As some of you know I’m a wiffleballer in my spare time. Some would say I’m a professional. I’ve been playing in the HRL: Twin Cities for about 10 years. But my other passion became creating and running its website. Obviously it’s become quite the destination, especially the real-time stats engine.

But it’s also kind of stalled in the past few years. It’s gone through one total rewrite before and I have started another. But it sits dormant on my PC at home. Time has been hard to come by, I’ll take a big part of the blame. But also to be honest, a part of it is that we don’t create as much other content as we used to. People in the league have grown older, don’t have as much time, plus the league is just evolving. Some of those hardcore writers have moved on. So it’s hard to know what to spend time on or how to enhance it where I think I’d like to do so. Plus I wonder what other leagues would want from it. I need a test audience to drive it further.

Which is where this public post comes in: if you run or participate in a wiffleball league out there and would like a site like the HRL’s for your own league, drop me a line. I’m looking at building out what I have with a brand new technology (already started) but also make it more flexible to meet the needs of other leagues. Whether it’s different rules, different scorekeeping, other features you may want, I’m interested in taking what I have and building a product out of it. A website (or sites) that I would host and you would use to enter news, stats, schedules, etc. I would likely charge a fee for use, but anyone who helps in designing it would likely have a reduced or nominal fee.

After I get some replies I will pick, say, 1-3 leagues to help me flush out what needs to be done to what I have, to support all of them at the same time. It’s something I think could take a good chunk of time and would like to tackle this offseason.

I appreciate and will respond to everyone, but if I don’t pick your league don’t fret. I’ll look to keep expanding down the road.

Cheers!

Dee

A co-worker of mine had his cellphone battery ‘die’ over the weekend. The issue was that it suddenly wouldn’t take any charge. When plugged in and turned on, the battery would never go over 1%. Basically, zero charge.

My wife has had a similar issue with her old Elixim camera battery. She wouldn’t use it for long periods of time, as we now have these fancy all-in-one smartphones. When she decided to blow the dust off and try to charge her Elixim in the cradle, the red light would blink. Solid light = charging BTW.

Back then I did a Google search and found quite a few forums scattered throughout the web that mentioned how to use a 9V battery to basically ‘reset’ the Li-ion battery.

Equipment needed:

• a 9V battery
• 2 pieces of wire or a bent paper clip (split into two, make the pieces as straight as possible)

1. Remove your battery from your phone/camera.
2. Place the 9V and Li-ion batteries on a flat surface. You’ll want to line up the + and – terminals on each, so you may need some napkins or a thin book under the Li-ion battery.
3. Connect the + and – terminals of the 9V to the same on the Li-ion battery using the wire or paper clips.
4. Hold for at least a minute. I usually set it for 10 mins to get a good ‘reset’.
5. Plug in your phone.
6. Replace the battery and boot up.
7. Check to make sure it starts taking charge. It may be very slow at first. Let it charge fully.
8. If it doesn’t seem to be working, try the above steps again.
9. If it does work, monitor the battery. It’s not a guaranteed, long-term fix.

I don’t profess to know the reasons or physics behind this, but it seems as tho Li-ion batteries, especially those left with zero charge for a period of time, can reach a state where they refuse to recharge from zero. This will sometimes do the trick and save you the headache of waiting for a new battery.

Let’s hope they never have to try this on the Boeing 787s!

Credit to the interwebs!

For those who have been using the handy Web Essentials 2012 extension for Visual Studio, the LESS features (and some others) have been ported into the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update. Unfortunately the author hasn’t updated the web pages for his extension to share this info directly (hey, he’s a busy guy), but you can find details via his blog.

More of a reminder for myself, as this has happened multiple times. If you try to attach to a database and you get an ‘access denied’ error, be sure to run SSMS as an Administrator. Some posts will also mention that the SQL Server service account needs Modify access to the file/folder. But the former ‘fix’ did the trick this time.

I recently started using SSMS 2012 and man was it slow when connecting to local databases. I thought perhaps it was a byproduct of it being written ‘on top of’ Visual Studio technology.

It turns out it was likely just some slow name resolutions. Be sure to use (local) when referring to the local machine/server. Credit goes to this forum post.

Starting to prep for the brand new Microsoft exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Thanks to the OP for his notes.