I spent 4 hours driving to and from Bowling Green yesterday to spend 2 hours watching BG make sure the Midwest Championship Trophy stayed in Bowling Green with a Minnesota 33 - 5 route of Minnesota.

BG took full advantage of having the 40 mph wind at their back in the first half to go up 25 to 0. If anyone has video of that Gopher gettin hit in the face with the ball, please send it my way. kthnx.

A Christian guy does a really good job of pointing out how rediculous it is to be a Creationist.

The train set around the Christmas Tree just isn't going to have the same luster anymore after watching this.

I thought about getting a couple of the monsters and Max from Where the Wild Things Are tattood on me somewhere. But now that they are making movie based on the book, it kinda takes away some of the novelty. Oh well, I still get The Very Hungry Catepillar and all the food he ate through inked on me.

Awesome Mario Video Nice job Guys

Today is the first day registration is open for the Columbus leg of the Crawl For Cancer.

I did it last year and it was a blast.  The $40 per person registration fee gets you a tee-shirt and about 2 pitchers of beer. Plus its for a good cause.

Sign up here.

So with the weather getting better, I thought it was time that I should get a cornhole set.  But rather than pay $100 for a plain white set with bags, I decided make my own.  I still bought the bags, trying to make those myself wouldn't be worth the time.  A quick Google search led me to www.woodgamz.com.  WoodGamz is in Dublin, Ohio and I had bought bags from them before - they are friendly and have a great selection of colors - as well as scorekeeping posts, koozies and what not.  Plus - why not support the local business around here?  If you need a cornhole set and don't want to go through the trouble of building your own, I highly suggest picking your set up from them.

BTW, these instructions will get really close to the official cornhole set dimensions which can be found here. 

After WoodGamz it was off to Home Depot to get the building materials.  All together, the cost for the materials was about $35.  The bags were $30.  So all together, this is going to cost you about $60-$70.

• 32 feet of 2x4s
• 2 2 foot by 4 foot planks for the faceboards (NOTE: Use something hard and sturdy to reduce bang when bags hit the board)
• Wood screws, some small ones and some larger ones ( to bind the corners together )
• 4 4inch or slightly larger 5/8" carriage bolts ( for the back legs ) and 4 wingnuts.

Of course, you'll also need a bunch of tools.  Including:  Jig Saw, Power Drill (couple drill bits, as well as Philips head bits ), Circular/Table saw.

1.) Cut 4 4 foot 2x4s and 4 21 inch 2x4s.  Wear protective glasses.  And gloves.  I don't like missing eyes or dirty hands.

2.) Use some small tacks to hold the 2x4s in place.

3.) Screw the long sides to the face board.  Drill some pilot holes for the wood screws.  Don't want to split any of the wood.

4.) Screw the short sides to the long sides.  Again, pilot holes...

5.)  Back legs.  I cut 4 10inch 2x4s.  Then drill 2 holes in the leg (1/2 inch).  One one-inch from the end, another about 3 inches.  This will allow you to change the height later if need be.  Smart, huh?

6.) Prep the board for the legs.  I drilled the hole 1 inch up and almost 5 inches from the end of the board:

7.) Put the carriage bolt through the holes and fasten the wingnut into place.  

Your Cornhole set is almost complete:

8.)  Prep the board for the hole.  The opening should be 6" in diameter and the center of the hole should be 9" from the top of the board.  Mark the board in the center, 9" from the top.  I tied some tape around a pen and nailed it to the center, with the pen reaching 3 " away, then just draw the circle using your pivot.

9.) Use a bigger drill bit and drill a hole somewhere in the middle of the circle so you have a starting point for the jig saw

10.) Take your time cut around the circle you drew.  Throw some paint on there and think about what theme you want to go with.  I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I'll put up a post when I figure it out.

I was able to get this all done in about 2 hours.  Having all the right tools and knowing how and when to use them helps a lot.  Good Luck!

Getting to the end of my rope with multiple instances with chained msi's with InstallShield, I might try to set up a script to edit the child msi file directly on multiple instance installs.

Gonna try to use Orca to do this.  Orca is bundled with the Microsoft SDK (in the bin folder).

But when double-clicking the Orca.msi file, when clicking Next on the license agreement screen, I get a pop-up window with the message:

 "Please wait while the installer finishes determining your disk space requirements."

I let it go for about 10 minutes before giving up.  You can get passed this by calling the msi from the command line: msiexec /i orca.msi

 

That's right.  The MSI editor Microsoft gives you is (kinda) impossible to install.  Fuck my life.

I could probably have the whole theme of my blog be about the little "gotchas" with InstallShield.

This little guy cost me at least a day or two of troubleshooting. 

When calling a chained MSI and passing the parameters, specifically, INSTALLDIR from a parent installer to child, you must put double quotes around the parameter value.  I assume this is because there are spaces in the path, which is the case every time you are installing to Program Files directory.  Little things like this take forever to figure out and InstallShield doc is usually not very much help.

InstallShield has a very good white paper out there, but it fails to mention this.  The event log wasn't much help.  "Failed to end a Windows Installer transaction.  Error 5 occurred while ending the transaction."  Oh yea, error 5.  Duh.