellen and I visited my Mom in Columbus, MS where all of my family gathered for Christmas.  Just as soon as I had recovered physically from playing with nephews and nieces during Christmas it was time to head to Codemash. 

The Mashing of The Code

Codemash was great this year and a totally different experience from the past several years.  For starters, several of us combined our funds together and got a suite at the Kalahari (thanks to Jeff and Carla McWherter for the idea). 

I was a little bit nervous at first about the suite but knew we had great chemistry among us and that’s all you need.  It turns out we saved major $$ getting the suite and got to play cards and stuff at night.  Truly a blast.

It was late Tuesday night when Jeff Blankenburg approached me and said he needed some help.  Wednesday was the pre-compiler for Codemash and Josh Holmes had a family emergency.  He wasn’t going to be able to make the pre-compiler.  I didn’t register for the pre-compiler because I had planned on just sitting in my room working on slides, demos, catching up on bills and email since I hadn’t been near a computer with an Internet connection very long. 

Jeff asked if I would step in and do an Intro to .Net since Josh wasn’t there.  It just so happens that I had just completed a whole series on “Back to the Basics” with three new slide decks covering an intro to .Net, Visual Studio and C#.  With zero preparation I stepped into the pre-compiler room at 8:30 AM the next morning just in time to kick off the Intro to .Net Track.  Three hours later I was done and came out of the track worn slap out.  No matter what someone says, speaking for that long is tiring.

Thursday afternoon I gave my talk on Demystifying Windows Communication Foundation.  After I spoke, several of us carried the conversation out to the open tables where we hashed out a lot of stuff for several hours and I somehow I wound up giving an adhoc CSLA talk.  That evening was the mixer and this year was awesome.  Good friends Carl Franklin, Dustin Campbell, and Darryl Hogan put on a heck of a show at the jam session.  They played Stormy Monday, Kansas and some other stuff.  Very cool.

Friday was recording day for Deep Fried Bytes as well as the battle of the Rock Band competition.  Woody and I recorded 3 or 4 shows from Codemash that we’ll be publishing soon.  Jeff Blankenburg, Jonathon Thorndycraft and myself formed a Rock Band to compete.  We made the Battle of the Bands top three and competed only to come in third.  SRT, watch out next year, we are taking you guys down!

BTW, if you want the slide deck from Codemash for WCF, you’ll find it here:  http://keithelder.net/presentations/

Grown Men Doing What?

After Codemash I rode back to Michigan where I stayed with fellow teammate Brad Lloyd.  Brad had a LAN party on Saturday where 6 grown men sat around playing video games for about 12 hours.  It has been awhile since I took part in a LAN party and it was fun to play even if I did get slaughtered.

Brad made a time elapsed video of the LAN party and needed some non-copyrighted music, so I gave him the DFB theme music to use.  Overall an interesting week to say the least.  Here is the video enjoy!

On January 1st, 2009 I received a really nice email telling me I had been selected to be a speaker in the INETA speaker’s bureau.  If you are not familiar with INETA here is a quote from their web site:

INETA provides structured, peer-based organizational, educational, and promotional support to the growing worldwide community of Microsoft® .NET user groups.

What does this mean?  It means that if you run or participate in a .Net User Group that meets the requirements for INETA then you can request me to come speak at your group and INETA helps to get me there.  For me this is great as it means I get to visit some areas I haven’t gotten to visit before and bring some WCF, Smart Client, Visual Studio, talks to areas I would otherwise not get to visit.

A big thanks to INETA for selecting me and a big congratulations to the other 15 members who were selected, many of which I consider friends (you know who you are).

Hopefully me spending several minutes to write down a problem we recently ran into at work working with WCF and the NetMsmqBinding will save some of you a lot of time.  If you’ve landed on this page here is the error you might be seeing:

An error occurred while opening the queue:The queue does not exist or you do not have sufficient permissions to perform the operation. (-1072824317, 0xc00e0003). The  message cannot be sent or received from the queue. Ensure that MSMQ is installed and running. Also ensure that the queue is available to open with the required access mode and authorization.

There are a lot of things that can cause this error and it isn’t very descriptive.  Recently we were trying to deploy a service into our test environment and ran across this error. 

The issue was with the endpoint address.  Let me explain.

Let’s pretend our test server was named “wcftest”.  We had also created a host record in DNS that resolved to our application and configured our service in a virtual directory.  Let’s pretend that it was something like “http://MyApp/services/Msmq.svc”.  Here is the service configuration we were using.

   1: <service behaviorConfiguration="MyAppServiceBehavior"

   2:              name="MyAppService">

   3:                 <endpoint address="net.msmq://myapp/private/services/Msmq.svc"

   4:                  binding="netMsmqBinding" bindingConfiguration="msmqBinding" name="msmq"

   5:                  contract="IMyAppService" />

   6:                 <endpoint binding="mexHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" name="wsdl"

   7:                  contract="IMetadataExchange" />

   8:             </service>

First we checked to make sure we had a queue on the server named:  services/msmq.svc.   We did.

Secondly we looked at all the permissions on the queue and on the MSMQ service and everything was good. 

Because we were using the name of the host we had configured and setup in IIS we thought the endpoint address of the service was suppose to have the alias name in it (MyApp).  Turns out this was the problem.  Switching the address to the server name fixed the problem.  The change is:

net.msmq://wcftest/private/services/Msmq.svc

Thinking about it, it makes sense based on how MSMQ works (computer name to computer name).  It just isn’t something that jumped out at us instantly because the service was working on a development box, BUT, only because it was configured with the name of the machine and no alias.  Aha!

I’m not sure when it happened officially but I have never noticed until today.  I was looking a business up that I needed to go to during lunch and saw a street view on Google Maps.  I then checked a few other places and it seems most of Hattiesburg, MS is now covered on Street View.  I pulled up my house on street view and it appears they came by last fall, about a year ago.  I know this because the palm trees at the end of my driveway are now much bigger and have since been trimmed back.  I did that this summer. 

If you are coming to visit, now you know which house I am. 

View Map

The accuracy isn’t that good because we live at 1116 Poplar and this shows us as 1126, very wrong. 

I wished they would have come by a few months later when things were in bloom, the yard would have looked so much better.  Oh well.