2 days ago I got an email about a different kind of going away party, a friend of mine, known him for 5 years or so, has been active reserves for a long time but recently switched to full active duty, but just states side.  He's Navy, so that meant driving back and forth between Columbus and Dayton.  About a month ago during a every-other-month get together, he said he's been "put on notice" that his time to jump over into the sand pit could be coming so this wasn't a surprise.

In the email he said we'd have a thing on sunday because he felt he could be gone before Thanksgiving (which, btw, his wife is t3h w00t when it comes to making a turkey) so ok fine, I forward it on to the group.  This morning ...I get this.

Friends -

I regret to inform you that the party has been canceled. The navy would like [him] to be on a transport to Iraq on Sunday, and he will actually be leaving town for San Diego sometime Tuesday, October 28th. 

For those keeping track, that's -today-.  I called him, see how he was feeling about it, how long, etc.  He's excited, 6 months, doing what he wants to do.  I outrightly warned him not to do anything stupid because the last thing I want to hear is he's coming home in a box.  To put this in perspective, he wanted to be a pilot and asked "would you fly with me" if he would get the OK -- I'd do it in a heart beat (mostly to out-fly him!) and even filled out some paperwork if he got it.  Well, he was turned down for that but did get commissioned to be an officer anyway.  Good thing is its a great position.  Bad thing is he will be required to move a LOT -- transports are easy to shoot at.  Granted, most of his movements should be by air ...but that ground comes up fast sometimes.  Damn gravity.

I'm not really worried about him or his ability to handle combat situations (see: being shot at) which he shouldn't see much, if at all, but I do wish, at the least, I would be going with him.  He's got a wife that's not in the greatest health and needs him from time to time ...I don't have that problem.  During the summer, we had talked about the realistic nature that he'd be going off and what I could do around the house, things his wife can't handle.  He insisted nothing (bullshit) but gave in by saying "make sure the mower has oil in it, it needs rebuilt so its eating it after every few runs".   Just the kind of guy he is.  So it looks like I'll be doing some shoveling (snow) and maybe some shrub cutting, lawn mowing and whatever else comes up while he's out playing in the big sand box of the east.  It's the least I can do.

A friend of mine got pulled over the other day, maybe a half mile behind me.  When I heard the officer gave him a ticket for 78mph, my first response was "no way in hell".  I'm good at math, so I decided to prove it with numbers.  Take notes, you can use this because its math.  Numbers don't lie (if you don't screw up).

Trig teaches us a couple useful things.  First, one of my favorite equations, A² + B² = C² - this tells you the length of sides of a 90' triangle, C being the hypontenuse.  What does this give us?  Everything we need, IDDQD, I win.

When the officer was tagging people, he was outside the far RIGHT lane, not the usual left lane, being head-on with normal, would-be speeders -- this is a fault of the officer I intend to prove with simple math.  There's also a fundamental flaw in lasers - they ONLY measure the velocity of an object realitive to the device, a perfectly straight line (ok, maybe off by a degree or two, but thats neglegable) -- that's why most officers sit in the left side.  I'm going to first establish the area, and some measurements thanks in part to Live Maps.  These are estimates, but a lot safer than actually going out there and measuring

5pm on I71 south bound on the north end is a bit of a mad-house and usually lasts until 6-6:30 (duh, normal rush hour).  People coming out of Polaris heading home, hitting 270/161/etc makes it a bit on the heavy side if you can't get out before 5.  I'd call it modertate traffic - you aren't changing lanes much and when you do, it might take a few seconds to get over.  Not exactly high-speed territory.  More over, the officer isn't going to get a good clean shot to someone that's floating down the highway in the left lane, especially during this time which doesn't play into his favor.

Here's the area.  The officer sits on the far right, he's in the left lane.  He estimates he was about 100yrds ("about a football field") when he got tagged, which considering the traffic volume, I'd say thats possible.  He also estimates he was going around 70, not 78.  Lanes of traffic in that area are about 30 yards wide.  We have our math.  So let's start with using a perfect triangle (which, as you can tell, its not, we'll get to that).

