All posts by Jim Geurts

Beer commercial shelf-life

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In my estimation, the average shelf-life of a beer commercial is about 3 to 6 months.  By that, I mean that beer companies tend to go with a specific marketing campaign for about 3-6 months… sometimes it goes longer, sometimes shorter.  It doesn’t seem, however, that the beer companies recognize a previously successful marketing campaign all the time, though.  For instance, I recently stumbled across the Budweiser wassup commercials.  They made me smile.  It’s rare for any commercial to make me smile, but in this case, I smiled and wanted to watch more of them.  I remember smiling the first time I saw them too…

So what am I getting at here?  Not a lot…  except that now I’m curious what the rotation period rules are for beer commercials… Say they have a successful marketing campaign such as the wassup commercials.  Eventually, say after 6 months, the commercials get old and just aren’t as funny as they were originally… How long needs to go by until they could play the same commercials and get a nice response again?  I’m guessing 2-3 years at a minimum…  Tricky thing, though, playing older commercials.  Trends change and marketers need to be conscious of that.

Enough rambling… here our the links to the commercials that made me smile tonight:

Invalid character in Base-64 string error with ViewState

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Well, for some reason, I decided to test an obscure case today… I was happily greeted by an error page saying that my viewstate was fucked.  What?  I thought to myself… “This is awesome! Leave it to MS and their skilled button monkey to test viewstate issues, right?”  Sorry it’s been a little while since I ranted about MS… I have plenty of crap that’s been building up inside me (mostly related to the stinky pile they call Visual Studio 2005), and maybe I can unleash it all to the world some day in the near future.

Anyway… This issue has to do with asp.net 1.1 and I’m about 96% sure that this has to do with some recent security “improvements” that I made to my web.config.  I decided to use authorization elements in my main web.config to control who has access to various files/directories in the system. 

My web.config looked something like:

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authorization>
            <deny users=”?” />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
    <location path=”Default.aspx”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”login.aspx”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”Themes”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”js”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
</configuration>

What this basically says is that everyone can access default.aspx, login.aspx, the Themes directory, and the js directory.  Everything else is limited to logged in users.

Now, for some reason, I decided to add the control I use to log in on to my default.aspx page as well as the login.aspx page.  When I tried logging in via default.aspx, I got the lovely viewstate error (Invalid character in Base-64 string). 

Allowing access to all files fixes the error… but as an alternative, I just removed “everyone” access to the default.aspx page for now.  In the future, I’ll remove the login control from that page, but it doesn’t really matter right now.  You have to be logged in to see anything useful right now.

Finding any information related to this was a bitch.  Actually, to be completely truthful, I didn’t find anything just worked it out on my own.  Thanks MS.  If there is a plus side to any of this, I guess it would be that I got to enjoy rebooting my box.

Ads are gone…

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As promised, I removed the ads from this site.  I ended up hitting around $101 which just doesn’t seem worth it, IMO… If you were one of the people who clicked ads, let me know and I’ll buy you a beer, once I get the money from Google.

Load balance multiple network adapters in Windows XP

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I recently verified that the onboard network adaptor, in my primary machine, sucks.  It seems that there is some sort of a hardware problem with it, and as a result it ends up capping my upload speed at around 10kB/s.  It got to be very annoying when I had some active torrents.  So… I decided to drop $10 and get a standalone network card.  But a moral issue arose within me because I didn’t want to just give up the builtin network card.  So, I chose to implement load balancing in XP, which happens to be very easy to do… After I did this, I’m averaging 80-90kB/s upload speeds now… happy happy ratios

Just make this registry change, if you have multiple network adapters:

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesNetBTParameters]
Value Name: RandomAdapter
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)

Getting professional hosting

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I’ve been looking to move some of these sites to a professionally
hosted solution.  I ended up doing some research the last two weeks of
some of the asp.net hosting solutions.  I narrowed my search
down to Webhost4Life, MaximumAsp, OrcsWeb, DataPipe, and ThePlanet.com.

