Here's a blast from the past that I recently found in my archives. It's a novelty stored procedure I wrote during my MS SQL 2000 DBA days. Back when I wrote this sproc, I was really big into writing calendar applications. I have written some sort of calendar application in almost every language I know, so writing one in tSql made sense to me.

While I never used this sproc in an application, or had any practical use for it, I still think it's cool. It's primarily an excercise using tSql's date functions, and my all time favorite feature of MS SQL 2000+, table variables.

If you use MSSQL 2000 or higher and don't use table variables, I highly recommend looking into these. In a nutshell, it's a type of tSql variable that is a table. You can select, insert, update, and delete the rows in this variable just like it's a real table. The lifespan of a table variable is the length of your connection to your db. So if you have a table var #myTable in sprocA, as soon as sprocA completes execution, #myTable is gone. SprocB can't access #myTable unless is specifically creates a new table var by this name.

So I wrote an article about this sproc for a database site years ago and I haven't been able to find it again. This was web1.0 days, so I'm sure the site is gone by now. The good thing is I still have the sproc, and now you can to.

So here's the info. The sproc efCalendar accepts a month number and year number, and spits out two recordsets.

Month, Year
Calendar view of that month

Recordset 1 is two columns, month name, and year.
Recordset 2 is a calendar view of the specified month. There is a column for each weekday, starting with Sunday and ending with Saturday. Then there is a row for each week in the specified month.

Here is what the results look like when run in Query Analyzer.

Download the efCalendar sproc here.

The summer season of E5 RHML has come to a close for my team. We were eliminated in the playoffs by a team we've beaten three times this season. It was an interesting game to say the least. We had nine players, and the opposing team had nineteen. Yeah, that's not a typo.

All in all it was a suprisignly tight game, ending with a score of 4 - 3. While I'm bummed we were eliminated in the first round, I did have two assists, and a goal, so I can't be too upset. Especially since I scored my goal from behind the red line.

It was late in the third, and we were battling down low, way low. I was in the corner and tried getting the puck into the mess in front of the net. What I ended up doing was deflecting it off of the other team's defensemen. It was an amazing shot. I took down one of their men, and scored at the same time.

That just happened!

Tonight I worked more on a fun distraction than my current project. It's the Where we do what we do site, and it's awesome! Any new web2.0 bloggy project that has more pictures than words is automatically cool in my book. I would like to thank JBone from wiretree for hipping me to tonight's distraction.

Surf on over and check out my office.

I've been completely slacking on posting to the site. It's nice finding fun new sites to get me going again. Speaking of new sites, I'm checking out a new web sharing service called Dropbox. So far it's pretty cool. I haven't made this a part of my daily routine, but I can see this service being very useful when floating between offices. The only part I don't like is the public sharing url format isn't something that I can remember. This may be configurable, I just don't know yet. Here are some random pictures I've uploaded so far, have a look.

8 / 1 / 8

That's right, I'm dropping a slight site tweak today since I missed the May 1st reboot.

This tweak isn't exactly what I had sketched out, but I'm still happy with it. I really only gave up on two ideas :

Middle content scroller
Dropdown menu link launcher in the footer

Part of giving up on my middle scroll bucket was the effort involved with the DHTML, and possible headache for site visitors. I don't think I have site visitors, but someday I might, so better safe than sorry.
Another reason for giving up on my two ideas was everybody's favorite web browser - IE. Internet Explorer likes to do things it's own way, so the height detection was sort of a pain. The drop down menu hotlink navigator idea was scrapped because of IE's popup blocking. No worries, I actually dig the html hotlinks better anyways.

So the 8/1/8 tweak adds a header and footer bar. The header now shows the random quote machine ( formerly just in the title bar ). The footer bar way at the bottom of this page now has some hotlinks for your enjoyment. I don't think this it the end all be all for this site, but I like it better than my first "design".

Just got home from my hockey game and I had two firsts tonight.

I was the first shooter in the overtime shootout
I lost the puck before making it to the blue line. FTL!!!!

Wow, talk about a super fubar-a-rino. I've never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, done that before, ever.
Nobody wanted to go so I just skated up and was going to take the first shot, but I'm an idiot.

On the plus side, we still won. Now my cold streak is really ice cold, as in subzero.

I really need to get my act together and start off ice training again. Pre kid I ate, slept, and breathed hockey. Now I just flat out suck most of the time. Oh well, no reason to cry over spilled hockey puck. But it's going to take a lot of producing for my team to overlook my shootout drop pass.

FAK!!!

Too excited not to share this one -- www.SK8FACE.com

Signed up with tumblr. The big bubbly theme was more than enough for me to sign up.
-- ericfickes.tumblr.com

It's finally happening after 20+ years of skateboarding. I'm getting my very own mini ramp. A friend of a friend gave it to me, and all I had to do was drive down to Castle Rock and pick up the pieces. Tonight was quite an experience. Here's a quick timeline of the activities.

4:30 - Picked up 24 Foot UHaul truck
4:40 - Got UHaul truck stuck in driveway / street
4:45 - Attempt to remove trailer hitch from bumper
4:55 - Attempt burnouts and wedge items under wheels
5:05 - Call UHaul Assistance line
5:15 - UHaul calls back and says fix it myself
5:20 - Walk down street to neighbor with wrecker ( not home )
5:30 - Meet new neighbor
5:50 - New neighbor picks up UHaul with his bobcat
6:00 - Begin the scary ride down to Castle Rock ( 42mi each way )
7:00 - Fill up UHaul with ramp pieces
8:30 - Chick Fil A
9:30ish - Clean out extra parking spot back at home
9:50 - Returned truck to UHaul
10:20 - shower
10:30 - Commence vedge time

So this UHaul truck was easily the most terrifying vehicle I have ever driven. It's not even worth going into details. I'm just happy Mike and I made it home alive. The ramp pieces are all laid out in our extra parking space next to the house. Hopefully all the local hooligans will stay clear.

So yeah, I finally met my new neighbor tonight. I've been meaning to go over and introduce myself, but I suck at being neighborly and social in general. Anywhos, it was pretty classic. I see him turn the corner in his truck. He rolled by the back of the UHual, rolls down his window and asked me the classic new neighbor question.

"Does that thing have a good bumper on it?"

