Often times as parents we ask ourselves whether we are doing a good job; whether what we say and so is having a positive impact on our children. More often than not, the answer is rather humbling, but occasionally there are glimpses of success. Here is a small one of ours, with a bit of humour.

The other day I was working in garden in the backyard with Miriam and we came across a yellow badminton birdie. Miriam picked it up, looked at it and promptly threw it over the fence to our neighbour's yard without so much as a word. When I asked her why she did that, she replied, "It's not ours, we don't have any yellow ones." Our neighbours, a middle-aged couple, who have an adult son are not known to be avid badminton players, but there was a day a few months ago that their son had a few friends over and set up a badminton net. Upon prying a bit further, I discovered that every couple of days for the past couple of months, Miriam will find the yellow birdie in our yard and dutifully throw it back over the fence. Apparently our neighbours believe it is ours. This made me chuckle a bit, so I thought I should let Miriam know this and suggested that next time we just hold onto it. She was adamant that we couldn't possibly keep it, because it isn't ours, "and that would be stealing." I asked her what she thought we should do, to which she replied, "I guess we'll just keep playing tennis with the neighbours."

We are about to enter the BBQ season. Therefore it is important to refresh your memory on the etiquette of this sublime outdoor cooking activity.

When a man volunteers to do the BBQ the following chain of events are put into motion:

Routine...

1. The woman buys the food.
2. The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes dessert .
3. The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces, and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill - beverage in hand.
4. The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities can take place without the interference of the women.

Here comes the important part:

5. THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL.

More routine...

6. The woman goes inside to organize the plates and cutlery.
7. The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great. He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer while he flips the meat .

Important again:

8. THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN.

More routine...

9. The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins, sauces, and brings them to the table.
10. After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes.

And most important of all:

11. Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking efforts.
12. The man asks the woman how she enjoyed 'her night off.' And, upon seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that there's just no pleasing some women...

This is a new little feature that I will be adding to the blog occasionally. It is a newsletter that Jakob publishes now and again. Don’t let “Weekly” in the title fool you though…in some areas he is like his dad. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it.

Read the Weekly Newz

I have now linked the Photos tab (see top right corner) with my Flickr account. My photo sets on Flickr will show up as a list on the right side of the page and clicking on one of the sets will launch a Flickr slideshow on the main section of the page.

There are a couple of new sets available as of a couple of days ago: Awana Grand Prix 2009 and Jakob’s Birthday 2009.

Enjoy!

Prior to Exchange 2007, one of the commonly used features was the ability to view a list of all mailboxes along with their size and the number of items in the mailbox. This functionality has been removed from the Management Console in Exchange 2007. Not to fear, though, all is not lost. The following command shell script can be used to retrieve a list of all mailboxes on a server along with the mailbox size and the number of items.

Get-MailboxStatistics –Server <server name> | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft DisplayName,@{label="TotalItemSize(MB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}},ItemCount

Replace <server name> with the name of the Exchange 2007 server to query.

SQL Server Integration Services offers an easy way to send email in your packages, but out-of-the-box it only supports sending plain text email. Below is a script that can be used to send HTML email.

    '// Example :
    '// SendMail("recipient@theiremail.com, _
    '//          alerts@mycompany.ca, _
    '//          "I can now send HTML Email :)", _
    '//          "<B>Yipee!</B> I can send email messages using HTML formatting from SSIS.", _
    '//          True)
    Private Sub SendMail( _
          ByVal SendTo As String, _
          ByVal From As String, _
          ByVal Subject As String, _
          ByVal Body As String, _
          Optional ByVal IsBodyHtml As Boolean = True, _
          Optional ByVal SMTPServer As String = "localhost", _
          Optional ByVal UserName As String = "", _
          Optional ByVal Password As String = "", _
          Optional ByVal Domain As String = "", _
          Optional ByVal Attachments As String = "")

        Dim oMessage As System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
        Dim mySmtpClient As System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient

        oMessage = New System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(From, SendTo, Subject, Body)
        oMessage.IsBodyHtml = IsBodyHtml
        '//Attachments
        If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(Attachments) Then
            Dim sFiles() As String
            Dim sFile As String
            sFiles = Split(Attachments, ";")
            For Each sFile In sFiles
                If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(sFile) Then
                    oMessage.Attachments.Add(New Net.Mail.Attachment(sFile))
                End If
            Next
        End If

        mySmtpClient = New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient(SMTPServer, 25)
        If UserName = "" Then
            mySmtpClient.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials
        Else
            mySmtpClient.Credentials = New System.Net.NetworkCredential(UserName, Password, Domain)
        End If
        mySmtpClient.Send(oMessage)
    End Sub

Here is a link to our Flickr photo set with some family photos from the Families with Children from China (FCC) New Year's celebration.

http://flickr.com/gp/aldoms/40313o

Enjoy!

Ok, I admit that I like statistics. Numbers are interesting to me. Take the number 4 for instance...ok, nevermind. What I really want to talk about is the Google Zeitgeist from 2008, especially as it relates to Canada. For the uninitiated, Google Zeitgeist is a collection of information that Google makes available regarding what is popular according to search trends. Shown below is a list of the top 10 most popular searches made by Canadians in 2008.

Most Popular

1. facebook
2. youtube
3. lyrics
4. weather
5. games
6. google
7. hotmail
8. yahoo
9. map
10. canada

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2008/#top

Interesting, eh? I'm actually quite fearful of what this tells us about ourselves! Can it be that there are that many Canadians that still need to SEARCH for facebook? How about Google...there are a whole lot of people out there using Google to search for Google. Sigh... Some may find that depressing, I call it job security. :)

Another day year, another blog attempt. I would really like to get in the habit of doing this more often (writing on a blog, not creating a new one :). For me the key is to make is easy to do and perhaps I can bring myself to find the time to do it more regularly. Also being a control freak I don't like using hosted services like Blogger because I hate the limitations that they impose (I guess that could be a topic for a whole other post eh?) In addition I have been looking for a .Net blogging platform that had all of the functionality of the major LAMP platforms such as Wordpress. I finally came across BlogEngine.Net which I am quite impressed with so far, so I will give this a shot and see how it goes. Fortunately it provides import/export functionality so if I turn out not to like it, I can always move the content to some other platform. :)

So what is this blog about?

Well, given that the majority of my readership (thanks Mom) are mostly interested in our family, I expect that the majority of the posts will be family related, but I intend to occasionally post interesting information that I glean from my work-life as well. The purpose for this is more as a way of documenting things that I spend too much time trying to figure out. Perhaps in the long run I will be able to help someone else as well as save myself some time when I have to repeat the task and can't for the life of me remember what I did. (Yep, I'm in my mid-30's now so the mind's not as sharp as it used to be.)

I'm sort of the Halloween equivalent of Ebineezer Scrooge. I'm not a big fan...and am always happy when Halloween is over and the stores start breaking out the Christmas decorations. I do happen to really like Christmas. :) Having said all of that, we do let the kids have some fun on Halloween. We usually let them Trick-or-treat around to the neighbours and then head off to Trinity Western University for their Harvestfest (think lots of games and candy without all of the evil-looking costumes). Below is a photo of our three munchkins dressed up in their costumes (Jakob - hockey goalie, Miriam - lamb, Matias - Fireman).