The penalty of shopping on time...

I went to Best Buy, not so early this morning to try to take advantage of their 'Black Friday' sales. I was semi-successful - I managed to get 2 of 3 things I was looking for. My Spoils: a 20" TV for $70 (yes that is correct) and a 50-disc spool of DVD+R disks for $3 (Again that is correct) - both after rebates. Of course, I am not sure how much my wife will like it when I walk in the door with a TV later tonight.

The item that I missed was a $30, 256MB flash memory card for my Digital Camera. At first, I was upset that they were sold out - those normally go for around $45-60, so this was a good deal. But then the guy behind me told me that he had bought some at staples this morning for only $10!!! (Makes me wish I had gotten up at 6am!!!). I guess if I wait long enough after the holidays the prices will go down far enough that I will be more affordable.

I guess you can take-advantage of the early pre-holiday sales, or buy stuff after the buzz is over when they (presumably) have inventory to burn.

Cute SQL Workaround

This post will only interest some of you hardcore techies out there, but I just needed to share:

Normally, when creating a view in SQL, you can't include an ORDER BY clause to sort the results in a particular fashion. I needed to do this recently, and came up with two workarounds for this limitation:

1. Pre-sort the table: use something along the lines of

SELECT *
FROM (Select * from table order by column_1)

2. You Can order your view, if you use the Top clause. So:

SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT *
FROM TABLE
ORDER BY COLUMN1

Upgrade

I just upgraded to MovableType 3.11, hopefully this will help me get rid of some of those unwanted comments on the site.

Photo Overload

A colleague of mine told about an article in the New York Times yesterday about digital data and backups, and how format change ever few years it seems. This led to a discussion about Digital Photos. I currently have a 5 megapixel Camera which I bought in late January of 04'. The average photo size from that camera is between 1-1.5 megabytes, and I currently have about 1.5 GB of these - figure about 1000 pictures - in ten months time While we did have a new baby this year, we didn't go on a vacation, so as far as I can tell, 2 GB/year might seem like an adequate amount of new digital imaging to be added. That is, of course for the next couple of years, until I buy my next Digital camera, say in 2007/8 which will be at least, 10 Megapixels.

I am currently in the process of burning all of my pictures to CD - I will probably make 6 copies of each CD (why not, blanks are cheap enough) and distribute them as follows:
one set of 2 cds (one for use and one for safekeeping) to ourselves, my parents, and my in-laws.

As a backup plan, I plan on uploading all my images to at least two photo sites - but then, what happens if one of them goes out of business, or worse, starts to charge me for disk space?

And then, my CD-Rs are only good until that media are still pertinent - find me a new computer made in the last year that has a floppy drive? There aren't many.