Talk about a totally classic first line. I confirmed the bumper was good and new neighbor guy proceeds to casually tell me he's got a Shift Loader ( some sort of alternate name for a Bobcat ) and chains which would pick up the truck. So at this point I introduced myself. Now we know each other.

So I walk over to his house and he drives around the corner in a bobcat. MY NEIGHBOR OWNS A BOBCAT!!! Damn, talk about freaking awesome. And to think I consider myself sort of macho because I play ice hockey.

Long story short, here are the highlights of tonight ( I'm tired of typing and it's late ).

New neighbor is freaking awesome
UHaul is no help at all
Castle Rock is far away
I will be skating my own mini ramp in two weeks
I'm not macho or a writer

Well this is a sad moment. I just listed my 2007 Subaru STI Limited on Craigs list.

Saw this great short presentation on how to hack a technical interview. Luckily I'm not jobless right now, but it's still worth a view.

The website behind the presentation

I've completely given up on trying to customize windows themes. Total fail for sure. Today I found out about the Zune desktop theme that Microsoft released, and now everything is better.

If you like black, gray, and orange, you must install this theme. I literally haven't run the windows Themes service since XP came out. I full on hate the default theme. I can tolerate silver and olive sometimes, but it's still a retarded theme.

The Zune theme appears to be the shiney XP MCE theme, only dark and nice.

If for any reason these links don't work, just google "Zune Theme", you'll find it.

Here's a cool AIR utility you can use to generate Adobe CS3 or Web2.0 style icons.

AIR Icon Generator

Here's a side project I did back in 2002. It was a layout redo for one of my favorite websites of the dotcom era, buzzkiller.net. This is a collection of writers who were fed up with buzzwords of the time and where doing something about it.

At the time, I was working for a company that wanted to be much larger, and loved to use these sort of buzzwords and catch-phrases all the time.Having to read these emails was a bit of a chore, but not quite as bad as some of the shizz buzzkiller was documenting. These guys are actual writers, so I can imagine how irate they must have been having to deal with this day in and day out.

So here's a before and after shot of buzzkiller.net.

Buzzkiller.net is still going strong today, but now has a cleaner blogeresque theme going on. No worries, I can always cruise over to archive.org and pull up this design whenever I want to logon and surf down memory lane.

I still keep in contact theRedWorm. You've probably read his work in a handful of magazines. While he's written for countless publications, I remember his work from Wired the most. My favorite is the article he did for Wired when he went through NASA's hypergravity test. He flatlined for four seconds then came back and wrote an article about it. How wicked is that? In case you didn't see this article you can read it here. I highly recommend checking it out.

Anyways, if you're into rhobust, scaleable, highly integrated, synergistic komono opening writing, check out this buzzword conversion chart. It should help you get through your next meeting or company ra-ra email a little easier.

I finally setup my FriendFeed account. This is a free service I think everybody who does the social thing should sign up for. It's the first web2.0 service that I can think of that aggregates all your other web2.0 services together into one page.

I've been wanting to build something like this since everybody has a public API these days, and now I'm not too worried about it. I still want to build a megAggregator for my online picture sites, but I've already got a large enough todo list.

Anyways, by visiting me on FriendFeed you can check out three of my blogs, four of my picture sites, my stumbleupon account, and my twitter account. It's a great idea, and I'm glad somebody built this.

Here's an interesting presentation I found over at three minds about Social Media. It's got some statistics that I'm a little skeptical of, but overall I think it's a great overview of Web2.0. Even if these stats aren't totally dead on, I do believe that they are not far off.

I still love porn more than social networking sites.

I'm all about the little details. If you know me, you also know that I'm easily amused. Something I like about OSX is it automagically shows the PCs on my network in the Finder's sidebar. Makes sharing files really easy.

Anywho, the other night I was explaining this to Jenn and noticed a little detail that I want to share. Check out the PC icon that OSX uses.
PC = BSOD on OSX - classic!

I like an OS that has a sense of humor.

Signed up with three new micro blog social whatchamacallits this week.

Posterous

is cool because I can finally blog via email. I know Flickr has had this since forever, but you had to use that cryptic email addy that nobody can remember. With Posterous, you just send an email to post@posterous.com. First you can auto-register just by emailing that addy. Or, sign up at posterous.com, confirm your email, and then start posting via the same email you registerred with. So, I like this concept, but the rest of it seems pretty standard blah blah.

Plurk

is a cool new approach to micro-blogging : timeline, and karma. I haven't taken the time to really figure this site out yet, but I have signed up. This is really the first micro-blog site that has caught my attention since Twitter. The concept of a timeline and karma are enough to sell me on Plurk. Just check it out already.

Identi.ca

really just seems like a free marketing site to me, but who knows. Besides the cost, I like the big post box at the top of the page. Other than that, I don't see what's so great about it other than it's fresh and new.

The next thing I'm looking forward to getting into is sleep, but I think that's a little farther away. I have the requirements already : burning eyes, daily grumpitude, and lack of motivation around doing most things. Of course, it may just be gas.

Looks like Internet Explorer isn't that bad after all. I'm working on a ColdFusion8 file importer, and Firefox3 is really sucking at rendering the form. I've been tweaking, cfflush-ing, and all sorts of tricks to no avail. For giggles I tried the same script in Internet Explorer, and the form renders about twice as fast, if not faster.

The large test file I'm working with has just over 20,000 lines which means my confirmation form has just over 20,000 lines. I'm going to keep banging on this wall until I think of a clever way to get this file imported and into a manageable form.

IE may have won this battle, but Firefox3 is still my daily browser.

While wearing my ColdFusion8 pants tonight, I found something that really pisses me off. Cold Fusion's CFSCRIPT doesn't support the ternary operator.
Seriously?!? WTF?!?

I chased my tail trying to figure out an IIf alternative to determine if an index in an array is defined. Tried all sorts of variations with no luck. Guess I'll be adding this one to the to learn list.

Something that has always bugged me about CF is the lack of documented CFSCRIPT usage. All I really want is a document that says how to use CFML in tag land, and then how the same functionality differs in CFSCRIPT land. I have found lots of CFSCRIPT code out there, but still haven't found good documentation on this yet.

I just need to get deeper into CF8.

< FLEX >
Today I was using Alert.show() while building a RadioButtonGroup change handler and noticed something interesting.
If you use your mouse to change the values of a RadioButtonGroup, Alert.show() will behave like a proper modal dialog. However, if you use your keyboard's arrow keys to toggle the values, the focus remains with your RadioButtonGroup.

