Rudyard Kipling The Heritage Our Fathers in a wondrous age, Ere yet the Earth was small, Ensured to us a heritage, And doubted not at all That we the children of their heart, Which then did beat so high, In later rime should play like part For our posterity. A thousand years they steadfast built, To 'vantage us and ours, The Walls that were a world's despair, The sea-constraining Towers: Yet in their midmost pride they knew, And unto Kings made known, Not all from these their strength they drew, Their faith from brass or stone. Youth's passion, manhood's fierce intent, With age's judgment wise, They spent, and counted not they spent, At daily sacrifice. Not lambs alone nor purchased doves . Or tithe of trader's gold-- Their lives most dear, their dearer loves, They offered up of old. Refraining e'en from lawful things, They bowed the neck to bear The unadorned yoke that brings Stark toil and sternest care. Wherefore through them is Freedom sure; Wherefore through them we stand, From all but sloth and pride secure, In a delightsome land. Then, fretful, murmur not they gave So great a charge to keep, Nor dream that awestruck Time shall save Their labour while we sleep. Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year, Our fathers' title runs. Make we likewise their sacrifice, Defrauding not our sons.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

I had a hard time trying to decide whether I should post this in the database side of things or the vb.net. This is coming from a vb.net 3.5 application connecting to a SQL Server 2008 database. We currently have this application on 50 different SQL Servers though all of these other ones are SQL Server 2000/2005. This section of a code comes from a routine where we are validating that the database exists and makes sure that it is up to date. By this point we have already validated that the connection string (strADOConnString) is valid and that we can connect to the server. When we run this section of code where we check for the database name in the server the only difference between this and our normal connection string is that we are looking at the "master" database instead of our database. This section of code blows up with the "Failed to connect to server" error message. I've validated that the user does have the proper permissions on this server and this is further verified by our ErrHandler routine which writes the error to the database using the strADOConnString. I've tested this locally using SQL Server 2008 and have had no issues. They have tested this using the SA account leading me to suspect that it is not a simple permissions issue. I've made sure that they can logon to SQL Server Management Studio with this user with no pop ups and I've made sure that they can connect to the server through an ODBC with this particular SQL user. What else could be causing this error? Dim strADOConnStringMaster As String = strADOConnString strADOConnStringMaster = strADOConnStringMaster.ToString.Replace("Initial Catalog=" & objSystem.DatabaseName & ";", "Initial Catalog=master;") Try Dim connection As New SqlConnection(strADOConnStringMaster) server = New Server(New ServerConnection(connection)) bDbExists = server.Databases.Contains(objSystem.DatabaseName) connection.Close() Catch ex As Exception strStep = ".STEP01" Call ErrHandler(_moduleName & strStep, _className, String.Format("Server defined in database configuration does not exist. Message:{1}.", lDBVersion.ToString, Err.Description), Not bCmdLine) If Not bCmdLine Then MsgBox("Unable to locate server defined in database configuration.", MsgBoxStyle.Critical) End If Exit Sub End Try

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

I rarely wear shoes, even at work, but it depends on the weather. Been lots of snow on the ground so have mostly been wearing boots.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

Ouch that is bad. I've never had to deal with that at work at all, but had something similar in college. First of all we had to do a project in COBOL and CICS and so it was a real pain anyway. We had a group of 6 that had to work together. Of the 6 we lost one because he was failing a different class. That wasn't too bad as he was one who would miss school every week due to the death of one grandparent or another. It was a little bit hard to be sympathetic after the 10th grandparent died in a row. We lost another guy because of a major back injury. Another guy had his appendix burst and had to be rushed to the hospital. The fourth guy broke an elbow on one arm and the wrist on the other while playing basketball. The fifth guy had one arm amputated after suffering severe frostbite. I got off light. The worst that happened to me that semester was a car accident on the interstate that I was able to walk away from. The truck totaled my car, but I was all right. We made it through, but it was rough.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

I am really looking forward to it since I'll be driving through it tomorrow after work. I just really hope that they won't be closing I29 like I've heard speculation about.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

You got my five on that.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

That ought to be interesting. I'll be heading to the KC one, but not until the first weekend in October.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

