PhillipBlanton.com

I grew up on these wonderful petite dill pickles and always pronounced it "wuh jess ski - Y row bee". However I just now noticed that there is a letter missing from the first word that I always thought was there. Now I reach out to anyone with polish ancestry, to try to help me get the right pronunciation of "Weijske Wyroby".

In a recent article, Sarah Palin asks, "Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?" The answer is clearly "No", but I take issue with Sara Palin's outrage over Rahm Emanuel using the word, "retarded" in the context he did. [More]

A quick javascript function for creating dynamic filler text, for texting website page layout. [More]

While waiting in the Denver airport, for an 11:10 AM flight to nashville, tennessee, I am sitting at a Quizno's in terminal A, that happens to be next door to a bar. The bar seems to be loosely associated with the Quizno's, because the barmaid keeps hawking Quizno's sandwiches and salads to the bar patrons. Many bar patrons are drinking beer, whisky and gin drinks at 9:00 AM. This would be totally unacceptable behavior outside of an airport setting. Apparently since airport patrons have been or will be traveling. The time zone excuse makes for a drinky drinkin' good time! The barmaid seems to be in her late thirties, and is enjoying the heck out of offering a "hot weenie" to every person who stops by. Apparently the Quizno's here ... [More]

I have had a Skype In number for a few years. When I first bought it, it cost me about $20 per year. I thought that was a good price for having a real number that people could use to call me on Skype. That and the ability to have Skype forward all calls to my cell phone when I wasn't at the computer, made my SkypeIn number very useful. Last year, when I went to extend the number for another year, the cost had gone up to $35 I think. I moaned, and paid it. It was still a good value. This year, I went to extend my Skype In number and see that it has increased again to $60 per year, plus they have changed Skype Out to a subscription-based service that they want $2.95 per month for. Skype Out used to be a service that came with... [More]

I am a software developer. I write software that targets the Microsoft .NET framework. I have switched to a Mac for all of my development work. You can too. About a year ago, I bought a 15" Macbook pro for my 16 year-old daughter, for her birthday. I was on a business trip to Oak RIdge, Tennessee and took her new laptop with me before i gave it to her. While on the trip, I fell in love with the operating system. For the past eight years or so, I have done all my work on a VMWare virtual machine. I haven't installed a development environment on my host operating system in as long. Therefore, the switch to Mac was seamless. I purchased VWare Fusion (for mac), ~$70, and just copied my virtual machines over to the new mac without a hitch. V... [More]

I found a good deal on a new dual-xeon server from an EBay seller, about a year and a half ago. I picked up an Enlight SR-107201 1U rack mounted server chassis with the motherboard, CD-ROM Drive, mounting rails and power supply for about $150. It turned out to be not so good a deal. This machine is relatively unsupported and the Enlight website support email system goes largely un-monitored. The only sites I could find where people were talking about setting up this server were in foreign languages. I bought two 3.4GHz Xeon processors, eight GB of RAM and four 500GB hard drives. After plugging it all together, the first problem started. It wouldn't boot. After trials and tribulations, it turns out that Xeon processors require... [More]

I bought the Belkin Multimedia Reader & Writer Expresscard for my new Macbook Pro, and it works exactly as well as a piece of ham. Well, that's probably not fair. I imagine it ejects from my Expresscard slot cleaner than a piece of ham would; but functionally it is the same as ham. I have tried five different SD cards of various capacities in it, and it failed to read any of them. I am surprised at the poor quality from a Belkin product. After all, this isn't a no-name EBay special freshly shipped from China. It's a BELKIN! Sadly, the picture I took here was copied off of the camera memory using the built-in SD reader in my wife's Macbook. The model I am referring to here is Part # F5U213 - P10789. Avoid it. It's junk.

All you developers out there pay attention. If you are as gramatically challenged as this guy was, or maybe English isn't your primary language? Either way, please resource all text in our applications and have someone else review it for its readability. This is a message that recently popped up from a toolbar application (ObjectDock) that I have been using for years. I'm sure the problem was caused by a Windows 7 incompatibility, but the text is what I am commenting on... Without regard to the grammatically obtuse message, I have a deeper question. As an end-user, how am I to even begin to "make sure that all the docklets I am using are current and not causing crashing while saving"? Can I tell by ... [More]

Those of you who grew up writing Windows software are familiar with the idea of a default button. ASP.net has the same idea, but did you know that you can have multiple default buttons on the same form? I know at first glance that doesn't seem to make sense. How can you have more than one "default" button? I have seen many javascript hacks to get a default button to click when someone presses the enter key on a form... Man, my writing skills are sucking out loud. Let's get right to it and not try to make it eloquent, as my eloquent bone seems broken today. ASP.net provides a simple solution for handling the Default Button functionality differently for different areas of the form, by using an asp:Panel con... [More]