The lesson here is since the focus remains with my RadioButtonGroup, you can continue to change the values all you want via keyboard. In my situation, I kept receiving Alert.show()s, instead of one.

Try it for yourself.
First click on a RadioButton below, and notice that the Alert.show() keeps you from clicking on the RadioButtonGroup until you OK the prompt.

Now try the same thing again using your keyboard. If you do it enough times, the prompts will cover up the stage completely.

< / FLEX >

Here are some highlights from today.

I've come to grips with downgrading my automobile. sniff...
I received a totally sweet error message from Eclipse
Fletch made the Mile High Music Together website

And now for the pictures
Super helpful Eclipse error message
don't know what I'd do without Eclipse's help

Fletch from Music Together class
strummin with the Fletcher!

I'm having a hard time finding a good wireframing tool for web applications. Right now I'm using Dreamweaver with the hopes of short cutting my html efforts once my application's screens are ironed out. I realize this isn't the easiest solution, but I've already started, and it seems like the easiest format to translate / clean up later.

My ideal wireframe tool would do the following :

Free or cheap
WYSIWYG functionality
Either use real HTML or export visual elements to HTML
Allow for clickable navigation between screens
Allow for small amounts of code interactivity

Dreamweaver meets most of these, and I've already made it far enough that I don't want to turn back.

After all these years of hand crafting my html, it's a real challenge making the switch to WYSIWYG editing. So far it's been ok, just not as easy as I was hoping. Hopefully this barrier is just my inexperience creating web pages the visual way.

Tonight I ported a .net1 project to .net2. I have to give props to Microsoft for making Visual Studio 08 so helpful in the migration process. There is a conversion wizard that updates the .net guts of the project itself. Then the next time you build your project, Visual Studio lets you know what code needs to be updated. It doesn't do everything for you, but I'm not aware of any IDEs that are this helpful when it comes to porting legacy code.

While the porting process wasn't too bad, getting IIS and ASP.NET setup and running was sort of a fubar.

IIS didn't like that I have Apache running
After turning off Apache, IIS complained about a metabase problem
Tried fixing with the MetaAcl Tool
Googled around and found my fix "C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>aspnet_regiis -i"
Next I couldn't debug because my project was built as a Release
Changed to debug then had to clear out my .net framework temp folder
Rinse and repeat windows voodoo, now I'm debugging

The jury is still out on how much I miss asp.net. It sure beats the hell out of PHP. But then again, I've got my PHP chops back and I'm really enjoying the simplicity and speed which I can crank smallish things out.

I need to start off ice training again. Tonight I could have had a hat trick, but screwed the pooch. I beat the goalie on a deke move and lost the puck right before the backhand. Then I hit the post on an empty net. On the plus side I did score one goal, and the team won, so it's not all bad.

This email from amazon is funny to me. We suggest Flex books and Pampers. Yeah, I'm definitely a dad now.

Today is national go skateboarding day. Mike and I went to the Commerce City Skatepark to see the Independent skate team demo. Turns out they showed up earlier than advertised and we didn't get to see anybody. Wack stamp for Independent. We did however roll over to the Denver park and skated the bowl for a few hours. Good times.

Trying out the acrobat.com document preview functionality. With acrobat.com you can upload a document, convert it to pdf, and then host a preview on your site. The document below was just a jpg converted to pdf.

One of the things I like about Burnout Revenge is that some cars sound like the cycles of tron. I know I've heard a few random TRON-esque sounds while playing the game. I love it.
Something else I've noticed is random disappearing cars. I'll get into a tight situation, and the car I'm battling will disappear. It's weird but funny at the same time.

If you haven't seen it yet, Adobe has launched a beta of their version of Google Docs called acrobat.com. It's looking pretty sweet. Besides being free, creating PDFs out of uploaded documents was enough for me to sign up.

It's really cool seeing Adobe launching new services like this using Flex. I'm also digging the clean and simple dark theme they've got going. Something that stuck out to me was this organic call out style menu.
cool program menu

I remember working so hard to make web applications mirror common desktop applications. For example, check out the forum at WebFX. Be sure to view that site in IE. WebFX has been around since web1.0, doing some amazing DHTML work.

Anyways, I like seeing new takes on common form elements like this. It gives me hope that web application interfaces won't be such a buzzkill in the future.

So I'm watching Flight of the Conchords the other night and I almost lost it when I saw this.

Yeah, it's the Footloose montage. FOC is on my favorites list now. Really, it landed on my list after watching the Business Time video, but this montage sealed the deal. I also like it because the shorter dude reminds me of an old skate buddy that I lost touch with.

Matt Makarow, email me dude!

Tonight I watched a sweet Ben Forta tutorial on Adobe TV - Build a ColdFusion-powered Flex application It was a quick walkthrough of a Cold Fusion wizard built into Flex Builder. Pretty freaking amazing that you can created a Cold Fusion driven Flex application all in a wizard. Surf on over and watch for yourself.

DotNet makes web services wicked easy, but this takes the cake for me.

Added program icons to my air fart machine. At some point I need to get the auto update built in.

David Realeyes hooked me up with a killer reference website today -- gotapi.com

Today was the first day of Flex development on OSX. It's really nice finally being able to work on a PC or a MAC without the use of an emulator like Parallels. The only downside was I spent most of my day fighting Eclipse. Most of the issues were windows to mac pathing issues, but one problem was not.

	[compc] Error: Java heap space
	

	[compc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

This error was a real pain in the arse. I found a lot of people having similar issues and they all fixed this problem by setting ANT_OPTS as an environment variable to increase the memory size. This didn't work for me. I set ANT_OPTS in my .profile, as well as in .MacOSX/environment.plist. No luck. I never figured out why the environment variable route didn't work, but I was able to fix this error within Eclipse.

If you run into this error while running Ant build scripts, try the following steps.

Run Menu > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog...
Select your Ant build file on the left
Click the JRE tab on the right
Enter "-Xmx640m" in the VM arguments field ( without quotes )
Click Apply, then Run

Hopefully this will get you going.

< ADOBE AIR >
I'm stinking up the internets with my latest Adobe AIR application. You can download a free copy over at ifartair.com. Have a download, let me know what you think.

