- This is a bear with a huge fish in it’s mouth.  (However Bears have necks so I disagree)

- It’s an elephant that travelled too far North and is lost.’

The video was “Supposedly” taken by a Russian civil engineer that was surveying for a future road.

I don’t know much about jQuery other than it’s a library of Javascript functions.  I wasn’t sure of how to add it to an ASP.net website running on IIS.  It’s a lot simpler than you’d think but there wasn’t a good explanation out there.

Quick Example:

Add…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

That links the library so that later on the page you can call jQuery.  For example this…

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function () {
        $("a").click(function (event) {
            alert("Thanks for visiting!");
        });
    });       
</script>

Will change all links on the page.  Instead of linking they will create a popup saying “Thanks for Visiting”.

Summary:

Adding jQuery to an ASP.net page is the same as adding it to any html/php/etc… page.  While you may download the javascripts I suggest using Google’s repository as it will likely load faster than hosting your own.

You can also change the version by changing the number.  The above version is 1.7.1 but you can use any versions out there.

Paying a few dollars more to know that the job is done right might be worth it to some.

It is usually not worth it for people who make less than $40,000 a year.

Recently, a woman very near and dear to me that makes less than $25,000 a year went to H&R Block to have her taxes done.  The price of doing a simple tax return at H&R Block was over $140.00! 
Now this person who I love very much likes things simple.  She doesn’t have a car and walks to work.  She could find a higher paying job but likes the stress free style that comes with a small office where the employees care about each other.  There she is an important cog of a small business.  Some may say the American dream is to earn riches but this woman is rich in everything but money.  She loves to make stockings for everybody at Christmas, make the occasional crafts, take care of those around her and live in a quant All American town that still has cobblestone streets in some places.  She takes care of everything herself and spends her dollars wisely on the things she really needs.

H&R Block doesn’t care about this kind of thing, just the dollar, not the person.

There are sites like TaxAct.com (sponsored link) that charge a total of $15 file your taxes.  ($0 for Federal and $15 for State).

The woman in this story chooses the path of least resistance so instead opted to rely on the “Expert” who “Expertly” parted her and her money.  For me this is the last time and next year I will be taking her through doing it online at TaxAct or some other similar site.

Summary: Don’t let your friends or family waste money on H&R Block.  Help your grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle or elderly neighbor across the street or down the hall save a $100.00  by taking 15 minutes and guiding them through the online tax forms for them.

For me, doing that is the real American Way.

If you are jealous you can still order one here.

ORDER A KINDLE FIRE!

Congratulations – your Kindle Fire is on the way. Learn how to get started and discover what your Kindle Fire can do!   

   
Kindle Fire puts Amazon’s incredible selection of 18 million movies and TV shows, music, apps and games, books, magazines, and more at your fingertips. Shop now and your titles will be available on your Kindle Fire after you’ve connected to Wi-Fi.

Free month of Amazon Prime

Prime members enjoy unlimited, instant streaming of over 10,000 movies & TV shows and can read thousands of books for free – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. Not a Prime member? Your Kindle Fire comes with a one month free trial. Learn more

    

Upload your music collection

With Kindle Fire, you can enjoy your music wherever you are. Discover over 17 million songs in the music store to add to your collection, plus upload your existing music now so that you can stream or download to your Kindle Fire the moment it arrives. Get started

Web browsing

Experience Amazon Silk – our new mobile web browser, exclusively available on Kindle Fire. Learn more

    

Outfit your Kindle Fire

Protect and personalize your new Kindle Fire with covers, sleeves, screen protectors, earphones, and more accessories made especially for the Kindle Fire. Shop accessories now

To easily shop for books, movies, music, apps, and more right from your Kindle Fire, you’ll need to connect to a Wi-Fi network and have a 1-Click payment method.

Connecting to a Wi-Fi network

Kindle Fire connects wirelessly over Wi-Fi networks. Don’t know how to connect to a Wi-Fi network? Learn how
Verify your payment method

Kindle content purchases are made using the default 1-Click payment method tied to your Amazon account. View or update
Learn more about your Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire is beautifully simple and easy to use. Have any questions? Check out the Getting Started guide and our online support pages to learn more about Kindle Fire.

Did you buy Kindle Fire as a gift?

