Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

Faith is beautifully defined by Alma as a belief in something which is not seen but which is true. It is also defined as a seed which grows, and takes root because of truth and faith. However I learned something new about faith tonight. I was listening to Glenn Beck give a fireside to our the youth of our stake, and while i was listening I had one of those eureka moments. And this is it: "Faith is a degree of enthusiasm in something." To have faith in something is to be enthusiastic about it. To believe in something, one is moved to act and direct decisions in accordance to faith in a principle. Enthusiasm is both the affect and the effect. So faith is not a passive principle, it is one which requires our activity, else it is not. Faith without works is dead, Faith without enthusasm will never have works.

I was talking to some 15 year old kids the other day and it is weird to think they were born in 1990. They never even knew the 80s! What a shame, what a gold age. Rockin time the 80s, and the 90s even better, too bad for them they couldn't have grown up in the best two decades ever!

In .NET the string class is a special type. It is a hybrid of both a value type and a reference type. A typical reference type is stored on the heap, and a typical value type is stored on the stack. Classes are reference types, for example, Windows.Forms.Textbox Numbers are value types, for example, Integer and Double. Value types are able to be stored on the stack because they have a finite length. Reference types have variable length. So for reference types, .NET keeps a memory reference on the stack to a location on the heap where the actual value is stored. This allows the stack to be very fast and compact while still being able to store large values like a string variable that contains the preamble to the Constitution. An analogy: A comparison to Sqlserver variables is the difference betwnee the char and the varchar data types. The char always has a fixed length, the varchar does not. So the string is a special animal. You can use it without always having to use a constructor. G...

I read a post that had a great idea! This post requested donations to help pay for the blog. I thought sure, why not and I donated a buck and it took less than two minutes to make the donation via my paypal account. Well I thought I'd try it. So here it is my request for donations: To help pay for the Joseph Fluckiger blog, world peace and the unification of string theory, click the "make donation" button below.

It’s amazing what you can find by typing in your name on google. Especially if your name is as unique as Joseph Fluckiger. Of 7 billion people on the planet, there are only a handful of Joseph Fluckigers. By searching on google, you can find, interestingly enough an archive of my race histories throughout my life, including my all-time favorite: a posting of the 1993 state championship team, Mesquite Poteet. Ah the glory days. I think my time was a 16:20 for a distance of 5 kilometers. My best race ever for sure. Scrolling through the results of the search "Joseph Fluckiger" brings up the following: 1993 texas state championship: http://www.uil.utexas.edu/athletics/archives/cross_country/playoff_text/93at_bcc.html 1999 BYU Rex Lee Memorial Run: http://www.runnercard.com/Results/1999/RexLee/RES-MEN.TXT 2004, Tripple threat: http://www.redtrailracing.com/TTT2004_final.html 2006: Venice triathalon http://www.altavistasports.com/results/2006results/venicetriathlon090206.html

I finally found a reliable, concise list of future shuttle launches and their statuses.   http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts116/fdf/manifest.html   It also shows how is on the mission and what is being done.  

I found a bug in the Microsoft Report Viewer 2005 control. When used in LocalMode in an application that does not have a strongName signature, the reportViewer control saves temporary files to IsolatedStorage folder and does not ever delete the temporary files that it creates. So the result of this is that it takes up a lot of harddrive space, about 240k per page of the report. And when a report has 900 pages, this is a problemo. The problem is solved simply by making sure that your application has a strong name key (see the “signing” tab of project properties).   Nevertheless, this untidy habit of not cleaning up after itself caused me a lot of problems, several customer servers where this application is installed almost ran out of hard drive space because of this bug. Not good!     -Joseph  

No, I'm not talking about mouthwash. There are five scopes in Visual Basic.NET Private Friend Protected Public Protected Friend An important thing that I learned about scope in the context of inheritance:It is important that the parent class of a child class be public, otherwise the child class won't be able to be instantiated. There is however, an instance when this is Ok. And that is when a class factory method is available to instantiate the class. A factory method is a static method that instantiates members of a separate class. Another sly nuance exception to scope arrises from nested classes. Private class level variables of a class that is nested within another can be accessed by the parent class. Ah ha! There not so private after all! Kinda like the neighbor who has a view into your living room from theirs. Like my neighbor for example. Singelton class: A class designed such that only one instance of that class exists at any one time. I typically accomplish this in my c...