If you don't have AIR already, download it here.
< /ADOBE AIR >

Here's something most people don't know about web development. Internet Explorer is a huge time suck because it renders webpages completely different than other browsers. The table below shows a show of a website I'm working on right now. The three good web browsers, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, render the page as expected. The most popular browser, Internet Explorer, pads all the images and essentially breaks this site.

Four hours later, I was able to smack enough html and css for IE to render properly. You can see the results over at South Georgia Quail Unlimited. The site is not complete, but it's up and works.

Today I hooked up with an old friend on facebook, and found cool feature. I was giving my buddy the url to Fletch's site, and facebook sucked it in and attached it to the message automagically. I saw the page blink for a split second so I figured there was some web2.0 running, but I had no idea what it was. Here's what it looked like. This is a really cool feature.
facebook url import ajax magic

Here's another reason why you should love Flash. Make sure you click through this site enough to go through at least one pop up book. This is some seriously amazing 3D work. Word on the internets is that this wasn't made using Papervision3D. However it was made, it's crazy.
The Eco Zoo

Flash Haters scoreboard
Flash	1
Haters	0

I scored my first goal in the RMHL tonight. Tonigh was also my first 10:30 pm weeknight game. We played at the ice ranch which is an amazing facility, but it's also 35 miles from home. So during the weekends I don't mind the road trip, but late weekday games are a little rough.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear of some new Adobe technique or technology that I want to learn. Today was no different. I started reading about Flash Player 10 and came across the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I'm not going to rehash what Adobe has already documented here, but I will show it to you.

eric the webmonster getting pixel benderred

eric the webmonster getting pixel benderred

This is an example using Ryan Taylor's HSL Pixel Bender kernel.

Check out the Pixel Bender Toolkit:Gallery for some other sweet filters.

Three more skateparks have been added to my colorado skatepark blog, Boulder, Superior, and Walker-Branch.

I really love the Boulder park. The Walker-Branch park is pretty cool, and tucked away off of Colfax. The Superior park is pretty laughable, but still fun.

Skate on over to the blog and see for yourself

I think Commerce City is my new favorite skatepark.

Crazy fun clover bowl with an almost full pipe capsule
Sweet plaza semi circle street course
The cement is smooth and not slick
It's not too far away
The local kids aren't thugs like another park I skate
IT HAS LIGHTS!!!

The skatpark is located in a brand new city park. Basketball courts, Bating cages, Baseball field, the whole shmear. I was wondering how the local non-skating kids would be like. The kids that watched us skate the bowl where really nice. Hopefully this won't turn into a thug playground.
So when I was putting on my protective gear, I had a fun little chat with a local kid. Starting with question one from the little kid skateboard book.
"What kind of board do you have?"
And before I could answer he followed with.
"Did you get it at Wal-Mart?"

This is when I realized the local kids would be just fine. So I told him I had them made by a company in California. That's when I got the "Nice. Those are good!".

That was probably the best chat I had tonight. Suprisingly, I talked to three or four different kids tonight. And it wasn't to say
"

WTF?!? SERIOUSLY?!? MOOOOVE!!!!

"
And the other memorable thing was they listened to me and Mike. Most little kids like to sit on the coping with their legs hanging down into the ramp. This group of kids walked right up to the coping. And get this. We asked them to step back just a bit and they all moved back immediately, without hesitation or jive talk.

After they stepped back, I had a conversation with them about their skateboarding uncle from Albuquerque. It was nice not being harassed by under parented kids at the skatepark.
I just said that.

Hotrod gives 110%!!!

Today was cloudy for a change.

Man, I need another week of just to catch up.

I've been off the radar for a while. Got back from DC late friday night. That was a good trip. I've been chainsawing all day today so this is going to be brief. Here are a few highlights from the last few days.

My first generation Dell XPS laptop is officially dead
My Motorola KRZR2 is officially dead
My next laptop will be a Macbook Pro
My new phone is an LG Shine
I turned 33 this weekend
Got a set of Creature OJ2s for my next setup
My office is back online with Qwest
I LOVE DIRECTV

Thought I had more, but I just can't remember right now.

Made it to D.C. tonight. Ronald Reagan airport is pretty sweet compared to Dulles. It doesn't have that 60s wing style, but it is a lot more modern and has a Metro stop.

I took the Metro tonight after seeing the mega cab line plus signs about extra fuel charges. F that noise. I miss riding the train, so tonight's trip was pretty fun. Well, except having my luggage and half ton laptop strapped to my back. My back hasn't hurt from a backpack since college.

Speaking of my XPS. I received an "OH MY GOD!" when I removed the beast from it's home to go through security. Just what I needed. A computer diss from an airport security guard in Denver. Nice.

Anyways, after my good time subway ride, I had a leisurely stroll from the Dupont Circle station to Hotel Rouge. On the way to my hotel I passed a few interesting buildings. This list is not in order, and not completely accurate.

IEEE Computer Society
The American Legacy Foundation
Embassy of a foreign country that I thought was made up
The Australian embassy
a few others

I know I'm not rememberring this correctly, but it was still cool. I spoke with a well dressed frenchman who gave me directions. Totally awesome accent, and really cool dude.

So I finally make it to the Rouge and was told they don't have a room for me. Just what I needed after a long day with no sleep. The good news is they refunded tonight's stay, and are putting me up at the Palomar Arlington. The possible bad news is I have to cab it back to the Rouge in the morning, then hope to make it to the Webmaniacs conference in time for the 8:00 Adobe Keynote. I hope they have a nap session I can attend.

The Palomar is pretty sweet, and the concierges have been super friendly. Considering I didn't make it here until after 11:00, I was expecting some attitude. Especially considering the first person I saw after getting off the elevator gave me a big look up and down, then the stink eye.

Suck it biznatch, I'm here on business.

Anyways, the rest of my evening went ok. I had a $20 sandwich which had black olive funk on it. Not cool. Then I locked myself out of my room putting the tray outside. Lucky for me I had only taken off my shoes and hat. All in all it was a fun evening. DC is so awesome, and I haven't seen anything yet.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....................

Looks like Hoss isn't the only one playing good hockey right now. Check out this sweet Canada beating goal from Ilia Kovalchuk.

Ok, now I'm pumped about next season. Got a feeling we're going to see a Russian Captain.

