The Matt Faus Blog

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Matt Faus Pictures

This weekend I took a much needed riding expedition down to the Austin area. Some friends from the riding club I participate in have moved down there, so the fun was threefold. We went to ride the awesome roads of Hill Country, hang out with some long-time friends, and even got free lodging! Thanks Michael and Lisa!

We left on the bikes Saturday morning at 7:30am. We weren’t in too big of a hurry to get down there, so we took several stops and went the back way to avoid the traffic of I-35. We made it there by noon. We headed out to lunch via a road called Lime Creek. This road was a sign of great things to come. There were all kinds of elevation changes, decreasing radius turns, and everything in between! Several 15mph turns would curve and go up with the trees hanging down over the road, so it felt like your head was going to brush up against them. In one 10mph turn, I even scraped my boot on the pavement because I was leaned over so far! I had never done this before, so it was a little weird.

We met all the Austin riders at Oasis, and the total was about 20. This place was built on a cliff, so there are several staggered patios on the back and everyone gets an awesome view. I had a huge plate of fajitas, as I was really hungry after all that riding.

After lunch, we went riding around some more, a little bit tamer than Lime Creek, but still incredible. The scenery and the roads there are truly awesome.

Then we headed back to the house to grill some burgers and hot dogs and just hang out. We had a good time, but I went to bed pretty early since I was so tired.

In the morning we met up for some breakfast burritos at this place called Rudy’s. They were really good. Then, we went out riding, and it was probably the best riding I have ever done. The roads out there are simply incredible. It was a good 2-3 hours of just twists and turns through the hills. It really re-invigorated my love for riding! I was able to really work on technique since all the turns were so closely placed, and it was a lot of fun riding in such a big group. I don’t have a video of this ride, but I sure wish I did.

After we got back to the house, we packed our stuff and headed out. We wanted to get back to Dallas before the sun set, and it was already 3pm. We made pretty good time, but we still didn’t get back until 6:45pm. Sunday alone I did 600 miles, so I was really tired. I had a steakburger from Steak ‘n Shake and crashed. All in all, it was an awesome weekend!

That’s right, I’m getting married! Ashley and I have been dating for 3 years and on our last anniversary, I got on my knee and asked her to spend the rest of her life with me. We’re both graduating in May, when we will begin our life together. It has been an awesome three years, and I know the rest of our years will be even greater! I took pictures (and even a video) of the proposal, and those are soon to follow!

Here’s the first picture!

I use Google Calendar for all of my school and personal appointments. Since it’s online, I can look at it from any computer. However, I really wanted to sync my Google Calendar with the built-in calendar on my 8525 so that I could get a buzzing or beeping alert an hour or two before each of the appointments. To do this, I am using ActiveGcSync. I actually just downloaded and installed it during my Automata Theory class, so I can’t give a full review, but it seems like it’s working well so far.

It downloaded all of my appointments from Google, and then when I made a change to one appointment on my phone and then re-synchronized it was uploaded and changed in the Google Calendar. The only thing that didn’t seem to work was that I added an e-mail address attendee to the appointment on my phone, but they were not included as a guest in the Google Calendar appointment.

It’s really awesome to see all this technology working together so elegantly.

I recently received my HTC 8525 Pocket PC, and boy is it sweet! It’s even cooler because Cingular has implemented the 3G network in Dallas and I can get DSL-esque download speeds from anywhere via my phone! Pair that with a 400MHz processor and you’ve got some serious Internet surfing power.

Not only that, but you can completely alter your lifestyle with programs like Windows Live Search. I’ve always been a big Google fan, but this program is simply incredible. After installing it to your device you run it and open up the map to scroll around, zoom in, and find your position. Now, at this point, it’s already impressive. The panning and zooming of the map is really quick - almost like looking at Google Maps from your desktop, just a little smaller. After you find your position, you save it as your Home location and go into the search dashboard. The search dashboard has several options. Categories allows you to surf categories of stuff, from Aerobics to Zoos, and tells you the closests instance of something that matches that category. Traffic gives you real-time updates on the most congested roads. (Not that I care about that, working from home and all, haha!) Finally, there is the almighty search box. Type anything in here, such as “thai food”, and it will find all of the restaurants near you in a matter of seconds, sorted by proximity! Scroll through the list, click the number, and order your food. I can literally find, call, and order food from a restuarant I have never heard of before in a matter of seconds. If I wanted to pick it up, it spits out driving directions from my location to the restaurant.

Now that’s something, eh? I guess the only improvement I could think of is having GPS integration. It might be supported, but I need to get a bluetooth dock before I can use my Pharos GPS Receiver with this phone.

