David was official photographer of Pride Charlotte 2008
David is a man of many talents. He is a true renaissance man. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, martial arts practitioner, software developer,
model, activist, and an all around nice guy.
Oh, and did we mention, he’s very humble too and has a tendancy to talk about himself in 3rd person.
Ok… so no more 3rd person.
Hmm, so where to really start? Well in fifth grade, I got ‘outed’ before I even knew what ‘gay’ was. The funny part is, the guy who started saying I was gay was just trying to hurt my reputation so he could try to win a student council election. He had no idea he was actually right. I won the election anyway, but my school life was horrible till graduation. And even though I had my first big crush in fifth grade, I didn’t come out until I was an adult as a result of the gay bashings.
I’m shy and quiet, but I open up once I get to know someone. If someone wants to know what I’m like it takes time, because I have to reach a certain comfort level with someone before my sense of humor and other personality traits come out. People who have been patient enough to get to know me like me.
I like quiet evenings at home, curled up with my boyfriend, Adam, on the sofa watching a good movie, a fire in the fireplace if it’s cold and rainy out. But I also like to go out and do things — dancing, movies, walking, visiting friends. I’m not into the bar scene really; too much smoke among other things. I’d rather spend quality time with real friends.
I like to travel. I love Fort Lauderdale. In Fort Lauderdale, there’s great food, all kinds of gay night clubs with lots of hotties, shopping, a gay beach with lots of hotties, and 45 minutes south, a nude beach with a gay section with lots of hotties, and there’s a very gay township with a gay shopping center. Did I mention lots of hotties?
I also enjoy weekend getaways… Asheville, Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, etc.
I’m very sensitive (sad movies make me cry) and deeply compassionate. I’m kind hearted and always try to help my friends. I’m a laid back and easy going person generally unless someone pisses me off. I don’t let people run over me and I will stand up for myself and for my friends.
I like to write. It’s my best way of communicating. I find it much easier to open up when I write than when I’m speaking. But I’m becoming less shy about talking. I’ve been doing some speaking to help others understand about gay and lesbian people. I believe the only way to make the world a better place for us is to tell our stories. One person at a time, we can make a difference. I feel a strong need to help others come to terms with sexual orientation issues. If I can make a difference in just one persons life by being out and proud and outspoken, then I will feel like I’ve left something good behind when I depart this world. It is rewarding to see it when I do make a difference.
I am very out. I’ve been quoted in many mainstream newspaper articles and my name’s been mentioned in some others. I’ve also been quoted in ComputerWorld and the Advocate. Also, I’ve been in the local gay newspaper a bit as well. So, really, virtually anyone at all could know that I’m gay. It’s great not to have to hide part of who I am.
I am a very open and accepting person and I try to associate with people who are the same. I avoid people who are racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted.
I live in Charlotte, NC, USA. I’m a computer geek by profession (though my friends tell me not to refer to myself as a geek).
I don’t watch TV much, but when I do, it is usually Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel or the History Channel… anything like that. I love to watch HGTV as I’m learning a lot from it about decorating and applying it to my house.
I listen to a great variety of music. Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll listen to different types. Jazz or new age is great for when I’m in my hot tub. Dance really moves me when I’m working out. The music I don’t like to listen to is rap, opera and country.
I spend some of my spare time working on my house, fixing it up off and on. I do a lot of the work myself. I’m working on redecorating now. Just taking one room at a time and trying to apply some style to it.
I consider myself to be very blessed by having close friends and a close family. My best friend Gerald talk on the phone all the time. He moved away to San Francisco, so we can’t just hang out together anymore. I have other friends who’ve moved away, but every time we get together, we pick right back up where we left off.
David is an IT professional with over 26 years of experience (he started his career as a teenager). He has programmed in more languages and on more types of computers (and similar devices) than he can remember, including TRS-80 Model I Level 2, Commodore Vic-20 and C-64, C-128, Industrial Process Controllers, CP/M machines, and Intel 80x86+ architectures. He currently uses Microsoft .NET Framework tools and SQL Server.
When he's not geeking out, he studies the Martial Art, Aikido; engages in community volunteer work; writes fiction (as well as non-fiction blogs); and does home rennovation work.
He lives in Charlotte NC, USA. 
Just wanted to give some updates to my original post.
Opera 8.02 is out and I’ve been using that. I’m finding that it is rendering more and more web sites correctly. Also, when I try to move over to FireFox, I find I miss Opera’s ability to help me quickly fill out forms.
One program to add to the list is “The Gimp”. This open source, free software is like Adobe PhotoShop. There are Windows binaries out there (Google wingimp). Since PhotoShop’s current version has added product activation and I’m opposed to product activation, I will not be buying it, even though I could get it for $149 upgrade price since I have a licensed copy of PS 5.0. The Gimp provides almost all the main features that you get with PhotoShop and it has some features that are better such as it’s built-in scripting system that puts PhotoShop “Actions” to shame. As more people become frustrated with Adobe’s buggy and frustrating activation scheme, I expect more users will switch to The Gimp.
Speaking of Adobe, there is also an open source PDF generator: PDFCreator. I’ve played with it a little bit and it looks promising.