To make a long story short, I ended up going with OrcsWeb.  They were
by far the quickest and most thorough with answering all of my
questions regarding services they can provide.  ThePlanet.com didn’t
bother contacting me
again.  DataPipe just didn’t fit what i was looking for.  And
MaximumAsp quickly said no to a few of my requests.  I really didn’t
give Webhost4life the chance that they deserved… I had read too many
bad reviews online, to keep them in the running.

So we’ll see how well OrcsWeb perform as the future keeps rolling on…

[Update] ThePlanet.com got back to me with some impressive services.  I’ll consider them for service in the future.

Large jackpot lottery

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Every so often, the lottery jackpot grows to an enormous sum.  This
sparks desire and hope inside many people, and as a result, they go
purchase some tickets.  I’m the same way, I like the idea that my
financial troubles could be solved with a simple ticket. 

But, I have done some thinking about what would really happen if I won and I talked with some people this weekend… 
The result is that I have to say that I really don’t want to win the lottery.  I
really don’t see that the good could outweigh the not so good.  You’re
probably thinking what the hell?  Everyone would love to win the
lotto…. let me give you 3 reasons why I wouldn’t want to win…

First, say good bye to your friends.  I haven’t really come to a good
solution for how you could get over this issue.  Your friends will
become instantly jealous of your new found money.  I don’t care how
long you’ve been friends, it’s just human nature to be jealous.  If you
give them money, they’re probably going to think that there are strings
attached.  What happens if you give money to some friends, but forget
some others… Even giving friends an annual salary just to hang out,
probably won’t solve the jealousy issue.

Second, say good bye to your privacy.  Chances are that you’ll have to
move.  This depends on where you are in the country, with how far
you’ll need to move.  If you’re in a fairly large city, you could make
due with moving across town… if you’re in a rural part of the
country, you’ll probably have to move much further.  Why?  well, one
reason is that you’re going to get beggars coming to your house. 
People always try to profit off of other people… the beggars probably
won’t be the traditional bums that you see on the streets, but rather
they would be blue/white collar beggars.

Third, travel… for me, I would initially travel a lot.  I think that
would be cool for a couple years, but that it’s possible that it would
get old after a while.  This is a weird subject for me… on one hand,
I’m sure I would see more places than I will w/o unlimited funds, but
the flip side is that I really look forward to travelling now.  it
excites me, and to lose that excitement would suck.

So why do I keep playing?  It’s exciting to think that you could win
something that random.  If I did end up winning at some point, I would
keep it as much of a secret as possible.  I would make sure that my
family is taken care of.  I did hear an idea that sounded pretty good,
and that was to give x number of people the exact same amount of
money. 

My Future, from the perspective of now…

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I closed a chapter of my life on Friday…  I am no longer an employee of Edstrom.  I left under good terms and provided them with a two week notice.  I can say that I will definitely miss the team (Jayme, Dave L., Dave M., Sean, Mike, and Harish) that I worked with there. 

As for me, the only thing I can say about my future plans is that they should prove to be interesting.  I have a couple things lined up, but I will wait to elaborate on the specifics for now.

In the mean time, I’ve been repaving my machine.  I wanted to start out with a fresh Windows install to go along with my change in life.  I got rid of Windows XP64 and just installed regular Windows XP.  XP64 just doesn’t get the support that it should.  So many programs don’t recognize it as Windows XP and thus it’s not a valid OS.  Maybe vista will give 64bit computing the attention it deserves. 

I decided not to install Newsgator and instead have been using RSS Bandit.  I haven’t used it long enough to have a decent opinion about it, so we’ll see how it goes.  I can say that the little bit that I’ve used it, I’ve noticed some pretty cool features that Newsgator didn’t/couldn’t offer.  It feels both nice and somewhat foreign not using Outlook/Newsgator for my RSS joy. 

As far as development environment goes, I decided not to install Visual Studio 2003, but just go with 2005.  Again, it seems that MS rushed that product through QA, but hopefully the benefits outweigh the random crashes/bugs.  It’s nice not having to install IIS on my dev box.  I plan on installing some alternative technologies (Rails, Python, java?, etc) on this box, to expand my world a little.