AnkhSVN is a free Subversion source control plugin for Visual Studio 2005. It took me a little while to get things configured properly, perhaps because I prefer to use PuTTY's plink.exe instead of TortoiseSVN's TortoisePlink.exe. After all, the entire point of using an IDE-integrated Subversion plugin is to avoid having to install Tortoise, right?
Here are the steps I took to finally get things jiving:
1. Install AnkhSVN.
2. If you're geeked out enough to be looking for something like AnkhSVN, you probably already have PuTTY, the free Windows ssh client. What you may not have is plink, the headless, scriptable, ssh client from the same author. Download plink and drop it somewhere convenient, like c:\program files\putty\plink.exe.
3. AnkhSVN has written a configuration file in your My Documents\Application Data\subversion\config. Open that file and look for the [tunnels] section.
4. Uncomment the line that begins "#ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh" and change it to read:
..where username and password correspond to your credentials on the SVN server. Make sure to use double backslashes as path separators, and single backslashes to escape spaces, when setting the path to plink.exe. And make sure to specify the -batch flag to plink, otherwise your shit just ain't gonna work.
5. If Visual Studio is running, quit it and restart. Go to Tools > AnkhSVN, and you should be able to access the features correctly. Start with the repository browser and enter the URL to your Subversion server: svn+ssh://svn.example.com/usr/local/svnroot/dev for example. As long as the credentials you specified in the config file are valid for svn.example.com, you're good to go.
I'm really enjoying AnkhSVN so far. My only complaint is that after completing any commit or checkout operation, the system focus tends to get set to a null state, such that I have to click back into Visual Studio. Maybe there's a way around that I haven't yet discovered, but I consider the minor annoyance a small price to pay to integrate Subversion into VS.
I should have a copy of Visual Studio 2008 in May after the Nashville "Heroes Happen Here" kickoff. If I remember, I'll report back as to whether or not AnkhSVN works with 2008.
You often hear the phrase "a friend of the family," a term of endearment granted to some individual held in high regard by, well, the members of a family. My family doesn't have any friends of this nature; not as itself, not as an entity. I have my friends, and my mom has hers, and my dad has his, but the circles with which we as individuals surround ourselves simply don't intersect. Most of my friends have never met my parents, and while I've met some of my parents' friends, I wouldn't consider them my own.
I don't remember the first time I met Chris Turner. It would have been at Outback Steakhouse, where he was a server; probably in 1995, give or take a year. What I do remember is the second time I met Chris, several months later, after he'd encountered dozens of new faces each night in the meantime. When my parents and I next walked into Outback and sat down, he greeted us by name without any hesitation, as if he'd known us for years. Maybe a nice tip was the reason Chris had committed our names to memory, or maybe it was just his inherent ability. It doesn't really matter why. That night, Chris Turner became a friend of the family.
Different people treat the practice of eating out in different ways. Some are faithful to specific restaurants, finding comfort in a favorite dish, not caring who brings it to the table. Others are loyal not to eateries, but to the wait staff; knowing that a good server, even if he found himself in a soup kitchen, would determine a way to make the experience enjoyable for his diners. My family tends to fall into the latter camp, and Chris was the perfect reason why. I don't believe I've set foot in Outback in ten years; instead, we followed Chris first to Bahama Breeze, then to Bonefish.
Chris was a master of his craft. It's difficult to impart the intricacies, the nuances, the skill, the level at which he operated. He was not a server, he was the creative conduit between the kitchen and the customer. He had his finger on the pulse of the entire restaurant - whichever one it happened to be - and used that not only to his advantage, but also to yours, if you were dining there. Entrees were tweaked at his suggestion, and suddenly jerk chicken pasta became bowtie pasta with jerk shrimp and scallops. Sauces that weren't supposed to go with your dinner appeared, and made it better. And every meal came with something that should have been on the tab, but wasn't.
I'm a cynical bastard and I know my share of pranksters, but none better than Chris. I turned 21 when he was at Bahama Breeze, and that particular Friday night is one I will always remember. Pretending that they'd introduced a new dessert, he brought around a pie tin containing the supposed confection, and invited me to sample how good it smelled. Before I had time to realize I'd been played, I had a face full of whipped cream. Moments later, and prior to cleaning up from the aftermath, a group of 20 or so girls who had been dining across the restaurant gathered in a circle around the table to sing happy birthday to me. I've never been so embarassed in my life, but to say that I'd love to go back to that night would be an understatement.