Lincoln here.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

We had a cat and a dog growing up. The cat was an abandoned farm cat that we picked up when visiting our grandfather's farm. She kept jumping in our van and no matter how many times we removed her. She wouldn't get out until we got home. We had her for about 12 years. She had an incredibly loud purr and loved people. Our dog was part of an abandoned litter of 9 puppies that we heard about from some cousins. We got the runt of the litter and had her for about 15 years. Even our friends who didn't like dogs, liked our dog. The only real problem we had with her, was her abandonment issues if we were ever gone for more than half an hour.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

For some reason Tommmy by Rudyard Kipling has been on my mind a lot today and I have no clue as to why. It has been nice to read through the comments though and see no attacks on the Armed Forces. I know that my friends and family in the Armed Forces have generally pointed to Navy or Air Force as first choice even though most have been in the Army or Marines. As I have no children, I'll refrain from any advice on over-protectiveness, but as a son I hated my mom's constant worrying and valued the encouragement.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

That is awesome. I sent the picture to a friend who has five cats and for some reason he didn't see the humor in it.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

No clue about the numbers, but I am one of the many lurkers. I enjoy the banter and some of the articles, but rarely have anything to contribute.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

It is funny that you say that though. My sister-in-law has Japanese ancestry and three of their kids have blond hair and blue eyee, but the fourth has black hair and brown eyes. Most people don't think that they are all brothers and sisters.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

My family has talked about doing something similar at least with the large house all together. Unfortunately we've not been able to get jobs in the same city and most of us aren't even in the same state. If nothing else we can all retire out on the family farm. After I graduated college I ended up living with my parents for about two years. At first it was to pay off college debt (my parents couldn't help as I was the fourth kid) and save up a bit, but afterward it was to help my parents out when my dad lost his job.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

For the most part I've not had too many problems with it, but two things do stand out in my mind. The first is that even when logged in as an admin I couldn't modify some files in my user folder without monkeying around with it a bit. That was pretty simple to fix so it was only a minor annoyance. The second is that I am a gamer. I have a wide range of games that I like to play from DOS based games to games made within the past few months. I've had several games (new and old) crash on me regularly in Vista in which I had no problems with in XP. I know that it is not entirely a Vista issue, but when it does happen I think longingly of my XP machine which unfortunately needs to be fixed right now. Aside from those I've been content with Vista. I don't always like having to find stuff again, but my Vista experience hasn't been too bad.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

They were one of the Norse/Viking countries, and while I cannot comment on any of the unofficial cousins that I may have had from those years, I do know that when they came to the States the immigrant groups tended to stick together for the most part. In rural areas that is still pretty much true even today.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

My dad is a pure Swede, but I can't claim it for myself. Then again my family hasn't been over here all that long. It has been only about 5 generations unless you count my nieces and nephews.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

The company that I work at does a lot of custom software and I can't think of a single project that I've worked on that hasn't had some change in the business logic after we installed it. Of course it is a "bug" in their eyes even though we did what they told us to do, but it is no longer a frustrating thing. It is just something to deal with and somewhat expected.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

d@nish wrote:

Too ahead of my times. Stuck with VB6.

Sometimes I wish that was as low as we went. I may have to work on another MS Access project in the near future. Luckily those tend to be rare. I've only had to do maintenance one in the many years that I've been here.

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.

How is asking a question a lie or falsity? That doesn't make sense to me. I'll try to explain my reasoning though. If we look at the number "2" we recognize that is a symbol representing a pair of something. What if we didn't agree on the value of this symbol. What if I thought it had a value of 1, you thought it had a value of 3, another individual thought it had a value of 6 and so on and so forth. If we try to add "2" and "2" together we are each going to get a different result that is right in our own mind and wrong in the others. If it doesn't actually have a value then there is no right or wrong answer. Say we as a society say that the value of "2" is actually 4. We go from there and build different stuff based on that equation, but then several generations later they believe that the value of "2" is actually 5 instead of 4 and they try to interpret what we've done based on that and it completely screw up every calculation they try taking from us because our standards are different. When it comes to right and wrong if it isn't based on some standard then it is completely useless save as a whim of ours. If the standard is solely society as a whole then it will constantly shift and change and have little meaning save as a means of telling us what society wants us to do or not do. Maybe I didn't explain it well and maybe I'm simply confused (which happens plenty). Honestly though, if there is no god, what is right and wrong?

Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.