Ian Lipsky

Apparently someone (Brendan Enrick) 'tagged' me almost a year ago and now I'm supposed to tell you 5 things you, whoever you are, don't know about me.

1. I'm almost a pilot. Took flying lessons back in HS and came this close || to actually finishing but ran out of time and money just before I was ready to take the test. However I was very pleasantly surprised to find out flying is somewhat like a bicycle in that once you learn you don't forget. After more then 10 years of never having flown a plane, I decided to take a quick 30 minute intro flight again and I managed to take off, fly and land the plane myself. The damage to the plane only came out to around $3000 ;) Ok, the landing was a tad bumpy, but the plane and everyone in it were undamaged.

2. I'm a dog person and since my last apartment didn't allow dogs, i got some ferrets instead. I still don't know how I decided that ferrets would be a good dog substitute. They are pretty darn cute and fun though. They also happen to be illegal in California so I had to smuggle them in from NV - or rather I mean if I lived in California i would have had to smuggle them in ;)

3. I do not have a single degree, not even a high school diploma. I'm mostly self taught. I started programming about 12-13 years ago by using frontpage to make an asp page that read from a database. I didn't like the way frontpage was rendering the page, signed up on an asp mailing list and started playing with the asp code frontpage generated and that's how I got started. So I owe my current career to frontpage's crappy html and to some very helpful people on the now defunct asplists.com mailing lists. The lack of a HS degree is mainly due to my own impatience with the NY educational system. Rather then run around on a soccer field for gym i decided to do homework instead. Apparently doing homework instead of playing games is grounds for not getting a diploma. Makes sense to me.

4. As Brendan mentioned in his post (and Steve mentioned in his) I too am a gamer. I play mostly online games. Currently that's Tabula Rasa, although I'm considering going back to WoW (shoot me now).  And it's mostly PC games. Although I currently own three game consoles (xbox, wii and ps3) I never seem to get into them much. I'm not sure why. I think I'm just used to sitting in front of a PC :) I did play D&D back in JHS for a while. The first computer games I really remember playing are the Quest series of games from Sierra. Why doesn't anyone make games like that anymore? *sigh*

5. I once had the police show up at my apartment asking me if i felt ok and if i had any sharp objects or felt like hurting myself. This is because on those same mailing lists i mentioned in #3 someone had posted a message which sounded suicidal. At this point I had started to help moderate those lists. Doing what any reasonable person would do, I forwarded this message to the other moderators to ask if anyone knew this person and could help. And apparently some of those other moderators didn't pay enough attention to what they were reading and thought the message that I forwarded actually came from me. So being the not-paying-enough-attention and reasonable people that they were, they called the local police and told them I might be doing something harmful to myself. So at 7am there's a knock on my door and I'm trying to explain to the police officer what a mailing list is and hoping he doesn't notice the ferrets (which he did) which would be illegal if i were living in California which I'm not claiming i am. Fortunately though he didn't seem to know they were illegal which was very good for me, if i were living in California :)
 

I have fairly low expectations from the free email services and from ISP's when it comes to doing anything about a user on their system that is spamming. But I think yahoo sinks to new lows. I would not be surprised in the least if every report of abuse is just dumped in the trash (after sending out a nice auto reply assuring you they'll do something).

I've reported several yahoo users to yahoo abuse and as far as I can tell, they have done nothing. I know for a fact in one particularly nasty case they did nothing.

I run a bulletin board and I try very hard to keep all the spammers off of it. And like most boards, I require people to validate their email address before they can post. So I know for a fact if someone registers with a @yahoo.com email address, and then posts spam, that that email address is sending spam.

One day someone registered, validated their yahoo email address and started posting spam to my board advertising their crap - printer cartridges if i remember correctly. They posted a link back to their store which was a yahoo store, and which had the same email address on the store's page as the email that was used to register on my board.

So I sent an email to yahoo abuse informing them one of their customers were spamming bulletin boards. I showed them a copy of the post. Explained how the email was validated. And I sent a copy of this complaint email to the spammer as well. I like them to know that at least some people actual report them.

The spammer responded by sending several hundred emails to my mailbox. I reported this to yahoo as well, including copies of the email with full headers.

Yahoo did nothing. The spammer's email was still operational. The spammer's store was still operational. This pattern is repeated over and over by yahoo.

So it is my opinion that yahoo sucks. Yahoo doesn't care what it's users do, especially if those users are paying yahoo.
 

First let me say that I doubt i would ever use a cell phone as an mp3 player. Mainly because i want my battery to last and i dont want to have to worry about it dying in the middle of a phone call. But if i were, i still dont think i'd like the Iphone much.

1. Its over-priced. $500 is a little steep in my opinion.
2. It does not have any flash memory expansion slot. Means you are stuck with whatever memory size you buy and you cant just copy media using a flash memory card.
   
3. You cant replace the battery. For me this isnt such a big deal since i think of all the cell phones i've had, i've only had to replace a battery once. But for someone who is going to use this as an mp3 player, the battery is probably going to get more use and wear out quicker. Which means when the battery goes, your stuck with a very shiny paper weight. Whats more, you are without a phone for however long it takes apple to replace the battery and it's going to cost you more then if you had just walked into the nearest cellular store and picked up a new battery.
4. Only available on cingular. I dont want cingular.
5. Download speeds arent as fast as they could be due to the technology apple decided to support (EDGE vs 3g etc)
6. And something someone else pointed out to me, you cant touch type with the phone since there are no keys to feel. Granted the phone should have good voice dialing so that may or may not be an issue.

Now on the plus side, i do have the admit the phone's interface looks really cool. It seems to have all the features of a smartphone - email, web browsing etc. The visual voice mail looks like a great idea to me, one i hope the other cell providers copy.

So the phone does have some very nice features. But i dont think those features are worth $500 AND a 2 year contract with cingular. The first time the battery goes bad on someone, they are going to curse having this phone.

 

I got tired of visual studio telling me that 'attribute align is considered outdated' every time I tried to do align=center.

Some googling gave me: style:margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto

This will center anything on the screen.
 

If you are trying to use the dataformatstring property of the GridView and finding that your format strings dont seem to be working, then try changing the HtmlEncode property of that column to False. If its set to true, your format string wont show up.

To access the data contained in a DetailsView Control named DetailsView1, do the following:

DetailsView1.Rows[x] where x is the number of the row you want to access. The row counts start at 0 so to access the first row you would do DetailsView1.Rows[0]

Then to access the data contained in an individual cell:

DetailsView1.Rows[0].Cells[1].Text

Normally a detailsviewrow contains 2 cells: The first cell, 0, contains the header and the second cell, 1, contains the actual data. This may vary if you have customized the detailsview in some way and added or removed cells.