Since I have always lived on campus at UTD, I’ve never really noticed how bad the parking situation is. I have heard a lot of people complain about this, and there is even a bumper sticker that reads “If you see my professors, tell them I’m running late because I’m still looking for a parking spot”. Now that I live at an off campus apartment, I get to feel this pain first-hand.

Last week, I pulled into the parking lot and saw a pair of reverse lights on the back of a car. By the time I got there, six other cars had raced over to vie for the parking spot. I was chuckling in glorious victory as I pulled into the spot.

Today, I rode my motorcycle to campus and there was not even a spot to park it! I really like riding my bike, because the parking spots are never full and they are right outside the door of the engineering building. Not today! I had to go all the way around to the spots near the library and then walk much further to class. All this, and I was already late!

UTD isn’t going to decrease it’s commuter population, but it was really not designed well for parking. The buildings are all centrally located, and the parking lots are all on the circumfrence. I think the campus could have had a parking lot for each of the buildings, and this would have made things much easier. However, the campus can’t all be rebuilt and the commuter population is not going to decrease, so the only real solution I see to the parking problem would be a parking garage. That way you can get lots of cars in one spot that is pretty close to all the buildings.

I’ve been moving into my new apartment over the past few days and I am now starting to feel like I’m back at home and settled.

For instance, I just now setup my brand new desk, which is 3′ by 6′. Then, on top of this desk I placed my dual 20.1″ LCD monitors and my 2.1 speaker system (the subwoofer went under the desk, of course). After booting up and tweaking the dual monitor setup a little I cranked up WinAmp and sat back to bask in the glorious sight and sounds I was beholding. Dual monitors are just so much fun!

And what a sight it is.

I actually wound up mounting my 2 front left/right speakers on the wall to free up a little more space on the desk. I’ve had these speakers for over 5 years now and this is the first time I’ve mounted them like that. It’s really pretty cool. It would be even cooler if I ran the wires through the wall, but I think I’ll wait until I get to a place I’m going to stay for longer than 10 months before I do that.

Well, after a really really long procrastination I finally got around to updating my blog software (i.e. this webpage). I am most happy to see the Akismet spam-detecting web service is installed by default with the latest version of WordPress. After signing up for an API key you simply activate the service in the control panel and it automatically deletes comments and trackbacks that it detects as spam. It’s a smart system so if anyone of the thousands (or more!) users submits a comment as spam that Akismet didn’t catch, it will learn by analyzing the content of the comment and start blocking it on other users’ blogs. Friggin’ awesome!

I had to delete about 800 old comments that were full of ads for every imaginable kind of porn, pills, shoes, identity theft, blah, blah, blah. So that was fun. Except not.

Anyway, I’m happy to announce that comments have been re-enabled, which will hopefully make this place a little more lively.

I want to work on updating my website, but now that I have spent my entire summer travelling and learning Spanish as well as working full time, there doesn’t seem to be much time left now that school is starting back up again.

Oh, and I just noticed that as I’m typing this post WordPress is automatically saving a draft every few seconds to make sure I don’t lose anything! Sweet!

I found this site that goes into a lot of detail on various ways to do this, but if you’re just debugging run this command:

mage -ClearApplicationCache

Mage.exe is included in the .NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK).

I have been working with ClickOnce a lot recently for work and one thing that comes in real handy when debugging deployment of your application (which takes way more than one click) is the actual location on disk of files that are downloaded from the ClickOnce server to the client machine. I knew that these files were downloaded and being run, but I simply could not find them in Windows Explorer. I tried all kinds of searches using both the indexed and non-indexed versions of Windows Search, but nothing came up. I don’t know why this isn’t more common knowledge, but here we go.

So, the first place you should look is here:
C:\Documents and Settings\_username_\Local Settings\Apps\_DotNet_Version_

However, since ClickOnce applications are not supposed to know where exactly the reside on disk (for a lot of reasons security and deployment considerations), the folder names get obfuscated from here. I would suggest just using the modified dates of the folders and files as clues in your search. Hopefully you don’t have too much stuff thrown in there. Another thought would be to explicitly add this folder to the Desktop Search index list (or maybe remove the explicity exclusion?), so then you could use good ‘ole search on it to find your files.

When I finally found the files I was looking for there were in this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Apps\2.0\LCN10VZX.HD3\025C2B6R.1XJ\qdab..ient_f1fd3e157083502b_0002.0001_10859e55371bee77

Lame, huh? (and, yes, I know running as Administrator is stupid)