I just got invited to a stranger's wedding. When I opened up my mail this evening, I found an invitation - properly addressed to me, so it's not the post office's fault - for a wedding in Bahamas in January. Neither the Bride's nor the Groom's names look familiar.

Most likely, they know a Scott Duffy who lives in Toronto, and looked up my name in the phone book. Still, you think they would have checked before blindly sending me mail.

I wonder what would happen if I decided to go? I mean, return the RSVP, book a plane ticket and hotel, and show up at the reception. And when they realize I am not the same “Scott Duffy” they meant to invite, what can they do? I'm here, the other Scott Duffy isn't, and I've even paid a lot of money to be there.

Of course, as funny as that would be, it would also make me look stupid. So I probably will not be attending this event. But, whoever you are, thanks for thinking of me.

And of course, if a total stranger DID mean to invite ME, send me an email to introduce yourself, please.

It's not like I have a ton of free time, but I just had to upload this screenshot of Keyhole. It's a satellite photo of my apartment building...

The application can zoom in a couple of times more than that, but the picture appears a bit overexposed so too much zoom loses a lot of details.

In the photo, you can see my building, the $25 million Music Garden, the marina, and a bit of Toronto harbour.

I was mucking around in Google this evening, when I clicked “More Tools”. I've been meaning to try Picasa, and I will get to a review of that later.

Right now, I'm here to rave about Google's newest acquisition, Keyhole.  http://www.keyhole.com/

Keyhole is a software application that is a map of the world. Maps have been done before, right? MapQuest and others own that space, don't they?

Not they way KeyHole works. Keyhole is not a map in the sense that you would like driving directions to the store. KeyHole uses satellite images. You can “fly” from place to place. So you can mark your Aunt Mary's place in Wyoming in the map, then mark your place in Florida, and the map will actually “fly” you by satellite photos between the two places (zoom out, recenter, zoom in).

All I can say is, Wow. This is a great idea, and I'm glad the developers got rewarded by being purchased by Google.

You have to see it to believe it.

Don't want to get anyones hopes up, but this Eminem video is very very cool.

I'm definitely feeling something in the air as November 2nd rolls around. I don't think the polls are really as close as the pollsters say they are. Consider this:

There is a massive effort to get out the young vote (18-24). This hasn't happened in a generation, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if young voters turn out in record numbers. And pollsters do not get to talk to young voters.

More and more people don't talk to telemarketers. Just this morning, I hang up on one. Was it a pollster calling to ask my opinion on something? Pollsters don't talk to people who use technology (even call display) to block the calls.

More and more people don't have a regular phone. Something like 5% of people only use a cell phone for all their calls. Pollsters don't talk to those people.

More and more people are out of the house from between 8am and 9pm - at work, out with friends, at dinner... Pollsters don't call outside those hours, and so pollsters don't get to talk to those people.

I have American citizen friends living in Canada. Him and his wife are definitely going to vote in the election from here. How many ex-patriate Americans are going to make the extra effort to vote this time around? Pollsters don't talk to those people.

So the question is, if you were able to ask young people, people with 2-3 jobs who are never home to answer the phone, and ex-patriates who they are going to vote for... who are they going to say? How many votes is that anyway? Several million more than 4 years ago, that's for sure.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is not that close on election day. I think both the Democrats and Republicans want you to think their candidate might lose, just to get out all the possible voters. But in the end, it might not be that close.

When I say Checkmate, I mean that Eminem video is very well done. The song itself is catchy. The video has amazing, never-before seen graphics and imagrey.  This could play on MTV, VH1 , whatever... all week next week. It'll be the hottest download on Kazaa. This video could influence the election.

(Maybe...)

This just in... Static Control Corp (SCC) has essentially won its appeal against Lexmark. Lexmark was attempting to use the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to claim that Static was overriding its “digital locks” which prevented printer users from using printer ink cartridges from other manufacturers.

One court had issues an injunction against SCC, but the appeals court dropped the injunction, finding that it is not clear that Lexmark will win its case. If you read the appeals court ruling, you'll see that 2 of the 3 judges came out pretty strongly against what Lexmark was claiming and the 3rd judge agreed but for different reasons...

As the kids say, w00t!

You'll recall a few days ago I was complaining about this printer ink cartridge scam:

And what about this anti-competitive technology? Inkjet cartridges these days have little computer chips, and the printers have little chip readers. The cartridge keeps track of ink levels, and is hard-coded to go down, never up. The printer will stop working when it thinks the ink is too low - even if there is still ink left in the container. And try using a no-name or third-party ink cartridge, and your printer will not work at all.

He he... I'm feeling a little better. The law does (sometimes) step in and protect the little guy from being bullied by the big guys. Sometimes.

Update: Oooooh. SCC is counter-suing Lexmark under the Antitrust law. You know, the price of ink jet printers may rise by a few dollars after this, but the cost of ink jet cartridges will fall drastically.

Long-time readers will recall that I often post here how much I love .NET. You can go back in the posting archives of this site and see how it thrills me when things that I want to do are made simpler with .NET (compared with other programming environments I am used to).

Today was not a good day in that regard.

Where do I begin? Well, first of all, I was writing a simple Windows Forms program to call a stored procedure and write the dataset returned out to a text file. Should be simple to do.

Well, I tried to be a bit fancy right off the bat. I don't know why I did it, but I lost a couple of hours of productivity and I still don't understand what the big deal is.

Here's what I tried to do: I wanted execution time to be displayed on screen as the program ran. You know, every second the text will update to say “1 second”, “2 seconds”, “3 seconds”, etc. Easy right? I just add a timer component to the form and have the Tick event update the text in a label.

Well, I tried to run the program in debug mode, by stepping through it line by line. When I happened upon my SqlConnection.Open() statement, the debugger froze. “There is no source code for the current location.” Hmm. I was using Step Over, not Step Into, so it should not be trying to go into the SqlConnection object code. Is my SQL connection setup OK? Check my connection string. Database is running. Add a generic exception handler to the catch statement. Tried commenting a bunch of stuff out. Moved things around. Nothing worked. The program always froze on the SqlConnection.Open() statement.

I called a friend over, and showed the problem to him. We both spent 20 minutes trying different ways of doing the same thing, to no avail.

Finally, I checked Google. It led me right away to this MSDN Knowledge base article. Ah, you cannot access the SqlConnection from inside a timer event in Debug mode. But the article suggested a work around. Instead of using a Timer component, I could use the System.Timers.Timer class.

So I reworked my code to use that class instead. The method and property names are slightly different, so it wasn't just one-line change. Ran it again.

This time it worked. But... the program continued to act strangely in Debug mode. When I tried to read the dataset using a SystemDataReader.Read() call, it froze again.

So finally, I pulled out all the timer events. Not the best solution, but it worked fine after that.

Anyways, .NET's flakiness with Timer events cost me a couple of hours today. While most of the time it is fun to be a programmer in this tool, today it was not fun.