"America is an unlikely place - a country built on defiance of the odds; on a belief in the impossible. And I remind you of this because as you set out to live your own stories of success and achievement, it's now your turn to help keep it this way.

It's your turn to keep this daringly radical but unfailingly simple notion of America alive -that no matter where you're born or how much your parents have; no matter what you look like or what you believe in, you can still rise to become whatever you want; still go on to achieve great things; still pursue the happiness you hope for....

You will be tested. You won't always succeed. But know that you have it within your power to try -that generations who have come before you faced these same fears and uncertainties in their own time. And that through our collective labor, and through God's providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other's burdens, America will continue on its journey toward that distant horizon, and a better day."

- Barack Obama US Senator (D) of Illinois speak to the students at the University of Massachusetts at Boston class of 2006.

Some useful information on how Pingback and Trackback work. Might be useful for non-technical people to understand how theses work:
 
A basic explanation on how Trackbacks work:

• Kim Kardashian writes something on Vistaprint her blog.
• A fan wants to comment on Kim's blog, but wants his own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on his own blog
• The fan posts on his  own blog and sends a trackback to the Kim's blog
• Kim Kardashian's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to the Fan's post   

              
A basic explanation on how Pingback works:

• Madonna posts something on her blog.
• A fan posts on his own blog, linking to Madonna's post. (This automatically sends a pingback to Madonna when both have pingback enabled blogs.)
• Madonna's blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to the Fan's post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The MBTA recently added two new super express trains will make it much quicker to get from Boston to Framingham, cutting about 10 minutes off the regular express train.

I took one of the outbound express trains a day after it started. The were plenty of MBTA personal at the Back Bay terminal letting passengers know that next train would be the super express train and that the regular train would be arriving shorly after.

The train itself had fewer cars than other cars during the rush hour commute. There appered to be 2 cars short and none of the cars were double deckers which sit more passengers.

During the commute they counted all the passengers twice, by two different individuals. One was counting the number of passengers in the car and the other the total number of passengers on the train.

I thought there would be more available seating, but I was one of three people in the last car that was standing during the entire commute. I suspect that the train afterwards had more room than normal. There were a lot of people getting off at Framingham, my best guess would be less than half the train got off at the Framingham stop.

There's rumors that the MBTA will add additional express trains later this Fall. Also the Yakee Station should be finished this Fall, and that will adjust the train schedules so that the trains can run a bit more frequent. They had to adjust the schedules last Spring for the construction.

Some big news for those that park at the Pearl Street Garage. From the Framingham Patch:

Officials are discussing a plan with the MetroWest Regional Transit Authority to operate a shuttle bus from the the town's Pearl St. parking garage to the MBTA commuter rail station.

"The hope is that this service together with the fact that we have opened the garage up for free commuter parking will increase its use," Town Manager Robert Halpin said. That in turn will make the parking lot safer for all, he added.

As a long time Macintosh user, one of the applications that I really enjoyed using is BBEdit from Bare Bones software. I have been using this software off and on again since 1997. It's been a critical tool for any text issues that I deal with on the Macintosh. There's a lot of really cool things that you can do with BBEdit. Here's two cool features:

Replacing Text in multiple files is one of the reasons people use BBEdit.  We all have some need to replace text, and more often than not it's with multiple files. Over the past 10+ years, I have found that BBEdit is the easiest way to find and replace text in multiple applications. What's cool is that BBEdit also saves your search/replace so that you can reuse the search pair again. Extremely helpful when I needed to replace Window line breaks with Macintosh line breaks or vice verse.

One of the strong points to BBEdit's simple search and replace is the use of Text Factories. This functionality allows you to perform multiple search and replace at the same time. So if I had 200 files that wanted to replace all the line breaks to UNIX format and change the copyright year to 2013, I can do it in one simple action. BBEdit then shows you a report of the changes that it would perform and allow you to decide to accept all changes. Very cool and very powerful.

In short, BBEdit is a great application and worth the $49.99 price. Your getting an application that can be used for any text functionality that you do on your Macintosh. If you tried the application in the past, I encourage you to try it again.

If your looking for a good opportunity to get a close up picture of an American Bald Eagle, you should visit the Ecotarium in Worcester. You can see a couple of Bald Eagles outside the walkway as you walk into the museum. There are other animals available outside, but the day that I went it was too cold to walk around to see them.

This particular picture I took with my Sony- Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V and zoom in to the head of the eagle. This was easy to do since one of the eagles was sitting on an egg and not moving around as much. The zoom did manage to block out some of the cage netting.

The Ecotarium is located near Route 9 in Worcester and it about a 35 minute drive on Route 9 from Framingham. This is a fun place for families to learn all about the environment and science. There's lots of indoor and outdoor exhibits. I would definitely recommend going during a warm day since there's plenty of things to do outside. For $3 more you can ride the train around the property.

The Ecotarium is eligible under the ACM Reciprocal Network. As of April 1st, the Uniform Reciprocal Benefits changed so that up to 6 people now pay 50% of the cost of the museum. The old benefit had 100% off for 4 people.

I just signed up for the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge 5k race which will run on June 20, 2013. This is the first race that I have done since high school, many many years ago. Over the next few weeks I'll be training to make sure that I have a great race. I am not in it to win the race, just to have a great finish and a fun time on the way.

I just downloaded the 5K Training For Beginners - From Couch To 5k Runner In 8 Weeks Or Less by Jago Holmes, on my Kindle to help me get started on my journey. It's a good investment since I was able to borrow it free since I have Amazon Prime. The reviews and ratings are good. I downloaded the preview and think its a good read for the month.

I'll update this blog on my journey to get to the finish line. I am not taking this race lightly. I want to make sure that the race is fun and that in the process I get into better shape. One other positive side effect is that it will make the morning run to the train station a little bit easier.

Today I encountered the above dialog in Microsoft Outlook 2010 when I was extending a meeting recurrence. This dialog box really confused me and almost prevented me from extending the meeting.

Why would exceptions be thrown? More importantly, shouldn't I know about them, in case I don't want to extend the recurrence of this meeting.

I get it that Microsoft wants to be helpful by showing the dialog box, but I think that they would have added more value to end users by telling me why Exceptions would be thrown and not just automatically ignore them.

Developer Tip: Don't just tell me that an error might be thrown, show me the error and allow me to take action on that.