Benoit Update

Yesterday, my favorite professional wrestler was found dead in his home.

Yesterday, I was sad.

Today, I am pissed.

It appears that Chris Benoit killed his wife and son over the weekend, and then himself on Monday. It's not confirmed yet, but it's a safe bet that that's what happened.

Chris Benoit was one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. Period. This is a legacy that cannot be taken from him. One would be foolish to try.

Chris Benoit is most likely a murderer. Period. He killed his wife, kids, and self. This is a legacy that could have been avoided, but is now his. No human can take that away from him. One would be foolish to try.

If you did this, Benoit, damn you.

Last night, CM Punk and Edge cried openly on the air. Steve Austin, John Cena, Chavo Guerrero, Jr., and Dean Malenko told you how much they loved you. Those were just some of the examples...

And now, that is all meaningless. You have tarnished the legacy of everything good in professional wrestling and strengthened the legacy of everything bad in it.

Thanks for the memories, Chris Benoit. I hope that one day I can enjoy them again.

Chris Benoit (1967-2007)

Chris Benoit, his wife, Nancy (who performed as Woman), and son, Daniel, were found dead today in their Atlanta home. That's all I know...I'm no news dude. Chris was 40 years old.

Those that know me know that Chris Benoit has been my favorite wrestling performer since 1995, when he became a member of the Four Horsemen in WCW. I'll be watching WWE Raw tonight...which is no longer about Mr. McMahon's fake death. Hopefully they'll drop that crap tonight.

My prayers are with the Benoit family.

Tools

First off, mea culpa. I have been silent for quite a while, and I have not been as forthcoming on technical topics here as I intended. Blah.

I am sitting in a hotel ballroom in Dublin OH listening to typical (but pretty good) nerd conference fare on a Sunday morning. I thought I would share some of my notes here, mainly for self interest.

Automation.... It is both obvious and worth repeating that your computer is awesomely well suited at doing stupid, menial, repetitive tasks. Your job as human is to tell it what you want repeated!

AutoHotKey : key macro recorder / playback tool for Windows http://www.autohotkey.com/

CLCL : Windows clipboard expando-ricfica. You don't realize it yet, but your system clipboard is horribly inefficient because it can only hold one thing at a time - one block of text, one picture, etc. Go fix it: http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html

Pipes : Yahoo pipes is an automation tool for the web.... http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/


In the Category of Other, Useful, Miscellaneous:
dBDeploy : ThoughtWorks database deployment tool http://dbdeploy.com/
FindBugs : U of Maryland uber Java static analysis tool. http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/
SchemaSpy : database schema documentation tool http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/



More to come.