Using our simple math of 100² + 30² = x², our math comes out to 105 for X.  So how fast was he going realtive to the 100yard side?  Easy - 78mph / 105 = X / 100.  This number comes out to about 74mph which is a huge thing.  In Columbus (maybe even the entire state), 10 over is two points on your license, under that is only 1 point and that turns out to a difference on your insurance -- they frown on tickets.  Now you could argue he said he was 100 yards away from the officer, and you'd be right, but comes out to about the same, the lower end of 74mph.

But there's a problem.  The road curves off to the left (east) meaning it isn't 30 yards at the base of the triangle.  By my guess, conservatively, it's 50 yards.

100² + 50² = X² comes out to 111.  78 / 111 = X / 100 comes to ~70mph.  Hmm, that's barely over the limit.  And if you again say "well, he said 100 yards" -- comes out to 67.1mph so by my basic, easy math, from where the officer was and the speed he recorded it COULD be anywhere from 74mph to 67.1mph - granted, yes still technically speeding, but NOT 78mph. You could also argue the officer tried to line up the left lane with where he was, which is plasuable, BUT with the heavier traffic ...I don't think that's realisticly possible to aquire a car though the traffic of that volume.  Hmm, maybe I should send this off to mythbusters?

Currently I'm finishing up another sitefinity project, yay!  I can't disclose (yet) who it’s for, what it looks like, etc (it's sweet, trust me), but I can share my experiences with it and what I've learned.  I really like sitefinity, it's starting to make sense and I can abuse the system in many many ways.  It provides me a good platform, takes care of 80% of the work and leaves me to develop, keeping me from being a plumber.

If you haven't already, may I suggest looking into Sitefinity.

If you're new to sitefinity's API, I recommend a slight tweak to the common approach.  The "I'll just create a new one" is not always the best route, nor the easiest.  That said, there are times when creating a module totally outside the realm of sitefinity is necessary.  This is learned with experience and knowing what sitefinity does out of the box.  I believe the most important thing to know is everything, EVERYTHING is based off of content.  Everything.  Generic Content is the most basic module to show this, so I will talk in regards to generic content and hopefully cover a lot of ramp up "how do I use this" time.

Each built in module is branched out into 3 places, effectively: The web.config, the ~/sitefinity/ControlTemplates/<module> and the ~/sitefinity/Admin/ControlTemplates.  Within the web.config is an area that will greatly interest you, the <metafields> area.  This allows you to say "you know, that generic content module is great, but I need 1 more thing in there", this is where you set aside a place in the database for it.

Let me stop here for a second.  There's two parts working behind the scenes you may not be aware of: Content and MetaKeys.  MetaKeys are suppliment info that hangs off of Content.  How I've come to understand how sitefinity saves data is this.  When you save a piece of content, its tossed into the database and an ID is created.  From that ID, metakey values are saved so, say you have a content with an ID of 5823 (its not really this, it saves it as a guid) and after that save, your other metakey values get tossed with that ID associated with it.  Effectively, you're saying to the API "hey, this content has this key, give me whats in there for it" and there you have it.

Sound complicated?  Here's were some of the awesomeness comes in.  Within the ~/sitefinity/admin/controltemplates/ there's two controls, ControlPanelInsert and ControlPanelEdit (guess what they do?) and on those user controls, there's a telerik control named ContentMetaFields -- this is where those values are pumped into those keys and vice versa.  "How do I do that?" ...simply keep the ID of the control in the ContentMetaField in line with your metakeys defined in the web.config.  That's it!

Displaying this data has the same approach -- make sure the control IDs line up.  Take a look at ContentViewSingleItem.ascx under ~/sitefinity/ControlTemplates/<module> and drop a label, give it the new metakey ID and there you go!

Non-coding post warning 

With the upcoming campaigns, the news media has been going ape over polls.  This poll, that poll, one showing X, another showing Y.  I ignore all of them, every single one, but with good reason - you can't trust 'em, at all, ever.  Let me take a step back and start explaining why.  This is a multi-part and involves a lot of "high level" science in part, a bit of football too so stick with me on this.