Your Kindle Fire was automatically registered to the same Amazon.com account you used to make your purchase. If you bought Kindle Fire as a gift, you can deregister it from your account. Your gift recipient can then register it to their own Amazon.com account right from Kindle Fire to purchase content. Deregister Kindle

    Join the Kindle Community
Get the latest news, deals, and tips for using Kindle.   
©2011 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Prime, 1-Click, and Amazon Silk are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon.com, 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109-5210.

In Visual Studio (VS) when web services work, they are nice and simple to understand.  When they don’t work, there’s no way of finding out what the real problem is.

In Visual Studio 2008 (and the editions before that), VS used WSDL.exe to consume the webservices for you to use.  Most people would simply right click on the project, type the webservice URL and then click add reference.  Most do not care about the specifics of how it was done.

Visual Studio 2010 threw out WSDL.exe and decided to use something called WCF (Windows Communication Foundation).  WCF uses version 4.0 of the framework.  Instead of adding a “Web Reference” you add a “Service Reference”.  I thought these were the same but one uses WSDL.exe and the other uses WCF (SVCUTIL.exe).

When the webservice/service reference is created right, you don’t care which one you use as long as it works.  Most don’t care about SOAP, WSDL, XML or anything else.  They just want to have a class that wrapped around the webservice and not think about all the little parts that don’t matter.

For my Taleo Reference that kept not working I would get errors like…

Unable to import binding ‘…Binding’ from namespace ‘…’
or…
Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference ‘…’.  Please check other error and warning messages for details.   

It took some trial and error to figure out what exactly was happening wrong.  I quickly found a Microsoft Page about the error but did not think that was the problem but it ended up pretty much being that but the solution it gave was not pretty and has you rewriting the WSDL file.  Because the WSDL files in my case are so complex, I did not consider that an adequate solution.

The problem for me was that the WSDL file was trying to import an XSD schema and wasn’t doing it correctly.  For me WSDL.exe and SVCUTIL.exe kept failing because it did not import the “Schema” properly.

Fortunately you can use WSDL.exe and SVCUTIL.exe from the command line and add in the extra XSD’s that you want it to import.

WSDL.exe and SVCUTIL.exe simply create a C# (or VB) file that wraps up your webservice nicely.  Here are 2 examples…

WSDL.exe Example (VS2008 and Older)

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\"

wsdl /out:c:\MyProxyClass.cs /username:USER /password:PASSWORD /pd:PROXY-IF-YOU-USE-ONE /p:PROXY-PORT-IF-YOU-USE-ONE "https://WSDL-LOCATION.wsdl">https://WSDL-LOCATION.wsdl" "http://www.w3.org/2004/11/xmlmime"

SVCUTIL.exe Example (VS2010 and Newer)

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin"

svcutil /language:cs /out:c:\MyProxyClass.cs /config:app.config "https://WSDL-LOCATION.wsdl" "http://www.w3.org/2004/11/xmlmime"

Note that if you use a proxy and SVCUTIL you may have to download the WSDL file as SVCUTIL does not work with proxies.  (Silly but true)

Other titles/search-terms that you may have searched for are…
- How to Encrypt a SQL Database
- Apply TDE
- Restore a TDE database
- Restore an encrypted SQL database
- Backup/Restore a TDE Certificate

Below are the steps to Encrypt a SQL Database.  The MOST important part though is to note the passwords used and to save the certificate and private key files.  If you lose any of that information, you database can never be restored and is lost forever!

Enable Encryption on a SQL Database

1. Create a master key encryption in Master database.
2. Create a Certificate that TDE will use.
3. BACKUP the certificate to 2 files.  (A Cert File and Private Key file that is encrypted with another password)
4. Create a Database Encryption Key based off of the Cert you created in step 2
5. Turn Encryption on in the target database

Sample Encrypt Database Script
–Step 1
USE master
go
CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = ’1StrongPassword’
go
–Step 2
CREATE CERTIFICATE TDECert WITH SUBJECT = ‘TDE Certificate’
go
–Step 3
BACKUP CERTIFICATE TDECert TO FILE = ‘C:\Temp\TDECert.Cer’
WITH PRIVATE KEY (
    FILE = ‘C:\Temp\TDECertPrivateKey.pvk’,
    ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = ’2ndStrongPassword’)
go
–Step 4
USE SecureTest
go
CREATE DATABASE ENCRYPTION KEY
WITH ALGORITHM = AES_128
ENCRYPTION BY SERVER CERTIFICATE TDECert;
go
–Step 5
ALTER DATABASE SecureTest
SET Encryption ON

Needed in order to Restore an Encrypted Database
1. The Master Database Encryption Password
2. The Certificate File Used
3. The Private Key File Used
4. The Decryption password for 2 and 3 (It is the same password for both).