< PHP_CODE >
Here's a quick way to do redirects via PHP. I threw in the try / catch because some virtual hosts redirect before getting to your site. By that time you can't redirect again since content has already been sent to the browser. Either way, this one works for me both locally, and on my host.

get this code
</ PHP_CODE >

My team lost, but so did the Flyers. I think it's a fair trade.

< SUCK IT MICROSOFT >

Dear Microsoft,

WTF?!?!?

After installing XP Service Pack3, I can no longer install IIS.
I can no longer install IIS after installing XP SP3

My machine has multiple copies of each file the component wizard is asking for, and it won't accept any of them. Check it out. Six versions of staxmem.dll. Nope, no dice. Apparently these six just aren't good enough. And if these are the wrong versions, WTF?!? I got them from Microsoft.
Yeah, six copies, and windows doesn't like any of them

Yeah, six copies, and windows doesn't like any of them

I would like to point out that I had .net2, IIS, and Visual Studio 2005 up and running smoothly prior to the SP3 fubar. I had uninstalled IIS and W3SVC temporarily to cutdown on extra unused services. I was also sick of who knows what windows services turning IIS back on.

I'm positive there's some ridiculous windows explanation for this, but I just don't care, and I'm not wasting anymore time on this. I've already lost an entire evening doing the uninstall - reinstall - uninstall - windows update - reinstall dance with no luck.

Speaking of windows update, I was forced to install security updates for office programs I don't even have installed. Currently I have a bare bones word and excel 2007 setup. That's it. Windows Update refused to install .net2 until I installed security fixes for Publisher and Outlook. Shared functionality or not, that's just unacceptable in my book.

If only I had a large enough vocabulary to explain how completely irate I am over this. I'm done with this mess. No more defending MS. Not even over the xbox360.

I do love my 360, but keep in mind it was defective as soon as I opened the box. My 360 was just like all the others with the Red Ring of Death. It was fixed for free, but keep in mind I dropped close to $400 on a game system that I had to immediately return for an entire month.
Ridiculous.

If I could afford it, I'd buy a Macbook Pro this weekend. Something I can afford, and will be doing is porting my only asp.net project to php for it's next version. That's right, the next version of Fletch's site will not be using .net.

< /SUCK IT MICROSOFT >

Someday it would be sweet to be invited to TED

Today was a double bonk.

I found out I didn't complete the setup of my Google Analytics
The Penguins lost to the Flyers

I fixed my problem. I hope the Pens fix their's on Sunday.

Tonight we watched Blue Harvest. Pure genius.

You must see this.

Today was suprisingly productive for a sick day.

We finally got DirectTV again
Dropped off our comcast cable box
Found a new car jump video for the blog
The doctor said my sick has peaked and I'm on the mend
Added Lightbox2 to Fletch's picture page
More pictures and videos were added to Fletch's site
Installed XP SP3
I'm officially giving up on Microsoft
Checked the tire pressure on my tires
Took Fletch for a ride in the STI
Penguins beat the Flyers 4 - 1

That's about all I can remember at this point.
Be sure to surf on over to Fletch's site and check out the updates.

Here's a classic father and son moment

it sucks when mommy and baby are sick

I played the first game with my new hockey team tonight. Man it felt so good to be out there on the ice again. I'm really rusty, but needed to take it easy anyways. The last two weekends I played in drop in hockey games and tweaked my right groin. I'm like the Lehtonen of adult league when it comes to pulled groins. On the plus side, I usually only miss a game at most, and not most of the season.

I'm just too much of a bone head to warm up properly, and work on conditioning off the ice. The groinage is a bit sore, but I'm ok with that. Going into tonight's game, I honestly didn't think I'd be able to complete the game. I had to leave last weekend's game early for fear of really tearing it up. My groin was pretty bad this past week at work, but it survived tonight's game. Alright......

So here's something totally weird and unexpected. I'm watching the Flyers Penguins game on VS, and I hear Fugazi's Waiting Room being played at Melon Arena.

WTF?!?!?!?!?

When the hell did Fugazi become stadium rock? I mean seriously. Fugazi, at a professional sporting event that isn't skateboarding or something outside of the mainstream.
I mean, it'd still be weird to hear them at the XGames. At least there I wouldn't be completely shocked.
Seriously. Fugazi. Well, at least it's a good professional sport, and not something like footbal, baseball, or basketball. And depending on how you look at it, ice hockey is actually less popular here in the states than Fugazi is.

Oh yeah, go Penguins!!!

< GOOGLE MAPS GEOCAHING >

Here's a simple Google Map Geocaching query example. Enter an address or zipcode to retrieve a KML response. I threw this together to help lookup latitude and longitude for addresses. This info exists in the <Point> node towards the bottom.

This is what I was trying to ajax up the other night.

ericfickes.com GMAP GeoCaching example

Load sample in a popup
Direct Link to geocaching sample

< /GOOGLE MAPS GEOCAHING >

This weekend should be big for us. Jenn is running a race tomorrow morning, and my first hockey season in Denver starts Sunday. Oh, and Jenn's first mother's day is sunday as well. Good times.

Gmaps is so cool, but so complex.

Back in my VISTA IT days, Tommy and I put together a multi tier Cisco IP Phone management system. Remedy was the management platform, which was integrated to use Cisco Call Manager's MS SQL database. Classic ASP was the server side web language. The end clients were Cisco 7960 IP Phones, and web browsers. The 7960 IP phones are essentially dumb terminals with an embedded xml service browser. These lightweight xml services are transformed into ui on the phone just like html is transformed in your web browser.

When you setup a new phone, you have to register it's MAC with your Call Manager server. Next, you have to subscribe each phone to any service that you want to make available to that user. Kind of like subscribing to an RSS feed today.

I built all sorts of apps for these phones just like I would a traditional browser. Hotel software, traffic software, flight tracking softwaare, etc. In fact, it was at the same time that Pappa Johns first introduced their online ordering sytem. I contacted PJ's about their new service and tried to setup a proof of concept for The Innovation Through Convergence Expo, but they declined.

So our big idea for the show was an ip phone service management application. This was a big convenience app since back then you had to configure each phone, and the services manually. You'd have to register the phone, then assign services to each phone. Now do this for each phone in your office, keeping in mind that not everybody has access to the same services. Talk about a pain. So what we did was take the phone management piece out of Call Manager and used Remedy to handle that. You still need to register each phone with your server, but that's it.

