adventures of a tired coder

Well, I mentioned MicroNewsAds in an earlier entry, and I made my big Seattle purchase from an ad in that site! No, not a llama. A few weeks ago, I saw a listing for a rather nice Clavinova on CraigsList for $800, but it was only being offered for so little money because the guy was moving practically the next day, and there was no way I could pick it up in time. Ever since then, I've been browsing the musical instruments listings on both sites more carefully, and I came across a listing in MicroNewsAds for a slightly cheaper Clavinova model (CLP-123), asking for $1100. That was still a pretty good deal, but I put in an offer for $800, just to see if he would take it. He did. So I went to his apartment to check it out over the weekend, got two strong male friends and a truck together, and now it's happily resting in my apartment.


That isn't the picture of the actual piano or of my apartment, but it's what that model looks like, minus the stupid stickers and clutter on top.

So I'm happy about that. Finally have a (digital) piano I can play on! After we moved it yesterday, I went through my boxes and dug out some music to play. The keys feel a lot like the piano I'm used to at home, since they're both Yamahas, and while there's still a noticable difference between this and a "real piano," it doesn't bother me enough to make me not want to use it. It's still somewhat heavy (about 120 lbs), but I figure anyone who can move my couch can move that thing, so it won't be extra effort if I have to move from my apartment.

About two weeks ago, three friends and I went on a weekend trip to the Olympic Peninsula, and we had a great time. We briefly thought about postponing the trip because in true Seattle fashion, it randomly began to rain on Friday, but Saturday and Sunday were clear and gorgeous. Our plans for tent camping changed, but we ended up being able to stay at a friend's cabin, which turned out to be a rather nice family vacation home on lakefront property. Some of the highlights of the trip included Rialto Beach, the Hoh Rainforest, Port Townsend, and Fort Wordon. One of my friends on the trip grew up in Port Townsend, so he knew the whole area pretty well and took us to where the good food was, etc. There's still so much to do there that we didn't get around to, so hopefully there will be a second trip in the future. Pictures to follow once I dig up my electronics bag and find my card reader.

Well, since work seems to be occupying quite a chunk of my life, I suppose it's worth spending a little time talking about it, now that I'm more settled in and have a better concept of what I'm supposed to be doing here.

First, I guess, a little bit more about my controls. Currently, I have three controls that I "own," all of them data-related. I started out with the GridView control, which is new to ASP 2.0. Next, I got the legacy DataGrid control from ASP 1.x (GridView is the new version of DataGrid. They render similarly, but GridView allows the user to do things with a whole lot less code). Finally, I got DetailsView, another ASP 2.0 control that is similar to GridView, except it only shows one record at a time.

Some screenshots that I took from one of the Microsoft articles (I'm not responsible for the poor quality):


This is what the GridView control looks like on the design surface. Tasks like paging and sorting can easily be done with the click of a checkbox; formerly on the DataGrid, you would have to write the code behind that functionality.


This is what the DetailsView control looks like rendered, in both ReadOnly mode (left) and EditMode (right).

More about all of this can be found at www.asp.net. The v1.x tutorials are pretty good, and there are also some beta docs available for v2.0.