Sometimes I can sympathize with content owners, thinking they have a right to protect their investment. The rest of the time I realize that DRM sucks! I have Vista installed through Boot Camp on my Macbook, and over christmas I purchased VMWare Fusion so I could run the few Windows apps I need inside OSX.

Well - fast forward to Friday night. I start up VMWare to do some fantasy baseball draft prep - RotoLab, highly recommended draft prep tool. My VMWare image starts complaining about being unable to write data to the drive (a story for another time). I think, "no problem, I'll just switch to Boot Camp to check the drive and finish my prep." So I reboot my machine, wait forever for Vista to load, and finally am presented with the "Black Screen of Death". Vista thinks my copy needs to be reactivated, and what's worse, it says my key has already been used (by the VMWare image activation, no doubt).

I'm not sure what triggered the reactivation, perhaps it was hardware changes in my VM settings, perhaps it was HD corruption. So it looks like I'll have to delete my Boot Camp image and start over. YAY! Windows Genuine Advantage, my butt!

Assuming the weather holds up, we are going to take Dylan to the Zoo for the first time. Ok, technically its the second time, but the first he was only like 2 months old and couldn't even see any animals, so that doesn't count!

Look for the pictures to be uploaded to flickr later.

I realize that it has been awhile since I last posted about Dylan's development progress. With him approaching his first birthday, I thought it a good time to update everyone on how he's doing.

Dylan is walking very well (running is more like it). And has taken to following the dog throughout the house. All the cabinets now have magnetic locks on them because he figured out how to open the latch child safety locks soon after we installed them. His new thing is opening and closing doors. He especially likes the bathroom door, even more so if someone is in it at the time.

He is just getting over his first serious cold, which caused a few sleepless nights as he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night because his throat was sore or he couldn't breathe normally. Turns out he was cutting 4 of his molars at the same time (YAY!).

Speaking of teeth, he now has 8 teeth and with his 4 molars, is well on his way to being a pirana. He's learning how to throw things, which is cool sometimes, like when he is playing fetch with Burt, but not othertimes, like when eating something he doesn't like. Either way, he has a pretty good arm for his age. Now I just need to teach him how to throw a curve grin.

Speaking of playing fetch with Burt, we recorded a video of it the other day, and thought everyone would appreciate it.

Expect to hear of the birthday plans soon... Shanon and I trying to decide now.

As some may notice, I add articles to my delicious feed that touch on management topics. Today I read an article that really hit home for me, on coding horror called The Bad Apple: Group Poison.

I have always believed in maintaining a positive outlook on life in general, and work life in particular. My parents raised me to believe that you will obtain what you are focused on, so if you focus on being negative, bad things will happen. However, if focused on positives, good will happen.

The study linked by the original article found that teams that contained people that exhibited negative thinking infected the entire group with that negative thinking and greatly impacted overall group production. As a manager, I think it is important to read this and make effort to stamp out negative thinking within my own group.

I think this compliments the work of Robert Sutton called The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn't which, title aside, I highly recommend reading for any manager. Mr. Sutton asserts that by allowing "assholes" to continue being part of a workplace it drags the morale and performance down of everyone involved. He also asserts that the best way to deal with these individuals is to not let them into the workplace to begin with, and to stop rewarding their behavior.

I recently had the pleasure (grin) of helping IT understand why an Excel addin developed in house was not deploying properly on a new workstation deployment. After poking around blindly for a while, I stumbled upon "Debugging in Application-Level Projects" in MSDN. This article clued me into to two system environment variables that adjust how VSTO reports exceptions: VSTO_LOGALERTS = 1 causes VSTO to create a log file in the same directory as the addin manifest file, and VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS = 0 causes the host to create a message box for each alert when loading.

Hopefully this information is helpful to someone else and they won't have to go digging as deep as I did to find it.

As webmaster for several business related sites, I am surprised how difficult it is to find any business directories that are specific to St. Louis or St. Charles, MO. I am sure that there is something I am missing.

I know about DMOZ (never had any luck getting our site approved), Yahoo Business Directory and Business.com registries, but what about smaller local directories?

If you know of any, let me know in the comments.

I am starting to come around to the twitter way of doing things. Personnally, I have had a blog since 1999, but have not been someone who religiously posts new elements on the blog.

When twitter was first released, my response was, "So what?" I don't think I was alone in this. However, now that I have given it a try, I find the 140 character limit freeing. I think the reason I don't blog more often is a form of writer's block. I see the new post window and freeze up. Twitter makes it easy to jott off a quick update and not worry about filling a certain space on the page.

With that background, I just downloaded Tweetie, which was reviewed by Gizmodo and rated the best iPhone twitter client currently. I had been using Twitterific, which is a very well designed client for posting new tweets, but doesn't lend itself to reading a timeline. As I use Tweetie more, I'll blog (and tweet) my findings.

Gizmodo Article - Twitter App Battlemodo

Oh and P.S. - you can find my twitter feed at: http://twitter.com/ackbarr/

I know that there is an about me section on this site, but thought it good to elaborate about what I do. I work for EPC, Inc. as its CTO.

EPC does a lot of different things, but mainly we are an IT Asset Recovery company. This means that EPC will work with companies to properly handle their old IT gear. In many cases, the IT gear still has resale value, and in those cases we will check out the hardware, prepare it for resale, and pay the company its current fair market value. Sometimes, the hardware is so old that it has no more value. In that case we will break the hardware down and recycle the pieces. The entire process is managed by software we have developed in house.

My responsibilities are to oversee the day to day IT support and direct our software development efforts. EPC now has 6 processing centers in the US and Canada (Toronto is opening up this week!), so the job can definitely have its fun moments.

If there is one thing I miss, it is doing software bug squashing. I occasionally can get my hands dirty, but usually have to step back and let others work on the code themselves.

So if your business has outdated IT equipment, or would like to find a vendor to help them with Data Destruction, give EPC a call!

Brian here: I'm going to turn the keyboard over to Dylan for a while!

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Toan and Christa Luu have had their newest child, Cammi Jade Luu yesterday, May 13th, at approximately 6:00pm.

Cammi was 6lbs 15oz, and I'm not sure on the length yet. Hopefully we can get a picture of the new Luu soon and post it on this site.

Our love goes out to the Luu family!

Thanks to Django's simple Syndication application there are now RSS feeds for the following content:

• Articles
• Photos
• Links

And before anyone else points it out, yes I know that the contact and about pages are not completed, and that the site search does not work yet.

Well, I am officially 30 now. On one hand, it doesn't feel any different, but on the other it is kind of depressing. That said, a lot of amazing things have happened to me in the last year: my first trip out of the country, Shanon and I purchased a new house, Dylan was born. And now this: Toan tells me that he and Christa are going to have their new baby today, so their child (I'm sure it is going to be a boy, btw) will share a birthday with me. Is that cool or what?

Oh and I can't forget Eric and Anne, who are celebrating their 2nd anniversary today! Congratulations you two!

Today was my sister Sarah's graduation. As part of the ceremony each senior did a music or drama piece. We took a lot of pictures of both the performances and the graduation ceremony. I will be cleaning those pictures up and should be uploading them soon.

Welcome to thewahoffs.com! This is hopefully the first blog post of many for our family. Look for pictures, news, sports commentary, and fun links from us in the future.