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in my neck of the woods, cableamerica is a provider of cable, internet and internet phone services.  it is one of basically three choices.  however, in my opinion, it is the best.

i jumped on board with them early on and they are a relatively small organization not trying to bite off huge bits of the market — early on they resold at&t broadband basically.  their prices are great, their services is superb (read: responsive, technical, helpful), and their technical service offerings are awesome (no ports blocked, static ips, ‘we don’t care what you do’ mentality, great hd service on tv, etc.).  this has helped in past employment as a remote worker (vpn back into home, various client email settings and not having to change them, etc.) and has been a great experience to me.

now i read that cox is buying cableamerica operations that affect me.  this concerns me for several reasons.  first, change generally scares some people.  it does me to — and i don’t know why.  second, my service level changes concern me.  i have nothing against cox as an organization, but others who have dealt with them and their services haven’t had good things to say.  from the internet service standpoint, i’ve heard nothing but complaints: outages, blocked ports, no “home office” offering (must upgrade to higher priced business class—which is not really any more value), and crappy customer service/response times.  i looked at current pricing and based on all my services, if cox were to take over today i’d be paying more money for less services and perceived quality.  i’m not sure what their HDTV offerings are yet, but their site seems to list some offerings for my area — however friends have also questioned this service quality.

i hope the transition will take into consideration the customer.  but often it doesn’t.  we’ll have to wait and see.  my father just started using qwest high speed and likes it — maybe i’ll have to give them another look…

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okay, so it isn’t really a fix, but should be.

today the team released the SqlTableProfileProvider which modifies the profile storage mechanism from colon-delimited blobs (which provide for challenging backend reporting) to a method where each property is realized as a separate column.

is this the best implementation? maybe not.  a quick look at the docs shows that the table has to be created in advance.  one flexibility thing i love about the providers is just that…the flexibility.  in the out-of-box profile provider you can implement new profile properties at will, and not have to touch the database.  what this new implementation does is better store the data for reporting, however removes that quick flexibility — the table would have to be altered each new profile property.

a good start to better storage of that data though!

one gotcha: data isn’t serialized and must be compatible with the storage type.

go check out the SqlTableProfileProvider and SqlStoredProcedureProfileProvider

also be sure to check out this implementation ASP.NET 2.0 Custom Profile Provider as this is closer (and perhaps great — i haven’t tried it) to what I’d be looking for.  the data may not be as easy to report on as above, but certainly simpler than colon-delimited.

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a new free service from the makers of OnTime and TransferBigFiles.com is now available.

hamid and team have announce Squeet.com in beta form right now. 

from their site:

Squeet is RSS via Email

Squeet provides an easy way to subscribe to any RSS or Atom XML Feed via Email. Such feeds are available on virtually all News, Blog and Entertainment web sites and even many corporate web sites now offer various information via RSS feeds.

No Software to Install!

Since Squeet delivers the content you want into your email InBox, there is no software to install. Just tell Squeet the feeds you want and when you want them and Squeet will email you the feeds based on your schedule.

so visit them now and try it out and give feedback!!!

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in case you haven’t seen, we released (earlier than expected) a patch for the WMF exploit currently getting a lot of news.  this is a “zero day” exploit, so we encourage you to install this update IMMEDIATELY to affected machines.

please see Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06–001

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i’m sitting at a paradise bakery in scottsdale, az waiting for my next meeting (i saw the “free wifi” sign as i drove by and figured i could work and stuff a croisscant in my mouth at the same time).

walk inside, open laptop, connect, browse.

no requirement to visit a special page, no capturing of my email address, etc.

free=free here.

bravo. bravo.