That was Chris. With most waiters, you were eating dinner. With Chris, you were having an experience.
Chris was diabetic, and he probably didn't take care of himself as well as he should have. I look in the mirror and can cast no stones. His health grew progressively worse. He had fainting spells, and wound up in the hospital a few times. He had at least one stroke. He put Ex-Lax into his boss' bag of Skittles, which nearly put his boss into the hospital. Always the prankster.
Almost a year ago, I encountered Chris in traffic late one night; I know which night, it was the night of the Tool concert down at the DeSoto Civic Center. I was on my way home, driving down 64, and he nearly ran me off the road. I was briefly happy that my gun was present on my hip, because I was about to have an encounter with some complete asshole who was swerving around and trying to do me harm. Then his window rolled down, and I saw his face, and we spent 20 minutes chatting in front of the home of whoever lives on Berryhill just off 64. He invited me, once again, to go bowling with his group of servers on Monday night; I know he was probably trying to hook me up with some cute waitress, and I told him that I'd make it, one of these Mondays.
The last time I saw Chris Turner was a couple of months ago, at Wal-Mart. I was pushing my cart down the Beer / Soda aisle when I heard someone call out my name. He told me that he was having dialysis every other day, for 4 hours at a time, and they'd just had to switch from a shunt on his left side to one on his right side, because the site of the former had become infected. He pulled his shirt down and showed me the bandage. He told me he was only allowed to drink 32 ounces of liquid a day. I tried to quantify where 32 ounces would fall among the cups of coffee, 20-ounce Diet Mt. Dews, and copious amounts of vodka that I consume each day. I couldn't really imagine limiting myself to 32 ounces of liquid and I wondered how he could, although I imagine maybe he didn't, after all.
I shook his hand and told him that I'd see him soon.
Maybe one of these Mondays I'll show up to go bowling.
Rescue 1 dispatched to 10226 Cottage Oaks due to a carbon monoxide alarm at zero-38. That's about 20 yards from my house. Hope everyone over there is OK... I think I ought to start a neighborhood web community, or something.
Because this post dares to defend some so-called "sex offenders," I need to make it clear that I thought up this scenario while trying to imagine the various ways that legitimate voters may be denied the right to vote in this year's elections. I am neither a sex offender nor a felon, and will have no problem voting.
Tuesday, February 5th ("Super Tuesday") is the date of primary elections in my state, as well as several other states.
My polling place is a church. This has been the case ever since I was old enough to vote, and was the case for many years before that. I have come to accept this as a matter of course; if I want to vote, I must go to a church to do so. It's always been a pleasant experience. I have never been proselytized at my polling place, and I've never flaunted my lack of religion upon anyone there, either.
It's just about as close to neutral ground as you're going to find in the South. Everyone just wants to vote, and nobody in the South wants to keep anyone away from a church. The area churches have no shortage of volunteers for election day, so it works out very well. As an agnostic I've never really had a problem with the idea that I have to go to a church to vote. As Laurence Fishburne so eloquently digressed in the movie Hoodlum, "The good Lord and I have an arrangement, I don't go into his house, he doesn't come into mine."
This evening I took a moment to verify my polling place. The districts here in the South are constantly being Gerrymandered, so anytime an important election is coming up, I like to confirm that what I see on my voter registration card jives, at least tangentially, with what the county Election Commission says is my local polling place. I'll be voting at the same location I always have. However, I noticed that the next district over is now voting at the local high school this year.
Voting at a high school, that seems just as normal as voting at a church. Until you begin to consider the fact that while no one in society is ostracized and prohibited from going near a church, many thousands of men and women in this country may not legally approach a school.
Individuals convicted of felonies typically lose their right to vote, their right to own a firearm, and a litany of other Constitutional rights supposedly surrendered by committing a felony. While I don't agree with this practice, these are the laws of the land. However, I got curious when I realized that several of my local polling places are public schools.
A quick Google for "sex offender list" misdemeanor brings up any number of statutes whereby an individual can be convicted of a lesser, misdemeanor crime, but still wind up on the "sex offender list." These are individuals who have not been convicted of, or even charged with, a felony. They have not legally lost their right to vote. Yet in a growing number of states and municipalities, those who are on the registered "sex offender list" are forbidden from being within a certain geographically defined limit of a public school.
So, I wonder. The guy who got caught taking a drunken leak in an alley, and who is now on the "sex offender registry" for that misdemeanor offense, and who has not legally lost his right to vote in elections because he has not been convicted of a felony, but who is legally forbidden from appearing within 1,000 feet of a school... What is this man to do when his assigned polling place turns out to be the local high school?
