I like to keep my life fulfilling, so I have lot’s of hobbies
and interests.
Martial Arts – AikidoCharlotte’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center began offering Aikido lessons is 2005. I had always wanted to study a martial art and this was just the opportunity I had been looking for. I am currently ranked Nikyu. |
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VideographyI have produced programming for OutCharlotte from time to time. For awhile, we had a gay soap opera. Sadly OutCharlotte folded and I have now gotten out of video production except for volunteering at the local cable access channel when friends need help. |
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PhotographyI have recently gotten much more seriously into photography with the purchase of a Canon EOS system digital camera and many lenses and lighting gear, etc. To learn more about my photography, visit my separate web site: David Lari Studios |
 David photographing Charlotte Pride 2008 |
SculptureAnother recent hobby is sculpture. I prefer to work in clay. |
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WritingI enjoy writing on occasion. I will be putting some of my short stories on the site in the near future. So, if you always wanted gay themed science fiction and fantasy, then check back soon. |
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Home Renovation and DecoratingInspired by the TV show, Trading Spaces, I have starting a major renovation in my den that will |
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Community Volunteer Work and ActivismI have been involved for many years in the GLBT community. My current involvement is somewhat limited due to time constraints, but I was the official photographer of Pride Charlotte 2008 and also help out at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center. |
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TravelI like to travel. I’ve pretty much just traveled in the US so far. My favorite vacation spot is Fort Lauderdale. Some of the more interesting places I have been to include Las Vegas, DC, San Francisco briefly, Monterey, Yosemite, Charleston, Savannah, and Biltmore House in Asheville. |
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Computer GamesI enjoy playing computer games and have especially enjoyed online games such as Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies (though I’ve retired from both of those now). I played World of Warcraft and got to a level 60 warlock before quitting that game. I founded a GLBT online gaming guild called Mystic Alliance. I beta tested Lord of the Rings Online. I also play single user games. I was disappointed with Doom 3. I also love Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Master of Orion 2 (don’t buy 3, it totally sucks), Dune Emperor, Half Life 2, Sim City 4. |
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YogaI began practicing Yoga in November of 2001. I practice it for stretching and balance. I have made major improvements in my flexibility so far and hope that my balance will improve also. I have fallen out of practice but will be starting again soon. |
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Working OutIn addition to a sensible diet, I also workout to stay in shape and healthy. I mostly use machines, but I am also doing some things like rollerblading, biking and walking. I have recently begun upper body work as most of my previous routine built up legs and buttocks. I hope to get my abs and pecs bulked up as well as the arms and shoulders. |
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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