At the time, Cisco's Call Manager ran on top of MS SQL server. Our Remedy system, and our ASP also ran on MS SQL, so it was an easy integration. So once you had your phones registerred with CallManager, you could log into the Remedy system and manage all your phones, and their available services with the same ease of a regular CMS system.

By running the management piece in Remedy, we received the following value adds :

Familiar management interface ( we were a big Remedy shop )
Access Control to services -- Groups, Roles, etc... ( I don't remember Call Manager doing this back then )
Floating user accounts ( log in to phone or browser )
Quick and easy updates to one or many phones ( Call Manager was one phone at a time )
Remedy's data was in sync with Call Manager's ( we were a Remedy integration shop too )

I'm sure the application had a few more bells and whistles, but that's what I can remember. The final thing that I was really proud of was the browser piece. While these web services were Cisco IP Phone specific, I built in some XSL / XSLT translation magic which allowed regular browsers to run the same applications.

This was mostly for testing and debugging, but it made for cool web integrations. These web services in the browser equated to web2.0 widgets. This wasn't a big sell, but it was a cool concept to show off at the show. In fact, most people just didn't understand what was going on. We had a cisco phone with it's green screen, and a laptop running the exact same apps side by side. Since this app had user management, you could log in and use the same services from anywhere.

Funny thing about all this. I thought this application was such a joke compared to the things we were building at the time. I was really just excited to get out of my office and go to Dallas. I had no expectations of winning anything, and we did.

Sometimes I wonder if this was really just a pat on the head from cisco for being a partner. Either way, it's pretty cool. After winning the award, Ron Pike and I went out by the elevators and threw our bouncy balls down into the lobby. SIX STORIES BELOW! All week we had been planning out the time, and how hard we'd have to throw the balls so they would bounce across the lobby and into the main fountain down below. We never got to practice since the lobby was always swarming with other conventioneers. Plus, these bouncy balls are the medium sized scwag balls you get at conferences that scream when you bounce them. You know the ones. They sound like a kid's laser gun and have the pupil burning leds in them. Yeah, we got some yells from the people down below, but that's just how we roll.

Tonight I tried to write a javascript widget for finding the lattitude and longitude of an address using Google Maps Geocoding service. The challenge here was to build this widget without using Google's geocoder.getLatLng() from their api. Sounds simple enough, but it wasn't.

First I went the AJAX route, but for some reason my XMLHttpRequest object never returned anything. Plus, it just seemed to undefine itself. No idea.
Next I went low tech and posted the geocode address query to an iframe in the page. I was using the iframe's onLoad event to parse iframe.contentDocument. No luck here due to cross domain security. I had to use netscape's UniversalBrowserRead to make the google request via a local file, but it didn't have any effect on parsing results out of the iframe.

I know I had my post url correct since it always returned in the iframe, or even if I just put it into the address bar. Oh well. Now I won't get enough sleep tonight, and I'll have yet another unsolved mystery to add to my technical deficit.

Today was definitely a monday.
Jenn and Fletch are both sick. My groin and right foot is jacked. Milo puked on the bed. And this was all before work.

Going to be early tonight.

The great Hossini and the Penguins sealed the deal today.

LET'S GO HO-SSA!

clap.... clap.... clap clap clap

LET'S GO PEN-GUINS!

clap.... clap.... clap clap clap

LET'S GO HO-SSA!

clap.... clap.... clap clap clap

LET'S GO PEN-GUINS!

clap.... clap.... clap clap clap

Finally finished game 4 Wings vs. Avs from thursday night. Damn, talk about some hockey ownage.

I can't believe I missed the May 1st reboot. It was written down on my whiteboard, then I erased thinking I'd never forget it. Yeah, it's 5/2 now and I missed it. Crap. Maybe I'll make next years.

Adobe announced the Open Screen Project today. This sounds really exciting, but we'll see where it ends up. I've been wanting to get into this sort of embedded web style development ever since I heard about bmw using flash for an in car display.

Tonight I posted new videos to Fletcher's website. Fletch is on the verge of standing by himself. Now that he has outgrown that baby lump phase, he's growing like a maniac.

Turns out Rock Band is actually fun. I played RB for the first time tonight. Mostly just on drums which was kind of weird. I found myself getting into that video game trance. As long as I stayed with the song I was good. If I got off once, I was gone for another few bars.

LAME has it's genre list hard coded into the app. Seriously? I can't even comprehend why that would be. I need to dig a little deeper.
Otherwise, I'll probably just use id3v2 to put in my own genre.

Two skateparks from Golden have been added to http://sk8colorado.blogspot.com/.
These two are small and quirky, but they're suprisingly fun.

Just found a cool slideshow feature of flickr. Here is my photostream.

I'm crossed between upgrading my flickr account now, or leaving it one big mess. Let's try mess for a while.

Look into preloader, IProgress.
My todos have overflowed onto the internets.

So I finally got the latest beta of Firefox 3. The browser homepage is pretty awesome. I suggest you fox up you browser.

Tonight's panorama comes from a room at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi Mississipi. I was there for a bachelor party a month before Katrina. Pretty sweet view of the Atlantic.

A new-ish quest begins tonight, THP8 for the 360. I've been really bummed about not being able to clear the xbox version, so I upgraded.
No thanks to my crapped out xbox.

I'm done with my original XBOX. I can't believe Microsoft can't put out a device with an optical drive that lasts longer than a few years. My original Playstation still works. I have plenty of older optical drives in a desktop I built a long time ago.

Guess I'll just have to play my 360.

Skated the Green Valley Ranch skatepark today. No thanks.

I also skated Westminster for a little bit. I love the Westminster bowl. It's the closest bowl to me with pool coping.
Pictures of both parks are now online over at sk8colorado.blogspot.com

Fletch and I had our cranky times synchronized. In the morning after seeing Dr.T, and then right before bath time.
It's pretty wild having a mini me.

I just noticed that Lipsum.org has banners now.

Lipsum is one of my favorite web tools. On demand greeking. Love it.

We received some awesome snow today. It was like living inside a snow globe. All the trees and bushes look like frosted mini wheats. Still not enough to get a snow day though.
On the plus side, it will probably be hot and sunny this weekend.

While doing some much needed Fonz research, I found this gem.

Captain James T. Kirk is AWESOME

So this is something I never dealt with back east. Yesterday was in the mid 70s. Today was in the low to mid 80s. In fact, I just got back from the skatepark and it's still in the 70s right now.
The weather report is calling for snow tomorrow and thursday. How awesomely crazy?

