stevienova.com

A while back (way back in April 2005 - wow they had blogs then?), I posted on how to create your own South Park character, and you know, looking at my referrer logs, this is one of the top queries to get to my site
Today I read on Jeff’s blog about the Simpson Character creator, [...]

The other day, I got an email from US Bank saying I need to login to their site and change my password, funny though, I don’t bank at US Bank. What’s the deal? A “phishing” attempt was made!
Phishing, according to Wikipedia, is: In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques.[1] Phishers attempt [...]

Earlier I blogged about exporting SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) Reports to Excel and keeping formatting. Well, my previous solution works, but not always (doh!)
I found in a new report that I created that the formatting was taking on all columns. The solution? Wrap those expressions in CDec() function and it works. It was for [...]

Congrats to Brad and Sarah on the birth of their daughter early this morning.
Now, who is next, Brye?
Technorati tags: Baby, Kids, Congrats

According to the Census Bureau, Portland is the 31st biggest city in the US with 537,081 people. Kind of interesting.
Via Metroblogging Portland
Technorati tags: Portland, Oregon, PDX, OR, Census, Census Bureau

Yes, it is true. Google Maps sucks. Twice now, I have looked something up, only to be led on a wild goose chase around town. On top of the that, they have less features (in my opinion) than Microsoft Live Maps. Let’s take a look at the debacles:
 
1) Fire on the Mountain
Fire on the Mountain [...]

Named Sets in SSAS 2005 (SQL Server Analysis Services 2005) are a good thing. You can set up named sets for things like “Last 3 months” or “Yesterday” which is really nice for end users. The nature of dates is that you can make the MDX dynamic but yet the named set is still “static”.
You [...]

Since I don’t have cable, I really don’t watch much TV. But every now and then you need some entertainment, and when the Netflix Queue is in the mail, I usually find something online. When I first got to Portland, I crashed at Emily’s for a week, and when I wasn’t Photowalking (hah!!) or out, [...]

to get the instance name: SELECT @@ServerName
to get the machine name of the server: SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(”MachineName”)
to get the machine name of the computer running the query: SELECT host_name()
one tip: cast the serverproperty as a varchar if you want to use it in a string or you will get errors in your stored procs/queries.
Technorati tags: SQL [...]

I think I found a new hobby: Photowalking.
From wikipedia: Photowalking is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things you may find interesting.
I like walking around and just playing with my camera, taking pics here and there of things I think are cool, and hope some [...]