We're headed back to China for one last ride on the Adoption Express.  We adopted our first daughter in 2003 and our second daughter in 2005.  Both were nine months old when they joined our family.  In 2006 we added a son who was six years old.  Now we are about halfway through the home study to adopt a 5 year old boy.  According to the information we've received about him, today is his birthday.  We wish it could be spent here with us, but the next one will be.  Until then, shengri kuaile, erzi - happy birthday, son. 

I came up with this to get the time portion of a datetime data type formatted in 12 hour time with the AM/PM on the end:

Example outputs look like 10:30 AM or 4:10 PM.

I'm not sure if this is the most efficient way, but it seems to work whether the time has single or two digit hours both before and after noon.  Replace the GETDATE() function, which I've stuck in for demonstration purposes, with your datetime column reference.  If there is a better way to do this please post a comment.

I renewed my hosting account a few weeks ago.  I'm with WebHost4Life.  They are a three nines host.  Three nines means 99.9% uptime as opposed to a five nines (99.999%) uptime.  Three nines is good enough for me and about all I can afford.  Every year at this time I try to think of a way to get more for less with the ideal being something for nothing.  This year I went so far as to poke around for free hosts.  I was surprised to find several.  One called heliohost goes so far as to offer ASP.Net hosting via Mono.  Free is free so I signed up, but literally as I was logging into the new account for the first time the site died and was gone for a couple of weeks.  Weird.  I found another one called 000webhost that offers PHP with MySQL.  The site appears to be professional and well maintained.  In their information they say their cost are offset by donations and other for-fee services.  I've got another unused domain name that I bought when I thought I was going to write the successor to Twitter.  (Don't act like you haven't had the same thought yourself.)  I could set up a WordPress based blog their that I could neglect just like this one, but figure the height of neglect is to not bother setting it up.  If something is worth neglecting, then it's worth neglecting completely. 

Another area of recurring costs (or at least potentially recurring costs) is HappyFish.  In December I will have put in four years on my little pet project.  I'm guessing I've spent upwards of 1500 hours of work on it either coding, debugging, rewriting, or learning.  As I think I've mentioned before, I've gotten much more out of it than it cost me.  The only thing I've learned from working on HappyFish that I have not repeatedly used in my ASP.Net work is multithreading, and I even used that once to handle a long-running action in a web app.  Up to this point all the costs have been modest - annual hosting fees, domain renewals, and my time. 

In my MVC post I explained the new data synchronization features I want to add to HappyFish.  Several choices of data stores are available.  SQL Server, Microsoft's SQL Data Services (formerly SQL Server Data Services), and Amazon's Simple DB are the ones I've investigated so far.  The problem is that they all cost money.  I can of course charge fees for the service or offset costs with advertising, but neither of those options seems too appealing.  Once you start charging for something you have a responsibility to deliver a certain level of service - those nines I mentioned earlier.  Plus you've got to manage all those accounts and billing and all that comes with it.  Still, after learning a few new tricks at DevConnections I thought I could at least pull it all off without the hassle of charging for the accounts on a limited introductory basis to test the waters.  Synchronization Services with SQL Server via a WCF SOA layer appears to offer what I'm looking for.  But after beating my head against the wall, or perhaps ceiling of my shared hosting plan, it looks like it cannot be done.  What I want to do costs more money (read: dedicated server).  So at this point I'm stuck.  If anyone has a racked server with Windows 2003 and SQL Server installed just laying around let me know.

You know you're in Vegas when you pass a guy getting onto the elevator who is carrying an open bottle of beer...on your way to breakfast.

I made it to DevConnections.  I had a flight delay that lengthened my layover in Atlanta yesterday by a couple of hours.  The Mandalay Bay is an impressive hotel.  To give you a sense of scale I took the above image standing by the elevators.  That black dot is a person standing not quite at the far end of the hall.  There are three identical halls radiating out from the central room in the foreground.  My room is bigger than my living room at home, and the bathroom is larger than either of the kids' rooms.  It's a big place.

I started the day with a run north on the Las Vegas strip.  That took me past all of the famous casinos including The Mirage, The Excalibur (think Cable Guy with Jim Carey),  The Bellagio (think Ocean's Eleven), the MGM Grand, and The New York New York among others.  The New York New York has a roller coaster on top that I think Gil in C.S.I. rides in a few of the episodes.  I covered a about six and a half miles.  Back at the hotel I cleaned up and grabbed a bite before heading to the SilverLight pre-conference session given by Dan Wahlin.  It was a good session and I learned a lot.  Wahlin clearly knows his stuff.  As I said before, I've played around with SilverLight some, but not enough to have a good coherent picture.  I feel like I've got one now.  So far so good.  The main sessions start tomorrow. 

I'm headed to the Fall 2008 DevConnections next week.  I attended DevConnections in the Spring of 2005 in Orlando and learned a lot.  I'll be spending most of my time on the ASP.NET track, although there are a few Visual Studio and SQL Server sessions I'm going to catch.  As usual, the schedule has a couple of sessions where I'd like to be two or three places at once, but I'm not complaining.  I'm also going to take in the Silverlight 2 pre-conference workshop.  I'm looking forward to a comprehensive primer.  I've played around some with Silverlight, but my approach has been so haphazard that I'm basically still on square one.  I'll be blogging and Twittering along the way with all the standard, cliche pictures of the sites of Vegas.