Modifying pre-existing WordPress themes...  That's my extent of PHP programming.  I got to thinking that it would be cool to turn my weather site into a regular WordPress blog and somehow incorporate the data that I currently have into some sort of theme.  All of my historical data is stored in a SQL Server database, while forecast and current conditions data is stored in XML. I did some searching on PHP with SQL Server and came across the blog for the Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team.  Who knew such a team existed?  From there I found a link to an article on MSDN, "Accessing SQL Server Databases with PHP".  Exactly what I was looking for. So, in the coming days I plan to explore PHP territory.  I've used .NET for all of my web programming.  We'll see what kind of learning curve I run into. What is your favorite language for the web?

Jim Souhan did a nice article on Dick Jonckowski in today's Star Tribune. Dick has been a figure in Minnesota sports for some time including the Vikings, Gopher Baseball and Gopher Basketball. He's only the 2nd announcer to ever take the mike at Williams Arena.

For those of you that don't know Dick, he's got a great radio voice and unique personality. He's the current PA announcer for Gopher Basketball and Baseball. He's also got a lot of passion for the games he calls and has shown up over the last several years for his reading of "The Night Before Christmas" as part of my niece's Christmas dance recital.

I had the opportunity to coach against him in American Legion baseball several years ago when he assisted his son, Jeff, in running the Shakopee ballclub and I was coaching Prior Lake. Always joking around and had plenty of stories. He's a class act.

You can also see some of Dick's favorite memories here.

[caption id="attachment_188" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="My MacBook Pro"][/caption] I use my MacBook Pro for both business and personal. At home, I try to use the Mac side as much as possible while still running a Windows Vista virtual machine at the same time for development stuff. When I'm at work, all I run is Vista from my virtual machine on the MacBook and then iTunes in the background from the Mac side.I was getting ready for a conference call last Thursday. I closed my MacBook and with that in tow, I headed for one of the conference rooms. When I got to the room, I opened my lid and to my surprise my screen didn't come right back on like it usually does. I power cycled it ... still no screen. After my call I went back to my desk and plugged into my external LCD display ... nothing. Granted my Time Machine backup was current, so that wasn't a concern, but what is wrong and how am I going to fix it? My buddy Jim at work, who is a Mac guru tried all the secret keyboard handshakes as I watched in disbelief, still trying to figure out how this was going to get fixed. Whatever Jim did, the screen came back and worked for the rest of the day. But then came Friday morning. I hit the power button as I arrived at work. Again, no display. I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out my Dell laptop, what I consider to be my reserve... The "break glass in case of emergency" laptop. This and webmail would have to get me through the day. I did some quick searching and discovered a tech article from Apple on display distortion and video card problems relating to a malfunctioning NVIDIA video card. The real problem here was my MacBook was 14 months old. Essentially past the one year warranty period. Others who had video problems mentioned a $310 minimum charge. I went to the Apple Store at Southdale. They put it through a few tests and figured out it was related to the graphics card and that had to be replaced. The good news ... It was covered under their "Quality Service" program. Even though I was out of the warranty period, I was still going to get my repair at no charge. They told me it would take 1-2 days. No big deal. It was the weekend. I'd have it before today. At 5 PM Friday, the Apple Store called me and said it was fixed and ready to be picked up. What service. I can honestly say that my experiences with Apple have been nothing but positive. The moral of the story? AppleCare, Apple's warranty program covers a product for a total of 3 years (1 year included with the product, AppleCare extends that an additional 2 years). It costs you about $300 for that warranty on the MacBook Pro and has to be purchased before the end of the first year. I didn't do that. The guy at the Apple Store told me that same repair when not under warranty is $310. If you have it done in-store, it is closer to $600. Ouch. $300 seems like a lot up front, but this case alone has convinced me that next time I will purchase the AppleCare. You may never need it, but it takes one repair like this to make it all worthwhile.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a story about virtualized performance where I did a comparison between VMware Fusion and Sun's VirtualBox.

I wanted to update that story to include some details on Windows performance when Parallels is added to the mix.

Interestingly enough, Parallels really isn't that much further behind Fusion in terms of average boot time. To be precise, the difference is about .8 seconds between the two. Probably not that noticeable to the average user.

It comes down to features in that case. I also think there is a lot to be said about the stability of Fusion given VMware's years of experience and product maturity.

This will be a very important year in the Parallels development cycle. We'll see what they have up their sleeves.