Sunday, March 16 Q&A

How is Claire?
I haven't head any new medical news. I did hear that she walked to the ice machine. I don't know how far that is, but it's not the sort of thing I expect is right next to her bed. So that's more good news.

How is Harrison?
No barfing last night. He still has a fever today but reports that he feels much better.

How are you?
No worse, which suggests to me I'm going to dodge this.

What is a typical reaction of a three year-old to having her Mommy out of town for a few days?
Incessant talking and asking questions (i.e. Chatterboxism). It can be quite distracting from doing ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL.

Is she talking to you right now?
Huh? Oh, yes. Yes she is.

I'm trying to use Visual Studio 2005 to create an ASP.NET form that UPDATEs a record in a large-ish SQL Server 2005 database through an ObjectDataSource control. I keep getting an error. What's going on?
This is a quirk (arguably: bug) of the ObjectDataSource that will occupy hours of your precious development time. For some reason, in order to get this to work reliably you have to set the primary key to editable both in the database and in the user interface(!!). That's a bad, bad idea. You may be able to get it to work by Googling around for a hack that involves manually editing the ObjectDataSource and manually setting some properties. But if this is just a one-off form, I recommend using a SqlDataSource instead and being done with it. What you give up in multi-tier best practice you'll regain in reliability. Hopefully this problem will go away with LINQ.

My wife recently bought one of those Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaners. Those things don't actually work, do they?
To my amazement ours does seem to be working for us. We have well water with a water softener and a rather forgiving shower enclosure with glass doors, so your mileage may vary.

It almost seems like my shaving mirror is getting usable again since we started using this device, but I didn't think it sprayed that high. To check, I'm thinking of peeking in at the device while it works, being careful to open the shower door only while the nozzle is spraying the other direction. What do you think?
I would recommend not doing that. The little sprayer rotates a lot faster than you think, so when you slide open the door and peek inside, instead of forbidden Scrubbing Bubbles knowledge you will just get shower cleanser sprayed in your eyes.

Is it caustic?
Mildly.

So do you think it is spraying my mirror?
Surprisingly I do have an answer to that. Considering the mirror is lower than eye level, it must be.

What is the state of the house with Sarah out of town?
Don't ask. I can report that the shower is quite clean.

As long as you're sitting at the computer, shouldn't you be programming?
Oh, yeah. Gotta go.