Remember Twiki from Buck Rogers?

So I used to play in the Midget Farmers. I weaseled my way into the band on guitar. Then switched to the funk side a little bit later.
When I joined the band we had three guitarists. When I hopped the train to funky town, we had two bassists. We played the A-Team theme as well as a few other classic covers.
One song missing from the cover list is the dueling banjos song. I can't believe we never did that, especially with two bassists.
. Speaking of the Midget Farmers, James posted the motherload.

Saw this today. Pretty bad. Check out some of the worst web designs ever.

Today I got to drive Fletch around for his afternoon nap. I was really excited about this because I was going to go get some Kolache Factory. Turns out they don't have a drive thru. So now I get to drive around endlessly trying to find fast food I'd actually eat.

The sun made this sunday drive quite a challenge. Every other street that I would turn onto would put my precious in directly sunlight. My life is an RTS.

< XBOX >

I go through phases with my toys. Right now I'm really big into Tony Hawk's Project 8 for the XBOX. I've already been through this game once, but I'm starting over with a new skater.
I have two new goals with this second trip through THP8.

Complete 100% of the game
Skate more like a real person

I will be clearing 100% of each area before moving on to the next. This means every single gap, and a score of sick in every goal. I'm a little suprised how many modern video games don't expect you to complete 100% of the game to win. So this time I'm going to play THP8 old school. Complete it all.

My second goal is to skate in THP8 the way I'd skate in person. So more flowing style, and less robotron. Project 8 is definitely the best THPS yet. The realism really helps with this goal.

These two goals are proving to be harder than I thought. At the same time though, I'm startinig to find lines as well as spots that I haven't even thought of before. Good times.

< /XBOX >

Tonight we watched Boston College school Notre Dame at the Pepsi Center. I haven't been to that large of a college hockey game before. I really expected it to be wild, or at least exciting. The last five years at Philips Arena has really spoiled me. At Philips we always had excitement, but the team was also crappy. Tonight was quiet and well behaved, but we did see two pretty good teams. It was cool seing all of the die hard college hockey fans from all over the nation. Just thinking about what a killer road trip this must be for them. Good times for all.

Today I watched the 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time. Well, I really only watched the Argument Clinic and the Ice Ice Baby sketches.

Tonight, Fletch and I practiced our wrestle faces. His training is going well.
Two bad dudes

The dangers of being a tv reporter.

Dr.Who theme song, by Delia Derbyshire

I received my fyre TV box tonight. A report and pictures are in order but I can't tonight. I've been fighting with my network and head butted a pipe in the basement.

That pipe came out of nowhere. I was just walking to the door, minding my own. I'm pretty sure that pipe concussed me.

Frozen Four championship game this saturday. We're going to be there. Make sure you look for us on ESPN.

Two cool things from today.

The playoffs are on and my team is out. Big suprise. This season I'm routing for the Capitals.
I don't have much interest in the west, but the east is going to be great. I'm hoping the next round will involve birds from the east.

So iTunes gave me the following error message today.
"iTunes cannot run because it has detected a problem with your audio configuration"
At first I thought it was related to that totally ridiculous sndvol32.exe problem. So I fixed that windows flaw and tried again.
No dice.

After a quick google, I found this kb article from Apple. Their solution is to uninstall and reinstall QuickTime.
Yeah, I'll be sure to do that right away.

Since I remember upgrading itunes a few days ago, I decided just to open Quicktime and see what happens. I mean, I never run QuickTime, so maybe there's a config step or two that never completed.
So I fire up QuickTime and it does in fact continue configuring.
QuickTime giving the blank prompt

At first I received a blank popup, but just clicked OK. After that process completed, iTunes opens just fine. I've never seen this before, and hope it helps somebody out.

Later today I skated the Commerce City skatepark. I love the bowl there. It's so freaking fast!!!! I've never skated a bowl with a capsule before, it's crazy. To top it all of, they're putting up lights at the park. This brings the lit skatepark count up to three; Denver, Longmont, and now Commerce City.

My last big accomplishment of the day was sweeping out the garage and assembling the hockey goal. It felt good sweeping out the remaining gravel and dust from the winter. I'm pumped about the goal as well. Now I need to start practicing again.

I learned something new about kids today.

They never look where they're going.

We went to Clement park today for some family get out time. It was my first visit to the playground as a dad. Four freaking kids almost t-boned Fletch while he was swinging.

A baby.
In a baby swing.
Are these kids on dope?!?

So I watched one of the bouncey balls after a near collision and saw him land face first in the grass. The kid just sat there for a while, then got up and did googly eyes and ran around in circles.
Hopefully I can take this lesson back to the skatepark.

No more elephant in the room.

Today's best domain name is destructoid.com

I'm officially fighting the wireless home network battle. We've been surfing at dialup to ISDN speeds when we're lucky.
This weekend I moved the wireless action upstairs without any noticeable improvement in surfing. Tonight I jacked my laptop directly into the cable modem and hung out at speedtest.net until I was certain it was faster. Unbelievable. My best test was 15MB down and 1.4MB up.

Now I'm tweaking and squeeking the wireless N router.
On network, no internet.
On network, slow internet.
No network.
RESET.......

Back on with router set to defaults, scary times, but online again. Now that I'm back on the internets, I have netstat running to listen for intruders.
Here is tonight's favorite nestat switch combo.
netstat -a -b -n -o 30
Drop to the command prompt and check out all the goodness. For more, checkout netstat /?

I fell for two April fool's jokes today.

Google's custom time
YTMND.com was dead

The Google thing didn't take long to figure out. However, I didn't figure out the second until after I sent out a mass email.
Hopefully the second email I sent admitting I fell for it will soften the replies tomorrow.

Too bad we don't have Leprechauns out west. Don't forget. It could just be a crackhead in a tree.

I just want the gold

Today I relocated the NOC closer to the living room. I'm hoping to get some better speeds on the internets now. The last month or so we've been surfing at dial up speeds.

secret network action

I learned about two new products today. Roka Blue, and Old English. I never knew OE was a cheese spread.
Old English is a cheese spread?

I impressed myself with a perfect parallel park job, first try.
yeah, I can park it

My current tv watching. Heroes from Netflix. Dazed and Confused from OnDemand.

Alright.....Alright.....Alright.....

