Nobody knows I'm here

Ok, that sucks. Over two months and no blog posts. There's a good reason for it but I won't explain in an effort to keep the one reader I have left from dying of boredom!

Some notable things happened to me over the last couple of months:

Tasha and I went to see the Nutcracker as we usually do during the holiday season. Although not a whole lot of men admit going I find it quite facinating. It's admirable how much work these people put in to the show and usually I'm very very pleased... Except this year. We bought the EXPENSIVE tickets this year but didn't really get to use them. On arrival we were like 30 seconds late and would have popped straight into our seats except when we opened the door to go in we were faced with a poor kid running for the door following a stream of puke he was exhausting. Tasha got nailed, not a lot but puke is puke and a little goes a long way. Now we're parents (thankfully) so a courtesy puke was resistible and we simply went to wash it off. We felt horrible for the kid and his mortified mother following behind him apologizing profusly. Ok time to sit down. The show went well except for one of the dancers falling. (again, you feel bad for them in a way)

We got to the half time show (I like to call it that to revive a bit of manhood) and went out to get some coffee. This time we were admittedly lagging and were literally 5 seconds behind the door shutting. This time, however, we were not allowed back in. The establishment saw fit to detain us outside until half of the second act had passed on the merits of "no late seating". WE WERE LITERALLY 5 SECONDS OFF TARGET. That may be a lot when dropping a bomb but when watching a bunch of men and women run around in tights it seems a bit much. Finally after all that time and listening to us complaining they allowed us to sit, but not in the seats we paid for. We finished the show in the very back watching people who weren't obeying the rules come and go as they please through the side door.

Why we didn't think to just get up and walk down there I don't know, maybe because it seemed like they were watching us every time we looked over at the door-person nearby.

What else:
Cool screenshot application:
I did some work with media files in my spare time and discovered a bit of info on the windows platform. When working with media files using directshow one must know that the was moved from the directx sdk to the platform sdk with the 9.0 release of directx. This was easy to find in Google, what wasn't eahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifsy to find was some information on working with the directshow sdk from C# for the purpose I was attempting to use.

I was going down the path of C++ code with a managed wrapper called from an aspx page when I discovered something. There are a wealth of Gems in the quartz.dll file if you just add it to your references. Everyone will tell you that there is only support for audio/video playback within managed code. There are some creative things you can do to get access to filter graphs and use some interfaces/external wrappers to capture video direct from a camera/video capture device. You can also load a media file of almost any type and save a rendered portion of the media file as a bitmap. Wrap this in some conversion code to drop it as a jpeg and you've got a cool screenshot tool.

I used it to create an upload preview system for home movies we create with Joshua.

Also dove into the apache lucene project this quarter. For those interested in search technology I highly recommend looking at this. I wrote a spider to pull down RSS files from rhapsody and index them in lucene, filtering by my music likes and created a cool search tool for what music I want to listen to. It was a bit overkill for a home project but that's what happens when you're trying to get the hang of something.

Ok enough updates I'm done writing.