system.reflecti0n.net

I was thinking about music in general this morning and it occurred to me that music as a craft seems to have disappeared. That's not to say there's anything wrong with the current state of music, its just that one aspect of it, craftmanship, seems to have gone by the wayside.

But lets get this sort of inquiry off on the right foot, I see the two aspects Art and Craftmanship in this way:

• Art is intensely personal, an artist identifies a part of themselves and express it through their medium: painting, music, writing, etc.
• The product of Craft is not personal to the artist it has more to do with the manipulation of the medium they choose.

What's shaping up here is that it appears that you can have Craft without Art, but you cannot have Art without Craft. Although if I had to lay judgement right now, I'd have to say that its possible to have Art with very little Craft.

Tags: opinion, coding

Well, the cat's out of the bag, what with Seattle players saying Vince Carter tipped them off about at least one play when they met last month.

True or not, its easy for any sports fan to believe... Even when things were going Carter's way, he never behaved like a professional. In his t.v. interviews he came across as self-interested more than professional-sounding.

Does it matter if he did it or not? Not really. The lesson here is that we look at Carter and beleive it's possible, which states more about the type of player he is than any action he took on the court.

So far, nobody has said a word to defend him.

Tags: sports, raptors

This blog is mainly an experiment to learn a better way to use asp.net DataSets more effectively. They seem to offer so much, but I believe that it's a matter of applying good technique to get the best out of DataSet programming.

Long story short, loading data into a dataset effectively gives you a homogeneous database, but as of right now, I mostly use DataSets for little more than binding to datagrids.

What sort of adaptations will I need to use the features of a DataSet more fully is the question I wish to answer as I develop this blogging website.

Tags: asp.net, system.data, ado.net, web design

Next year, when I have the need or even half the interest to go out for a walk to the mall or through the park I'm going to think back to today...

It's -15 Celcius today, plus a nasty howling wind that makes it similar to the conditions one might see on Pluto... Okay maybe not, but it is definitely one of the nastier weather days I can remember this side of Christmas.

Next year I will take every opportunity to enjoy the warm weather. Long walks through the park every day, even if there's something really good on TV.

Tags: weather

It would seem clear that those that wish to do harm to the United States don't like to gamble. They go for a sure thing, that's why they send so many people to see the job to its completion.

Sending a missile from another continent away just isn't a sure thing, with or without a "Missile Defense Shield".

In other words, you can't have "missile" without "miss". A missile could run out of fuel, its guidance system may fail or be mis-programmed. To an agent of ill-will, anything other than a direct hit would likely be unacceptable.

So these misanthropes will probably wait until the technology to have a no-doubter of a missile comes along. Some sort of missile that can't miss, that will reach its target at high speeds with a higher degree of certainty.

Ironically, this is the kind of technology that the proposed U.S. Missile Defense Shield intends to have, at least according to the dramatizations we all see on the news. The irony being that the U.S. Armed Forces appear to be the architects of their own demise, by seeking to create a better missile.

Tags: news