I'm riding high this weekend. For the second week in a row, I've made a profit from Sam's Town.
Last week, having not visited the Devil's Den for a month or so, I had a hankering for the crab legs and shrimp at the Sam's Town buffet. Unfortunately, I didn't have any cash. I have a rule where I take $100 down there, but I didn't have a hundred bucks, because it was a week to payday. So I collected all of my change and turned it into real money using the CoinStar machine at Schnuck's, then headed south with a grand total of $60. $20, I figured, for the buffet; $20 to gamble with, and $20 to hold onto in order to buy lunches during the following week.
As it turned out, I had a comped buffet waiting, so I suddenly had $40 to play. I didn't need it, though; I put a few bills into a quarter slot, quickly hit the "500 pay" for $125, and from there on out, every machine I touched decided to pay me. I was up and down and up and down, but I returned home a couple of hours later and $240 richer, with three crisp $100 bills. I had turned $60 into $300. It had been a good night.
Tonight I went down with some money to risk, but as it turns out, I really didn't need the capital. There was a great band playing at Roxy's, probably the most impressive show I've ever seen down there. For quite awhile, Roxy's featured "Broad Band," an all-female act from Nashville that I really liked. They disappeared some months ago and it's been hit or miss since then. I'm not sure who the band was tonight but I sure hope I can see them again. Their repertoire included everything from Skynyrd to the Stones to Johnny Cash to ZZ Top.
And I managed to sit at the same machine for about two hours, watching a few of this band's shows. I'd primed the machine with $100 (400 credits). A couple of hours and any number of Heinekens later, I cashed out with 700 credits ($175). I've been down to Tunica many, many times. This was the first time I've spent my entire trip sitting at one machine. It wasn't a huge profit, but it was one hell of a good time. I've got to figure out how to express my enjoyment of the band they had at Roxy's.
I also set a new personal speed record, 110 mph on I-40 between the 240 flyover and Exit 16. I don't have to apologize to anyone for tailgating this time, the road was wide fucking open.
On the night of the New Hampshire primary, the media far and wide were invited to watch as ballot boxes were locked into a vault requiring key-card access. It was an impressive show. I've worked with those sort of systems before - in fact, I've been beholden to them for a paycheck (though I really liked my situation, where my card would get me into just about anywhere) - and I trust them to some extent. At the very least, they keep the riff-raff out, and they do offer some public display of security.
The following night, Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting catches Bill Gardner, N.H. Secretary of State, overseeing boxes full of ballots being left in an unsecured area accessible to janitors and God-knows-who-else. Questioned repeatedly, Mr. Gardner is not able to answer why the ballots are being left in an unsecured area. He refuses to answer whether or not the vault is full. He refuses to answer why, suddenly, ballots have been moved outside of the secured vault and into an area subject to tampering.
Secretary of State Gardner stands around mostly dumbfounded, while other unidentified officials answer in his stead. "Make sure you're here in the morning, and you will see, this door that's sealed now, this building's secure, those ballots are secure," Gardner says. The door is then "sealed" with a piece of paper-tape that several officials sign. It looks right official and shit!
Until the following morning, when Bev and her crew arrive, as invited by Secretary of State Gardner. They manage to find an entire box full of the paper "seals" used as a security measure on the door and the ballot boxes. Testing the seals, they are easily applied to a box, peeled off with no trace, re-applied, peeled off again with no trace, etc. The very "seals" that are supposedly guaranteeing the security not only of the ballot boxes themselves, but also of the facility in which they're being stored, are so easily tampered with as to be laughable.
This is not an audit trail. This is not a chain of custody. Moreover, these ballots are not secure, and no New Hampshire voter can be confident that their vote was not tampered with! As much as I respect Bev Harris and her folks, even they could have potentially altered the contents of those ballot boxes, had they so wished.
We will never know how the ballots really stacked up. If Bev and her watchdogs could compromise the "seals" in a matter of seconds, who else might have come into the "secure" room in their absence, in the interim between the time that Bev was escorted out, and the time that she returned as invited the following morning? What might they have done? Why were boxes full of ballots specifically left outside of the vault that was presented to the network media the previous day?
Perhaps something in here wasn't abided by. I dunno, I'm no lawyer. I'm just a guy who likes to eat a splendid dinner and see the lovely tall sights on a Friday night. I'm just a liberal being drawn more and more to a certain Republican named Ron Paul.
