Eric, who is 8 ("Almost NINE, Daddy") asked if we had any family secrets, like a rich uncle or a great great grandfather who was a spy.  I told him the only thing I could think of was that Grampy was a vampire.  And Aunt Pat is a werewolf.

He didn't believe me.  I think he knows about Santa, but he is afraid to say anything.

Like just about everyone else, I want an iPhone.  My current phone is a Samsung Blackjack, and it has worked perfectly for me from day 1, it has all the features I need (and then some), and I haven't had a bit of trouble with it. 

The only problem is that iPhones are SO good looking.  I'm a sucker for new stuff too.  I have a mac desktop at work, a mac laptop at home, so I need an iPhone to complete the package.  (I used to have an iPod, but my legendary self-control failed me and I spent 600.00 on iTunes in one month; now I have a Zune and a subscription to the Zune store that lets me download all I want for 15.00/month.)

I ended up with some extra money on my iTunes account, and on a whim I bought a season pass to Heroes.  I usually don't like watching serial tv shows, but Heroes is awesome. 

I decided that I didn't like having to deal with running my own IIS and Exchange servers at home.  While I don't really mind the IIS part, since I understand how it works pretty well, my Exchange setup is a mystery to me...when it quits working (which it only very rarely does), I have to dig for a while in order to get it to work again. 

One of the perks at work is that I get free hosting, for web, media and exchange.  Pretty cool.

I started to move everything this morning, and I hope to be done by tomorrow morning.  The DNS changes haven't propagated across the Internet yet, but once they do, hopefully everything will look the same.  Mail is working, so I have to get Jenny's mail all set up so she doesn't notice the change.

When we moved into our house last year, one of the things that I got was a Roomba vacuum cleaner.  My wife, who sometimes does not appreciate cool things, banished it from the downstairs.  Since my office in the attic usually looks very "lived in", I never got a chance to try it out.  On Friday though, I cleaned the attic up, and was able to setup the robot.  It's awesome!  You press a button on the device, and it skitters across your floor, vacuuming up everything.   When it's done, it drives itself back to where it started and attaches itself to the charger.

Since the boys come up here a lot, there were lots of popcorn kernels and other stuff on the floor, and I didn't think that the robot would be able to handle it.  I was wrong.  The robot got all of the popcorn kernels up, as well as legos, bottlecaps, screws, and all sorts of other miscellaneous detritus.   It even handled driving over the various power/speaker/usb/printer cables that I have all over the place and kept on running.  The only time it stopped abnormally was when the dirt holder was full.

I got the base model, but there are additional ones that are programmable, and I would LOVE to get a programmable robot.

Since I got this neat new PC, I had to go out and get a few games to try out on it.  I usually don't play games that much, not because I don't find them fun, but because I don't have enough time to get good at them.  And there is nothing more humiliating than having a 14 year old who plays Halo2 about 9 hours a day smoke you when you play online.  If they ever get too cocky though, I will be able to trump them with the "well, at least I have seen a woman naked" card. 

Anyway, the last game I ever played all the way through was Half-Life 2.  It was great.  I went and bought Shadowrun and Halo 2 for Vista, and have been messing around with them some tonight.  Shadowrun seems really neat, although I haven't gotten too far into it.  I'm pretty disappointed with the graphics in Halo2 though:  they look the same as the 2004 version of Halo 1.  Maybe I just don't have my video settings right (I like to go to the video setup and slide all of the settings to 11.  What's the point of having a smoking video card if you don't use it?)

One of the things that I like to do is get weird, one-off questions from people, and try to come up with an answer for them as quickly as I can.  It also helps because it means that I can write code for a change, instead of herding nerds or completing my mandatory TPS report training.

One question I got recently was seemingly simple:  How to eject a CD from VB.NET.  I figured it would be cake:  WMI was built for stuff like this, so it should be easy.  I looked at Win32_LogicalDevice, and I could tell if a disk was a CD (or DVD) by looking at the DriveType property.  So that was easy, I figured it would be nothing to Inovke the proper method to open the CD...then I found out that there WAS no member to invoke that would open the CD.  (Win32_LogicalDisk is documented here).

So instead of giving up, I dropped back to the old method:  sending MCI strings, which was the cheesy way of doing this back in the VB3 days, so it's at least 15 years old.  I can't believe there isnt a better way.  I guess that if anyone ever ported the FW to Windows 3.1, this would still work, so that's a plus.

Anyway, the code is:

Module Module1

    Declare Function mciSendString Lib "winmm.dll" _
    Alias "mciSendStringA" ( _
        ByVal lpstrCommand As String, _
        ByVal lpstrReturnString As String, _
        ByVal uReturnLength As Integer, _
        ByVal hwndCallback As Integer) _
    As Integer


    Sub Main(ByVal args() As String)


        Dim result As Integer
        result = mciSendString("Set CDAudio Door Open", _
            Nothing, 0, 0)
        Console.WriteLine("mciSendString returned " _
            & result)

    End Sub

End Module

Easy squeezy. 

To be honest, I usually don't do vb.net...I had to keep going back and taking the semicolons off of the end of each line.  Anyway, figuring this out was fun, even if I didn't come up with the best answer (there has to be a managed way to eject a CD, I'm just not smart enough to find it)

One of the last songs Johnny Cash ever recorded was a cover of Trent Reznor's Hurt.  Reznor later said that Hurt "wasn't his song anymore", because JC made it his own.  Apparently, Hurt really made an impression on Kermit, too. 

Some people have far too much time on their hands.

Jenny and I went to see Knocked Up tonight.  Very good, well worth it.  I wanted to move in with the hero's roommates though,  they remind me of the people I used to live with (although we were all in the Army, so we abused different substances).

When I turn my TV on, I am automatically put on the local cable access channel.  Its the standard stuff:  live coverage of the school board meeting, etc.  I turned the TV on tonight, because Friday is always Family Movie Night, where we watch a movie "as a family".  Jenny was upstairs, and Eric was reading a book somewhere, so Alex and I were talking while waiting for them to come downstairs (Jake and Izzy were asleep; they don't get to have family movie night). 

Anyway, the local cable access channel had a replay of the dedication of the Billy Graham Museum, which was earlier this week in Charlotte.  Billy Graham is a pretty big deal in Charlotte, and George Bush (senior), Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were all attending.  Anyway, Billy Graham gets up to make a speech (he is about 400 years old), and the TV flashes "Billy Graham Museum Dedication" on the screen.  Alex looked at me and said "Is that Rick Graham that you work with?"

I laughed uproariously. 

(This is probably a lot funnier if you know the Rick Graham that I work with)