I've always wanted to create an artificially intelligent software application. So today I have begun this endevor. I have affectionatly named it HAL, after the 2001 Space Odessy HAL. So far it can answer questions like "What will the weather be today." and "Am I pregnant?" My goals in building this program are: Create a program that is intelligent. The criteria for success is that my friend Ilijits Bos will judge this program to be intelligent. If he uses it, interacts with it and after using it says "it is intelligent", then I will have achieved this goal. He will determine his criteria for success at his sole discretion. The only caveat is that I can't bribe him to say yes, or drug him or blackmail him into saying yes. learn new programming techniques In the near future, you will be able to download HAL from Fluckiger.org. HAL will be written in C# .NET, deployed via click-once, and will run as a low-permissions desktop application (security fri...

Durring my road-ride today I bunny-hopped a 3.5 ft black snake.

This is Joseph’s first travel China log from, er Tampa. I was quite heart-broken to arrive and find out that they changed the flight to 6am instead of 10am. I didn’t realized how excited I was to get to China until I heard I was going to have to wait a whole additional day to go to China and see my fam. The other funny thing, is that I will miss my birthday. I will cross the international date line while flying to China, so I will skip ahead 24 hours on September 11th thereby mostly missing my birthday. I leave Detroit at 2:25 pm Central Time Sept 10th and arrive at 8:45 pm Sept 11. Crazy. I guess I’ll just stay 30. I thought it was only possible to miss your birthday if your birthday was on February 29th. But I have now, by fortunate misfortune, found a new way. I will start a stay-young-by-skipping-your-birthday airline. Well, maybe at least they’ll give me special treatment on the flight. One question I hope to answer while I am in China. Perhaps one of the most important questions ...

A relative asked me if I was concerned about identity theft. Anyone in the world can access my blog which has pictures and descriptions of my life. So, I have decided to post this agreement which you must accept before continuing: I promise not to use any information on this blog to steal Joseph Fluckiger's Identity. [I accept] [I decline] Ok, so that's probably as effective as the Microsoft software agreement which no one I know has ever read, not even my dad who is a lawyer. Seriously, identity theft is real and I don't want it to happen to me or you. So I'll tell you what I know about it and how to prevent it and also identify it early so you can mitigate the consequences if it does happen. Identity theft I think can be summed up as: Someone taking out a loan with your social security number . That's it, that is what identity theft is. If someone has a picture of me, or knows what my son's name, or knows that I used WD-40 over a camp fire last summer, it does...

I passed the first test of 3 for my Microsoft MCAD Certification! I passed the test called "Developing Windows Based Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio" yippeee!yahooooo! It has been a longtime goal of mine to get the Microsoft Certification for Programmers, so it is a great personal victory for me to have passed the first test. I didn't actually think that I would pass it, I was taking it to see how hard the test was and how hard I would have to study to pass it because I got a take-it-again-for-free coupon. :) But I did in fact pass it on my first try. I scored a 775, while the minimum score to pass is a 700, so I passed by a margin of 3 questions on a 38 question test. I was certainly happy coming out of the test. Now I think I will stop having those nagging nightmares where I'm in school again and can't find my class. Something that didn't bother me conciously, but something - perhaps in retrospect humerously - that bu...

Last night Michael was having trouble getting to sleep, so I climbed into his crib with him and laid down next to him. Well Michael took this as a sign that it was play time, so he got up and started energetically climbing around the crib. I might have scolded him and asked him to lay back down, but he was just too entertaining. He would nuzzle his face right against mine and slobber on me. Next he stood up and walked around next to my head by holding onto the side of the crib. He was looking for a way out. He is very resourceful and discovered something that might help him escape: my head. So he stepped up onto my head, which really hurt, but I was laughing too hard to do anything about it. I asked him to kindly step off my head, and he did, but then he decided to sit on my head. This made me laugh even more. He did finally get to sleep and I was able to finish watching the winter Olympics. Too fun. Too fun. -Joseph

more pictures of 12hour We won! Yesterday I rode in the 12 hours of Razorback relay-race. It is an off-road, very technical 10.2 mile course. There were four people on our team: Kevin, Damon, Rick and myself. I've been training for this race for several months. The race starts at 10 am and goes to 10pm. The team that gets the most laps in wins. Our team completed 14 laps, I was the 3rd leg and rode 3 of the 14 laps. It was a very exciting race. We were in 2nd place most of the day, down by as much as 7 minutes. That is until the 11th lap, which was my turn. Our team number was 418, and the team that was in first place was 410. So I was waiting at the starting line for my teammate to pass off the baton to me. The 3rd leg guy from team 410 was right there too and I was talking with him. We had both ridden the same times all day. His guy came through, and 5 minutes passed. My guy came through and I took off as fast as I could. By this time it was night and so I was racing around with ...

Welcome to my Blog. My goal in writing this blog is to make the world a better place. Well something like that, at least I hope to share some stories from my life and you'll enjoy, and also I think it's pretty cool to have a blog. :) Happy reading, -Joseph Fluckiger