The Matt Faus Blog

Last weekend I had the awesome opportunity to go wind surfing on Hood River. Driving down with Patrick and his wife Saturday morning, we traveled through Mt. St. Helens and witnessed all the damage that the volcanic eruption 1986 did to the land, and saw how long ecological systems actually take to replenish themselves. It’s pretty incredible how after even twenty years all the trees and vegetation are still lying in ruins struggling to make the land green again. I would have thought that after such a long time that the trees would have rotted away, but all of the trees that were knocked over from the blast of ash that came rushing from the mountain were still there. It was definitely a site worth seeing but far from the best I saw all weekend. I guess that’s the biggest difference between Texas and here - all the beautiful nature.

Anyway we got to the lodge and after a nice bike ride from the complimentary rentals we had dinner and began to rest up for the big day ahead of us. One interesting thing about the bike ride was that I started in Washington and rode all the way to Oregon, crossing over what is known as the Bridge of the gods. Apparently the native Americans called it this because it was a natural land bridge at the time that allowed them to trade with the opposite shores.

Now, to the point of this whole post - the wind surfing. Now, I would like to preface this by saying that I am an avid water skier who has not gotten to do much at all for the whole summer. Needless to say, I was pumped about getting on the water to do some surfing. This was the first wind powered sport I had ever tried, and it was an awesome new experience. After suiting up with some water shoes to get a better grip on the board, we headed out. When we got out there, the wind was nonexistent. It wasn’t too big of a deal because we had some dry land training to do first anyway. One lessons, two lessons, and still no wind. It was noon and I was quite bummed out. See, it’s opposite with skiing - wind is bad because it makes the water choppy, but with wind surfing it is, of course, the opposite. After a #2 at McDonald’s everything got much better. The wind picked up and with all the training I had been doing that morning, I was rockin’ and ready to go. It took me a little bit, but I had several really good runs. It was nothing like water skiing, which I think I’m pretty good at, but it was a lot of fun. It’s definitely not something you can learn in a weekend and it takes much more endurance than skiing. I’m sure if I lived around a place like that it would be something I could get into. I didn’t become an expert or anything but I think I got a pretty good handle on it through the few hours of wind that I got. Overall, it turned out to be a very successful excursion.

On the way to Portland for the night we stopped by several waterfalls and they were a grand site indeed. I haven’t seen a whole lot of waterfalls in my day, so I took plenty of pictures to commemorate the event. Portland fed us some incredible steaks and then we headed back to the beautiful city of Seattle.

Today, by pure accident, I discovered that the built-in search box in the top-right corner of the application window cycles through the collection of search engines when Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down.

This was cool for me becuase before I learned this I was selecting with the mouse, and that was getting annoying. Now I can do everything from the keyboard:

• Ctrl+T (new tab)
• Tab (move to search box)
• Type search phrase
• Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down to select search engine
• Enter (launch search)

The search engines I use the most are Google, of course, and Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com also has a pretty awesome Thesaurus, and I try to use it when I want to sound sophisticated (read: when writing formal papers).

Hey, I’ve got another link for all the developer’s out there. Today, I was trying to figure out a regular expression to determine if a string was a valid GUID or not, and I figured, “Ya know, I’m sure there have been tons of people to do this before me: Google it!”. After a little bit of searching I found this website that has regular expressions for almost anything you can thing of such as dates, times, addresses, social security numbers, etc. etc.

RegEx Library

Today I was altering a computed column of one of the tables in our SQL 2005 database, but was hitting the problem that concatenating a string with a null value produces a null value. My table had a FirstName and a LastName column and I was trying to make a FullName column with a computed value of (FirstName + LastName). The problem I was hitting was that when the LastName column was null the whole equation was returning null, but I, of course, wanted an empty string. The key to solving the problem is using Transact-SQL’s IsNull() function which returns a predefined value if the first parameter is null.

Wrong:
SELECT ('Test String' + NULL)
----------------------------------------------------------
NULL


Right:
SELECT ( 'Test String' + ISNULL(NULL, '') )
----------------------------------------------------------
Test String


Hopefully if someone is Googling around looking for an answer to this problem (like I was a little bit ago) they will find this and it will make their day.