Instant Messaging: Tired of pop-ups and bloat in your IM software? Try Trillian free version. Works with the major IM networks, such as Yahoo and AOL but it’s much cleaner with no bloat.
As I’m really getting seriously into photography, I’ll probably do a post soon dedicated to image processing freeware.
As of today, Opera has just released version 8.5 and it is now competely free. No more ads of any kind. (I will actually kind of miss the google adwords because I found some neat stuff with those.)
My roommate Jason saw it and says it was a great movie and he had no problem understanding what was going on despite not having read the books. Gerald is seeing it tonight with David (my sweet… sweet David). So, I’ll have some more input from them soon.
Ok… Gerald has now seen it too. He likes the movie, but he definitely feels that a lot of it must have been left out to condense it to movie length from a 900 page book.
I saw the movie over the weekend in Atlanta. My friend Adam and I both thought it was okay, but I don’t think it was my favorite by any stretch. It was definitely a change of pace as it didn’t have nearly as much action as the previous movies. And it did feel like we were missing a good bit of the story simply because of the length of the book as compared to the movie. The book was 900 pages (granted those pages don’t have as much text on them as they are geared toward youth, but the book still would have been maybe 400 pages in standard type and that is a bit much to fit into a 2 hour 20 minute movie.) There were some things that just didn’t make sense to me as someone who has not read the books.
In hindsight, not sure I would say it was the best way to spend $10.
David,
I am Gary Sims, the author of Learning FreeNAS. It is true what you say that FreeNAS is still underdevelopment and as such things do change, however the basic principles of FreeNAS remain the same and as such the shelf life of this book isn’t as short as you might think.
With regards to the Publishers (Packt Publishing) they are an excellent organization who give some of the proceeds to their open source books to the project itself and so help its development. Also they are very good with their authors and we receive amble compensation and royalties for our work.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Gary
Hi Gary,
Thanks for writing. I’m glad Packt is a good organization and I wish you much success with your book!
Good stuff. I used to have a macro to do this but I lost it when I reformatted, didn’t want to recreate the wheel and found this. Thanks for sharing (will be useful until VS2010 comes out). The only change I made was having it upper case the first letter of the property name (e.g. so the private variable _firstName would have a property called FirstName). I used the following function though I believe there’s a way to use StrConv in VB to convert to property case… anyway:
Public Function UCaseFirstLetter(ByVal str As String) As String
Return String.Format(“{0}{1}”, UCase(Left(str, 1)), Mid(str, 2))
End Function
I then just modified the propety line in your macro changing strName to UCaseFirstLetter(strName)
Also, it’s funny, I use VS2008 everyday and I’ve never assigned hotkeys to macro’s and for the life of me, I don’t know why. Thanks for giving the steps to do this. Huge time saver.
Oh, nice enhancement! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to add that to my copy.
Thanks!
I deleted the [app] folder from the Temporary ASP.NET Files and restarted the VS 2008 Editor. And it worked.
Thanks a mil and keep on doing the fantastic job
It worked for me too !!! Thanks a lot !!!
thanks for the hint, worked perfectly!
Just an update: Looks like eyeOS is fixed now with the release of version 1.8.5.1. I’ll continue to follow the development of eyeOS, even though I’ve switched to OpenGoo.
Windows Update might have some security change.
It worked for me too then came back again later, is there a permanant fix for this?
I’m not aware of any permanent fix. So far, I’ve been lucky, it hasn’t come back.
I have the exact same feelings towards Dark Age of Camelot, a game that once had an MA presence. I googled your webpage after bumping into someone still in MA in DAoC. Seeing the guild tag brought on a wave of nostalgia.
it worked after fix but not for all pages
anyway, thanks
/wave Aspasia
On July 8th, I completely refactored the code. The original code was a modified version of a macro I recorded, and was not very robust. The new version is much better and resolves some issues with the original.
I have to say, I have been using this version for about a year now and I still have to search for the same things over and over. It definitely needs an update to turn on the old menu bar on and off.
Thanks for the post. Worked like a charm.
Cheers, this did the job for me.
simple but efficient, thanks.
I haved download your zip, thank alot.
Thanks. It worked for me.
Can you let me know which settings have been changed? strange only 2 of 50 websites have this problem, >> before no problem
Just an update. After replacing my TV tuner with a card that was purported to work with Windows 7 (x64) and then switching over to a Logitech webcam, I’ve got everything working that I’ve tested so far. Still have an old scanner (questionable) and an old laser printer (shouldn’t be a problem) to configure but everything else is fine now. The extra RAM is wonderful and I’m slowly getting used to the GUI. “Pin to taskbar” is a great feature and really helps with space utilization compared to older Windows versions.
Another update: An old Microtek scanner that I have wouldn’t work and there’s no chance the drivers will be updated to x64 (though they did update them to work with Vista x86). Windows XP mode to the rescue! I downloaded and installed this option and can now run the scanner in the virtual XP mode. So far, I’m still liking Windows 7 and have not booted back into my old XP x86 install in awhile now.
fixed the problem
how did you figure this out?
It took a good bit of looking at what others had tried and combining some things… experimentation… and finally figuring it out.
This worked. Thanks a lot