I love abortion, I hate the idea of women (or girls) having kids they don't want and can't support. I love food stamps, with limits; I'm in favor of the idea of supporting those among us who haven't figured out how to make it yet, as long as they're willing to work. I love Social Security, even though I'm well aware that no matter how much I pay in, nothing will be there for me 35 years from now. I love guns (bet that was a surprise). I have no religion, and never will. Yet here I am thinking quite seriously about voting for a guy who calls himself a Republican, for the first time in my life.
That ought to say something about how fucked up our entire political process is at this point. A bleeding-heart liberal who sees eye to eye with a conservative. Turns out, though, Ron Paul is actually a conservative. Eliminate the IRS, stop the war on drugs, gut the federal government, and put decisions back under the auspices of the states. Y'know, like that thing called the Constitution of the United States called for.
Wake up, motherfuckers. We've got 10 months to go, and it's time we start holding people accountable.
The email address for Jiffy Lube customer service is jiffy-lube-customer-service@shell.com. They don't provide this address on their website, so I had to fill out a form (including personal details) to get in touch with them. Maybe someone else looking to contact Jiffy Lube customer service will find this useful.
I'm not trying to start a trend or anything, but we can probably all agree that pussy pics are a common uniter.
My cat spends most of his days confined to my master suite, because I don't trust him to have free roam of the whole house while I'm at work. Leaving him to explore without supervision, no doubt he would systematically destroy my plasma TV, my laptop, my 22" desktop monitor, my stereo speakers, and my beer bottle collection (which is beginning to rival that of the Flying Saucer). His food, water, and litterbox are in the master bathroom, and the bedroom contains more cat toys than your average Wal-Mart, so all of his non-emotional needs are met when I'm away.
As with most pussy I've encountered, this one enjoys being in a position of prominence at all times. And as such, he's made a habit of occupying the highest elevation available in the space he occupies most of the day. That happens to be the one-and-a-half inch wide perch on the top of the door that separates the master bedroom from the master bathroom. My mom wanted to see proof of this, and the photos were fit for public consumption, so here we go:
This is Mulder relaxing on top of the master bathroom door. He has incredible balance, and can pace back and forth over the length of the door quite rapidly, turning around with ease. Every now and then, he'll slip just a little bit, but he corrects himself immediately with a slight dip accompanied by a telltale scratching sound. I wonder if he'll be able to do this once he's declawed?
Mulder atop the door (click it for larger pic)
Next we see how he arrives at this perch. First, he jumps onto the ledge of the Jacuzzi tub (not pictured). From there, he propels himself up to the window sill; and yes, that's a vodka bottle on the outside sill, it serves as an ash tray. It's an easy and horizontally level reach from the window sill to the towel rack, which he crosses halfway before launching himself up on top of the door. At that point, he looks down upon me as the inferior being.
How he gets up there (click it for larger pic)
Look at that coon tail. Sometimes I'm half tempted to let this little runt kitty outside and see how he deals with the surrounding wildlife. Mulder vs. coon, though, I bet he'd win. I constantly have the scratches to prove it.
At some point this evening, my beloved kitty decided that he was hungry. Not for cat food or cat treats. Not for delicacies like tuna or cheese. Not even for table scraps, bits of shaved ham, cotto salami, or morsels of tilapia. No, Mulder decided that he was hungry for one of the anaheim pepper plants that I'd brought inside a few months ago in an attempt to overwinter them.
And surely enough, he bit and chewed, reducing the poor plant to a mere stub of its previous self, severing its stalk and rendering the majority of the plant useless. It's likely a goner now, with a stalk and a sparse set of leaves remaining; a wasted effort at this point. One of the others has yellowed over for lack of sun, leaving only one real candidate for overwintering and early production. I might as well give up.
At just about the time I caught him, my Mulder was beginning to regret having grazed upon this particular bit of vegetation. I'm not one to eat the non-fruit portions of pepper plants, so I'm not keen on the positive or negative piquancy of the greenery; you might say I'm far more well versed in the seeds and stems of herbs in another genus.
In any case, kitty didn't appear to be very happy about his choice of leafy greens. I hope it's served as a lesson in what not to eat. It takes a lot more effort to raise and nurture a pepper plant than it does to raise a cat. So the way I see it, peppers are beloved but pussy is easily replaced.
Suggestions for clandestine extermination and disposal of unwanted felines may be hereby solicited.
