One of my favorite summer activities is kayaking.  Not only is it great exercise and a neat way to see nature, my wife and I seem to get a similar work-out because she is quite a bit lighter than I am, thus she uses less effort to go just as fast as I do. 

Unfortunately, I typically find that within a half-hour of kayaking, my lower back really aches.  It aches to the point that the finishing my kayak trip sometimes becomes more of a chore than a pleasure.   I found what I think could very-well be the reason for all this pain from a user named Jed on KayakForums.com:

This may not apply in your case but some people experience back pain that is caused by hyper-extension of the lower back. Tight hamstring muscles can prevent the pelvis from rotating forward far enough to allow the lower back to maintain it's natural curve. Constant extension of the lower back then leads to sometimes significant discomfort.

An easy test for this is to sit in your boat with your normal posture and try to rotate your pelvis forward as far as you can by trying to push your belly button out towards your knees. This will contract the muscles of the lower back, rotate the pelvis forward and move the whole torso forward somewhat. If the natural curve of the lower back returns when you do this, then tight hamstrings / bad posture may be the culprit.

This type of aggressive posture does more than just relieve some types of lower back pain, it also pulls the back away from the seat back / back band and allows the paddler to balance naturally with the torso slightly forward of vertical. By returning the pelvis and the lower back to a more natural posture, torso rotation is greatly enhanced which then leads to more power from your stroke.

Lastly this posture greatly enhances the paddlers ability to work the extreme ends of the boat especially the forward quadrants and nearly eliminates reliance on any type of back support. I suspect the latter is something the back band manufacturers and sellers would prefer we did not know.

As a bicyclist who has the naughty habit of not stretching before each ride, my hamstrings are typically very tight.  Reaching my toes is nearly impossible!  I’ve always told myself that I should really integrate stretching into my fitness regimen, so perhaps now is the time to start.

Well, if you’ve owned the Motorola MPx220 SmartPhone for any length of time, you know it has its fair share of bugs.  Sometimes you might be convinced that a hard-reset is the only solution to some of the phone’s problems. According to a post on the Microsoft.public.smartphone newgroup, this is how you reset the phone:

To do a hard reset, hold down the round blue button while turning it on. It will then ask if you want to reset it Make sure you remove the SD and sim cards to make sure they won't get wiped-out. Some have said it will wipe both cards if inserted, but others say it's only the sim card that gets reset. I just pull them both to be sure.

Although I have to tinker with SQL, I’m no DBA.  Upon doing some research for an up-coming project, I discovered the Templates folder in Microsoft SQL Server 2000’s Query Analyzer.  However, there was a problem… even though I installed the templates, they didn’t show-up in the Query Analyzer Object Browser L

See all the pretty + boxes next to each folder in the image below (indicating that each folder contains templates)?  I didn’t have any of those… only the folders were appearing.

After racking-my-brain to figure-out what search words to use to find help on this problem, I found the problem: Query Analyzer won’t display template query files that are compressed with NTFS Compression.

To fix this, I had to turn-off NTFS Compression on each .tsql file.  To turn-off NTFS Compression:

• To open My Documents, double-click the My Documents icon on your desktop.
• You can also right-click a file or folder and then click Properties.
• To change properties for archiving, indexing, compression, or encryption on NTFS drives, right-click the file or folder, click Properties, click Advanced, and then select the options you want to change.

FireFox is nice and all, but I work for a ‘Microsoft Shop’, so it doesn’t do me much good to browse the ‘Net on a Mozilla-based browser.  Yet, we all know that Internet Explorer is nearly become a dinosaur.

Well, there’s a bit of hope (and it’s free!)  I recently downloaded the Avant Browser which is basically a wrapper for Internet Explorer.  Some of the nifty features include:

·         Flash Animation Filter (Yippee! Block those annoying Flash ads.)

·         Built-in Pop-up Blocker

·         Multi-Window Tabbed Browsing

·         Real Full Screen Mode and Alternative Full Desktop mode

·         Built-in Yahoo/Google Search Engine

·         Full IE Compatibility

·         Records Cleaner

·         Safe Recovery

·         Skins

There certainly are other browsers like the Avant Browser, but I found that this one works best for my needs.

In case you didn’t already know, you can run SQL scripts right within Visual Studio.NET which is much nicer than having to fire-up Query Analyzer all of the time.  This tutorial assumes you already know what a Database project is in Visual Studio.

Instructions:

The first thing you must do is create a Database Reference in your database project. In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, open the database project and right click on the Database References folder.  Select New Database Reference… and the following window should pop-up:

If the database you’d like to connect to is not listed, click Add New Reference… and you will be prompted to setup a connection to the database of your choice.  Items are added to this list via the Server Explorer. 

You can add several database references to a project.  I would suggest making a reference to your local, development SQL database and one to the live web server’s SQL database.

Once the database you’d like to connect to is listed in the Add Database Reference list, select it and click OK.  You notice that this reference is now listed under the Database Reference section in the Solution Explorer:

If you have several databases listed, you can right-click on the one you want as the default (usually your local SQL database) and select Set as Project Default.

To run a SQL Script against a selected database, right-click one of the SQL scripts stored in the database project and select Run On…  You’ll be prompted with a window like this:

Select the database you’d like to run the script against, click OK, and the script runs!  Hopefully you’ll find this a useful and time-saving tip J

Don’t you hate it when you complain about a program not being able to do something, then you realize the program could do exactly what you wanted but you were too dumb to know how to use it correctly?   Well, for me, this is the case with Visual Studio.NET’s Copy Project utility.   I’ve tried it before in the past, but never got it to work right so I just manually copied projects from my development machine to the live web server.  Duh.

When configured correctly, the Copy Project utility copies whatever you want to the live web server, the most useful feature being the ability to copy over only the essential files required for running the app.

Instructions:

In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, select the project that you would like to copy project, then browse to Project > Copy Project…

You should be prompted with a window that looks like this:

For the Destination project folder, it should be the full URL path to your site’s virtual directly.  That may be http://localhost/someproject or a fully qualified domain name like  http://my.domain.com/... It all depends if you’re copying to a virtual directory on your dev machine or a web site on a live web server.  Obviously you should insert the path to the file-share on your machine that connects to the live web server.  Apparently a mapped drive or UNC path will work.

Select Only files needed to run this application from the Copy section.   This prevents .vb, .resx, and other non-essential files from being copied to the web server.

You may be prompted with a warning stating that the Virtual directory could not be created… just click OK.  You will then be prompted with this:

Check Apply to all items and let VS.NET copy all the files to the live web server.