Restore Encrypted SQL Database

1. Create the Master Key in the Master Database
2. Restore the Certificate used for encrypting the database to the Master Database.
    This is done from 2 files (which are encrypted using yet another password)
    -The Certificate File and the Private Key File.
    -These are restored using the "CREATE CERTIFICATE" command as "RESTORE CERTIFICATE" is not a valid command.
3. Restore the database normally.

Sample Restore Database Script
–Step 1
USE master
go
CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = ’1StrongPassword’
go
–Step 2
CREATE CERTIFICATE TDECert
    FROM FILE = ‘C:\Temp\TDECert.Cer’
    WITH PRIVATE KEY (FILE = ‘C:\Temp\TDECertPrivateKey.pvk’,
    DECRYPTION BY PASSWORD = ’2ndStrongPassword’)
go
–Step 3
–Restore database normally.  It will use the cert from step 2

Conservative estimates set 1,300,000 new jobs by the end of 2012 and 800,000 more by the end of 2013 for a total of 2.1 million jobs.

Others say that it might be 2.7 million jobs created.

The cost of this is $447 billion.  That’s $447,000,000,000.00 for 2,100,000 jobs.  That means that each job costs the government $212,857.14.

(Unless the high estimates are right and it ends up costing only $165,555.56)

Alas I don’t know the details about the job plan and all the “Trickle Down” thoughts put into it.  However, I would think it should cost a lot less than $200k per job.  What are your thoughts?

No matter how happy you are you want a better job, more money or both.  With Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, etc… it’s a real mess.

Sure, you could search the web, every job site and company site in the world but you’d never get the exposure you want.  Even worse… your current employer sees that you’re looking for work which could be AWFUL!

There’s a simple solution though.  Twitter!

Now how the hell can Twitter + You = A Better Job/Life?  It’s real easy, here’s my list of why’s then I’ll tell you how.

The Why!

1. Anonymous
  Anybody can set up a Twitter Account and be Anonymous.
  Your current employer will have no idea you’re looking.
2. Simple
  You have to get your skillset down to 140 characters.  This means NO BS!  Just the facts Maam!
3. Even Playing Field
  It’s not who you know, it’s what you know.  Other than that, all Tweeters are viewed as equal.
4. Instant World Exposure
  Putting your resume on a blog or other website is slow and takes Google a longtime to show in searches.
  Twitter is instant!
5. Free!
  It costs an employer $400+ to post 1 job on Monster.  Twitter is free for both you and them!
6. Easier than the job sites
  It can take 10-15 minutes to setup a resume on the big job sites.  Twitter can take as little as 1 minute.

The How!

1. Signup for Twitter at Twitter.com
2. Use your real name or make up one to hide it from your bosses.
3. Post a tweet that starts with this…
    “@TweetResumes #Resume Skill1 Skill2 Skill3…” where Skill1 is your first skill and so on.

Example…

Before you know it, you’ll twitter resume will be getting seen by hundreds that would never have known you existed previously.

China will eventually fail.  It won’t be 50 years from now, it will be much sooner.  The reason behind it is simple.  People can only have one child.  What?  Wouldn’t this prevent overpopulation and lower need for resources?  On the short term yes.  On the long term there is a much LARGER problem that looms a couple generations in the future.

The problem is that nobody takes care of China’s old people so the responsibility falls to their child (Not Children because they can only have 1).  When their child gets too old, the caring for them falls to their child’s child.  1 “Working Class” person might have to take care of their parents and both sets of grand parents (or even great grand parents).  This means 1 person would be taking care of 6+ other adults.  By 2050 about half of the population is over 50!  Does this sound like a powerhouse to you?

About this time I suspect China’s ultra-controlling ways will finally meet the breaking point and the few youth left will finally be able to overthrow what is left of the communist ways.

While it’s all milk and honey now for China, what brings them down will eventually be the very people that built them into a financial power house.