Thank you, patient readers, for indulging my long absence.  I will be adding some new articles shortly, including nifty tricks you can teach Subsonic to do, more C# .NET Interop magic, more news from people with similar DNA, and perhaps some revelations on audio processing, IMVU and search engine strategies for your blog.

I was interested to see how people are finding this blog.  It appears to be a common practice for IT recruiters to google prospective developers.  Many people are finding this blog by my name "Chris Velazquez", as well as the misspelling "Chris Velasquez".  In fact, a google search on just "Velazquez" shows this web site in the top 100 results, despite the more obvious relevance of Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, and the fact that Velazquez is quite a common name in the Spanish-speaking world.

There seems to be some interest in C# dictionary of delegates, an alternative to using a switch statement.  While this isn't an earth-shattering revelation, several programmers have picked up on this technique, and I am beginning to use it more frequently in certain parts of my own code.

As expected, many IE7 users want to use BugMeNot to bypass mandatory registration.  And also as expected, people are having problems trying to get MS Office and Excel to work seamlessly with their C# code.  Surprisingly, the image of my daughter holding balloon with static cling in her hair is becoming a hit on the search engines.

I'll be fertilizing this blog with my mental droppings shortly.  Stay tuned!

News from people with similar DNA

The week after next I'm going to have a visit with my sister, Tracy Velazquez.  She's coming to Houston for some conference and of course will spend some time in Boerne with us.  Yes, this is the Tracy Velazquez that ran for Congress in 2004.  I was the one to blame for her campaign web site, including the blogging software.  So I must confess that I'm not the first person in the family to have started blogging.  If you visit the archive of her site, you'll see that her sense of humor is similar to mine, once again proving indisputably that we have similar DNA.  Alas, she lost that election, even though she's "hot".

My son, Tony (11), recently advanced from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts at the Blue and Gold banquet held at the Boerne Convention Center.  I was unable to get any decent photos with my cheesy cell phone camera.  I did, however, get a picture of the most beautiful, talented, creative and intelligent girl in the world.  That would be my own daughter, of course, Aria (7).  She is pictured here demonstrating the effect of static electricity from balloons on one's hair.

No respect

Last night, Tony told me he had found the perfect song for me.  It's called "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, and you can listen online or buy the MP3.  I tell you, I get no respect.

My swag's in the mail

Erin from ActiveState referenced my blog earlier this week, and she got a creative marketing idea from my Nutty Warnings blog entry. I pinged her back, teased her a little, and got a free T-shirt!  I love geek swag.  The last time I was this happy was when I won the puzzler from SoftArtisans (using a Perl script, heh heh) and received a free SoftArtisans T-shirt and a license for ExcelWriter, which I am still using in production today!  Actually I was more excited about the T-shirt, because for a few hundred dollars anyone can license their software!

Well this has been a slow news week.  No astronauts went ballistic this week, and the hype over the death of what's-her-name is over.  The usual body count from Iraq and our casual acceptance of new encroachments by Big Brother just aren't news anymore.

Garfield, eat your heart out

So I guess I'll just introduce my beloved cat, Spot.  We have three cats, but Spot is decidedly "mine"; she often hangs out on the gate waiting for me to come home from work.  I picked her from the litter a month before she was ready to be adopted.  She is about 4 years old now.  When she was about a year old, she was exploring one of our neighbor's abandoned cabins and accidently fell down the chimney.  The fireplace had been boarded shut, so she was trapped in the chimney just above the flue.  I wondered what happened to her, and after about a day and a half of her missing, I heard a very faint meowing.  I found her and rescued her from the cabin, but she had blown out her vocal cords trying to get somebody's attention.  As a result, she barely meows any more.  Now she's kind of fat and indulgent, so I guess it's true that pets and their owners start to look alike.  I took this photo of her this morning; she has spent the night sleeping on some pizza boxes from the night before.

"It's not the fur that makes you look fat", quips my daughter Aria.

Something to think about

I think I've finally discovered the absolute worst programming language.  It's called "Whitespace", and it's even worse than brainf*ck.  All commands in the language are composed of whitespace.  This is not a joke.  I'm seriously considering porting this to Whitespace.NET.  Anyone want to join me?

Remarkable benefits of NASA technology

Having spent the past week in the Clear Lake City area of Houston, in light of the recent flap with astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, I guess it should not come as a surprise that every time I passed by the NASA Johnson Space Center there was a queue of reporters waiting to have there smiling faces videotaped in front of the NASA front entrance.  Of course, the most interesting aspect of this stranger-than-fiction drama was the fact that Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando while wearing a special "space diaper" that obviated the need for pit stops.  I asked the guard at the gate of NASA if there was any way I could buy or otherwise obtain one of these coveted "space diapers", but he didn't find the humor in this so I left before he could call the cops.

 Lisa Marie Nowak and Nick Nolte.  Separated at birth?  I report, you decide.

A Valentine poem

Valentine's Day is right around the corner, so you should set your MS Outlook reminder to give you the electric cattle prod sometime before Wednesday.  Of course, I like to stay on top of these things, so to speak.  Therefore, in order to display my more sensitive side to my lovely wife, I embarked upon some original poetry.  Chicks dig poetry.  Without further adieu...

Washington Monument
Never looked as grand
As what I have for you
In my hand
Happy Valentine's Day

See what a true romantic I am?  I wonder if I can sell this one to Hallmark?

News from people with similar DNA

My chef brother, Josh, opened his new restaurant, Deep Ellum in Boston last month.  He's been getting some rave reviews from the local press, which is always welcome.  I asked him if he had a web site yet, to which he did not answer.  So I did a registration lookup at DomainTools.com and found that he already did have a domain registered, and when I visited the web site, it was already under construction.  Josh was not happy that I found his web site.  But I hope everyone in Allston gets a chance to sample some of his remarkable cooking.  He's phenomenal.

Yet another case of Texas envy?  I report, you decide.  I'll update when the website is "officially" launched.  Till then, you'll just have to find it yourself.

San Antonio's biggest problem

One thing people certainly will not envy about Texas is that 4 of the 10 "fattest cities" are right here in the Lone Star State, with San Antonio topping that list at position #2, just behind #1 Las Vegas, NV.  Now anyone who's been to San Antonio knows that the food is great here - barbecue, Mexican, and many others.  San Antonio is one of the most hostile cities to bikers, and there are so few bike trails that it's hard to understand how Lance Armstrong got his start here without getting run over.  And the few existing public parks and green spaces in the Alamo City are lame.  If I were king of the world, I would kick the military out of Camp Bullis and turn it into the most wonderful public green space in all of Texas.

On getting noticed by search engines

It's clear that I have much work to do when it comes to search engine optimization.  I read with eager abandon the article on SEO referenced by my friend Big Nellie on his blog.  You would think that because I registered the domain "chrisvelazquez.com" and that my site is called Chris Velazquez, and that in fact my name is actually Chris Velazquez, and has been since birth, that when you type the phrase "Chris Velazquez" in the search engine, that the first entry for "Chris Velazquez" would be one of my own pages.  My home page has the words "Chris Velazquez" in the title tag, the H1 tag, and all over my web site.  Yet if you go to the #1 search engine, you won't find any pages of this website at all unless you place the term "Chris Velazquez" in quotes, and even then it only shows one of the blog pages, sometimes.  It's not that I'm in love with my name; my name is pretty ordinary, and there are a few other people who also have the same name, including a rancher in New Mexico and a film producer.  As you can probably tell, this entire paragraph is an attempt at an experiment to see whether this page will become the first search engine result for the term "Chris Velazquez".  Sorry to have to bore you with all this.

 What Gooooooogle thinks about my website!