Well, I got a pocket PC phone from work to develop mobile applications and to celebrate I thought I would make a post from it! So, here I am typing this from my phone!

Well, I’ve been in Seattle for the past couple of months and my brother, Ben, was coming up here with the high school choir, so my parents and my other brother, Andrew, also decided to spend the weekend up here! Everyone arrived Saturday and the fun began!
Saturday, I cooked some dinner and we laid out the gameplan. Sunday we went to Mars Hill Church to catch the 9am service. This is an amazing church, by the way. I have been here a couple times since I’ve been in Seattle and the biggest feeling I get upon leaving is that everyone there is so honest, real, and well, human. It’s amazing because the things we talk about are directly applicable to everyday life and the speakers are incredibly down-to-earth and understanding. If you’re ever in Seattle you should definitely check out this church. For lunch we met up with my Aunt Verla and Sue at a place called The Dish. They had some really good breakfast food, especially the omelets. After this we headed down to Lakewood to pay a visit to the FBCC High School choir and listen to Ben sing a few songs in a concert for the Lakewood Baptist Church. After the concert, we stole Ben away and had a nice family dinner in downtown Seattle. We ate at a place called The Pike – the pizza was really good. After this we just walked around downtown and along the bay and soaked in the scenery.

Monday we went to Bainbridge after having lunch with Patrick at Ivar’s. Andrew got the seagulls to eat his leftover French fries from his hands and then we hopped on the ferry! Bainbridge was gearing up for the Fourth of July festivities and we got some awesome hand-made ice cream before heading back to the homeland. At this point Andrew and I headed off to the Mariner’s game and my parents went on a dinner train. The Mariner’s game was fun as far as baseball games go, but I can’t speak for the dinner train. (The food looks good in the pictures).

Now, Tuesday was quite a day. Boarding a tour bus at 7am, we didn’t get back until around 6:45pm – a full 12 hours! Now, what were we doing on this crazy twelve hour expedition, you ask? Why, trekking across the face of the world-renowned Mount Rainier, of course! The tour bus took us up to a region of the mountain called Paradise and we got to see several amazing pieces of scenery along the way. The glaciers at the top of the mountain were in full melt so the waterfalls were swelling with majesty. With over fourteen thousand feet of altitude, the clouds were even clipping the top of the mountain, creating a subtle halo effect. It was a lot of fun to get outdoors and explore such a wondrous creation. While hiking through some of the forests of this sleeping volcano, it was incredible to see some of the trees that are still living after nearly 1,000 years. Could you imagine living for nearly 1,000 years? It’s unfathomable how the immense complexities of nature all seem to work themselves out to such beauty and elegance. Needless to say, my dad and I took a lot of cool pictures. He loved playing around with his new Sony Cybershot DSC-H2, and I got some pretty good pictures, too. After having lunch in the shadow of the colossus we did a little more riding around until we finally got to a small patch of snow where we had an Independence Day snowball fight, which is something that you’ll never get to do in Texas! We didn’t have a whole lot of time to play in the snow because people were waiting to get home, but it was fun nevertheless! My dad caught some pretty cool shots of it, one of which are included below, enjoy! On the ride home from the mountain we passed through an Indian reservation, one of the only places in Washington where you can buy fireworks and boy was it crowded! After getting back to town we hung out a little in my apartment, checked e-mail, downloaded pics, and then we were off to watch the fireworks over Puget Sound! We were kind of late in leaving so we didn’t have a great spot to see them, but it was a pretty good show. It’s really too bad we didn’t have our boat out there as watching the fireworks from a boat would have been incredible! They lit up the whole sky and their reflection on the water was really something else.

It was really cool to see my family this weekend and I think I got a much-needed break from work, haha! As always, don’t forget to check out all the pictures we took over the weekend!

Well, it seems Microsoft has deemed my involvement with the online InfoPath community worthy of recognition and have bestowed upon me the immense honor and notarity of the Most Valuable Professional award. As I am only one of seven in the world who have received this award for InfoPath, I am, needless to say, incredibly excited! For those of you in need of a visual aid, please see the picture below.

Click here to check out the posting on Microsoft’s website!