Photoshop Express is out, and it is awesome. This may be the coolest Flex app I've seen yet. Props to Adobe!

Fletch scored a poop hat trick tonight.

In the diaper
In the toilet
In the tub

I finally got to take Ash snowboarding. It was her first trip and we had a great time. I'd have to say she is a natural. I took her up a blue and she made it down just fine. No back flips, but nothing broken either.
Me and Ash @ Breckenridge

Here's another shot of Ash buckling up at the top of the Mercury Super Chair.

I'm really digging making panoramic shots out of my camera phone pictures.

Always wear sunblock

Ah yeah, 3 day weekend.

Just finished watching Die Hard 4. That was almost funnier than Semi-Pro.

< LOLCAT >
I heart LOLCATs. I'm totally and completely a dog person in real life. On the internets though, I'm all about some LOLCATs.
The big reason I love these pictures is that they're all so believable. Think about all the times your cat tears out of the room from a dead stop or even resting? Or how about the cuddly purry time that gets cut short just because.
I'm starting to think that LOLCATs are really just the secret lives of cats. I know it sounds bananas, but think about it.

You always find cats in crazy mission impossible type positions.
I can totally see cats saying those sorts of quotes
What else do you think they're running off to in such a hurry?

Now that you know this, send me your LOLCATs. Here's one for the road.

< /LOLCAT >

I started writing a flash image rotator tonight. The rotator was suprisingly easy to whip up. However, for some reason flash isn't parsing my xml config file properly. I guess now is when the real fun begins.

This Bill Cosby rap song is classic.

If you liked this version, there are plenty of others on the internets.

I heard about a new animal on Top Gear last night. It's a Honey Badger.
< QUOTE >
The Honey badger or ratel is a tenacious small carnivore that has a reputation for being, pound for pound, Africa's most fearless animal despite its small size. It is even listed as the "most fearless animal in the world" in the 2002 Guinness Book of Records. Tales of their fondness for honey and the foraging association between the Greater Honeyguide and honey badgers have reached almost legendary proportions. Despite the wealth of fireside stories and folklore that surround them and their extremely wide distribution, honey badgers are still relatively unknown and seldom seen. Recently (1996-1999) a field study of honey badgers in South Africa revealed more in depth information on their social life, breeding and feeding behaviour, and dispelled some of the myths. Work on honey badgers continues with current projects including genetic research and the "Badger-friendly" initiative.
< /QUOTE >
- honeybadger.com

This is sort of funny.

We saw Semi Pro today. Loved it.

I don't miss tornados, but I do miss Atlanta.
my home town + tornado

Today I watched videos about a creepy gnome, a flashlight gun, and a new dance about riding Marta. While these are all pretty funny, the best of friday came from wikipedia.
If you check out the wikipedia entry for Error, you will see this picture.
this is definitely an error

This is just too funny.

I remember going through an Oracle 8i install a while back and it taking all freaking day. Tonight I downloaded and installed Oracle 10g Express in less than an hour.
I love me some internets.

FletcherVision is in place, but now it has been integrated into Fletch's website. Now you can see his pictures and videos on one website.
Jenn just updated the pictures and I found a new favorite. Here I am with Fletch, working on our next big hit. It's a little Bossa-Ska-HipHop-Lullaby, with some funky bass lines underneath. That's what Flectch likes to dance to.

Watch out groove holmes

I like to rap while skate, just like Ill Mitch.
I am big respect fan for long years time.

I love Full Throttle, but this may be my new energy drink of choice.

Check it out, a mashup that I actually dig.

Here's a simple Flex soundboard with the Arnold prank phone calls.
If you haven't heard these prank calls yet, what are you waiting for? Get flash 9 if you don't already have it, then get ready to LYFAO!

< FLEX >

Launch the arnold soundboard in a new window

< /FLEX >

Jenn and I went to betanightclub.com
It's pretty cool working somewhere that has their own nightclub.

FletcherVision is now open for giggles.

http://youtube.com/fletchervision

< PHOTOSHOP >
Quick and dirty panorama action in Photoshop CS3 Extended.
Here's how to make a panorama picture in under five minutes using Photoshop.

Take some pictures
Open Photoshop Extended CS3
Click File > Scripts > Load files into Stack...
Select Files from the Use: menu, then click Browse to locate your pictures.
Select all of your pictures and click Open.
Be sure to check 'Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images', then click Ok
Let Photoshop do it's magic...
Now you've got your pictures all laid out and ready to be smacked.

Oh yeah! Your pictures laid out panoramic style in under five minutes.
< /PHOTOSHOP >

The novelty of snow has worn off. Christmas Town has closed.

Here is the first Dangermouse I was into. That mouse had a sweet ride.

Somedays I just need a little reminder.

Case of the mondays, then excused of my Jury duties. Good times.

Today was snow. Yesterday was sun and snow.

I rode Keystone for the first time today. Man that was fun. Well, except for the bouncing down the mogules on each major body part. The views and weather were amazing today.

Today I Laughed Out Loud, and I was inspired by Frankie. Tonight I WD40-d a sqweeky door. Man that stuff is good. Now I need to wd40-ize the rest of my doors.

Here's some place you may have seen me before.

< FICKELCHOOK >
So we're watching tonight's Thrashers game, and Jenn summed up the wickedosity of Eric Perrin's shootout move.
"You know what that move is like? It's like the Karate Kid doing the crane kick. Can't stop it. There's no defense"

Classic!

< /FICKELCHOOK >

I miss Trader Vics. I can't wait to check out the new TV in Vegas.

< MUSIC >
James Brown's 'The Funky Drummer' is amazing. Its a groovy little tune that'll get you doing the head bob in no time. The best part of this song comes at 5:32. That's when the magic starts.
This little block of gold is a perfect tune to start playing my favorite game.
"Where'd that sample come from?"
I got into James Brown, and other related funk and soul jazz artists because of rap and hip-hop. I'm fuzzy on the origins of the game, but I wouldn't be suprised if James Brown was the first.
I remember James finding a JB tape on the side of the road. It was so beat up, but still played like a champ. I played the funk out of that tape.
I also remember finding James Brown's Funky People Pt.2 at Media Play in the cheap cassette tape rack. It was $2.00 so I figured it'd be a safe bet.
That tape was probably my all time favorite finds in the cheap racks. You will find a handful of samples on this one as well. Most notably the 'it takes two' quote from this song.