Read this article: http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/02/03/hsa-healthcare-insurance-cx_jh_0203hsa.html

I highly recommend everyone who has to pay for their own health insurance (and even for those who don't) to look into HSAs. Reading this article you can see it's putting the pressure on the behemoth, money-grubbing, satanic insurance and drug companies. Go consumer-driven healthcare!

Finally someone did one: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/02/WickedCode/.

What I want to see is one done in ODBC so it can be used for Oracle or Access or a text file or whatever....anyone aware of such a beast?

I made a screwup with the Login control today under ASP.Net 2.0. I was using an ODBC membership provider for all the back-end logic, and drug a login control to the page. The problem, though, was that I then double clicked the control and it added an event-handler for authentication:

Protected Sub Login1_Authenticate(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.AuthenticateEventArgs) Handles Login1.Authenticate
End Sub

I then created a user using the appropriate controls and tried to login using those credentials; alas, it didn't work. The event handler above got executed, but the membership provider I had registered in the web.config file did not. What happened? As it turned out, having the authenticate event handler above short-circuits the default operation of the login control to hook into the membership provider internals for authentication; and so it just did nothing with it. After deleting the authenticate method (which equates to removing the delegate from the multicast chain) everything worked.

In summary:

1) I added a Login control,
2) Created an Authenticate event handler,
3) The act of creating the event handler short circuited the default operation of the Login control to use the Membership class and its infrastructure.
4) Removing the Authenticate event handler got the Membership class to be used again, and everything worked as expected....

...I'm retarded (and not ashamed to publicly admit it).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/00/ASPNET20Overview/

This article does not go deep into the details (which is the very point), but it does give a great overview of the new technologies that have come out in ASP.Net 2.0. I wish I had seen this about three or four months ago....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vstchExtensibilityArticles.asp?frame=true

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/esk3eey8(en-US,VS.80).aspx

*growl*. Well, unbeknownst to me the full schema for the asp.net website config file is located in the install for Visual Studio 2005 (I had started laying out a basic one - not the full DTD - for something I wanted to write). Anyway, if you want to take a gander at it, look under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\xml\Schemas\. The file is called DotNetConfig.xsd.

For those interested in cycling, and especially for those interested in cycling without a lot of spare room (or change) I would highly recommend the Cycleops bike trainers. They hitch your bike up on a cyclinder (see the picture below) and allow you to spin on it with variable resistance. My particular one uses earth magnets, though there is one level up from this that uses a fluid system. Cheaper ones use wind.

I own a house, but when I lived in an apartment I would have loved to have known about this. It's by far a better workout than any stationary I've ever used; and you get to use the bike you'd normally ride on (so you don't have to readjust to the new feel of the bike when summer hits). Greatest purchase, short of the bike, that I've made for my own training.

You can read more about them here.

I have used this page a lot in the past couple days and am posting it here for my own reference (and for others).