My wife’s friend Kristen is getting married, and they were discussing wedding videos and such. Since the version of our montage that I uploaded to YouTube was disabled due to music copyright issues, I’ve decided to just embed it here instead.

For the record…those of you who have had weddings – did you have a videographer? If so, did you think it was worth it? How much have you gone back to watch your video? If not…do you regret not having one?

I’m totally stealing an idea from Ashalah, and using the “question and answer” format to try to pry myself out of a blogging hiatus. Just ask me questions you’d like me to answer about anything and I will answer in a post next week.

HOW – Post your question either as a comment on this blog post, or send me an @ message on Twitter (I’m @mattstratton)

WHAT – I’ll answer questions about pretty much anything. They can be technical (WordPress, SharePoint, etc)… or personal. Or maybe you just want to know my opinion on a subject. Within reason, the topic can be pretty much anything.

WHEN – The answer post will most likely come out on Monday…I want to make sure there’s plenty of time for folks to pose their questions.

WHY – Everyone who asks a question will have their name entered into a drawing for a nifty prize. The prize is currently TBD, but it’ll be cool, I promise.

Given that I’ve haven’t blogged in quite some time, it might come as news to you that I’m back to pretending to get into shape. In early June, I started improving my diet and a few weeks later, began physical exercise with a vengeance.

What I’m doing

Diet

On June 5, I started following the South Beach diet very strictly. Unfortunately, I neglected to weigh myself before beginning, so the first weight measurement I have is from two days into the diet…which was 235 pounds (for comparison, I was 239 pounds on March 6). I stuck with Phase 1 of the diet for about three weeks, and then started “Phase 1.5″, where I mostly stayed on Phase 1, but moved in a couple Phase 2 foods into it. I’m still pretty scared of carbs, so I consume them very lightly. I did “slip up” a bit last weekend when we were Up North, but even with that, I didn’t gain any additional weight over the weekend…which is a plus.

Exercise

About a week into my diet, I added some workouts. I had good success last summer with the Couch to 5K program (although I never completed it), so I resumed that, with runs on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. On Monday/Wednesday/Friday I began a combination of 100 Pushups and 200 Crunches.

I’ve kept up with the Couch to 5K (tomorrow will be Day one of Week 5), but I have fallen behind on the pushups/crunches. But that’s okay, since I’ve replaced them with gym weight workouts. I’ll resume the pushups and crunches next week, I think. But I’ve been going to the gym fairly consistently on MWF and doing some weight machine workouts…and I can definitely tell a difference in my upper body’s definition.

Tools I’m using

It should come as no surprise that I’m a total geek while working out. I haven’t been doing calorie tracking, so I don’t have any measurements/apps for my food intake. But for my running, I am using the awesome iPhone app RunKeeper. It’s a GPS-based app that tracks all of my runs, and uploads them to my RunKeeper profile. For the 100 Pushups and 200 Crunches, I am using the 100 Pushups and CrunchFu iPhone apps, respectively. For my gym workouts, I’ve been trying to find a great iPhone app for that tracking, but coming up short. So I actually just use the Notes app on my iPhone to list out the exercises I’m going to do. I measure my heart rate with my old Polar M32 HRM, and pretty much just keep track of my average heart rate in RunKeeper.

Results so far

As of today, I weigh 224 pounds. If we assume a starting weight of 235 pounds on June 7, that means I have lost 11 pounds in 35 days. Not too shabby…plus I figure a portion of this is muscle gain. I am down two notches on my belt, and wearing jeans that I haven’t been able to wear for over a year. And even better, I am now able to tuck in my polo shirts when going to work…which makes me look even trimmer.

Going forward

Obviously, I have a ways to go. I have a few plans in place, but I also have some follow-up questions to you, my readers, to get your input and advice (since I’m sure everyone has a lot of opinions!)

New workouts

Starting this week (yesterday), I am switching to an every-day gym regimen. I will maintain my three times a week morning runs, but will go to the gym every evening (after the boys go to bed). On non-run days I will start my workout with 30 minutes of cardio (elliptical machine), and on every day, I will do a rotating training workout. I have three main workouts – Back & Abs, Legs, and Chest & Arms. This means I won’t do the exact same thing on each day of the week…it will rotate though all three. For example, this week:

Sunday – Cardio + Back & Abs
Monday – Cardio + Legs
Tuesday – C25K run in morning, Chest & Arms in evening
Wednesday – Cardio + Back & Abs
Thursday – C25K run in morning, Legs in evening
Friday – Cardio + Chest & Arms
Saturday – C25K run in morning, Back & Abs in evening

I know this sounds like a lot, but I’m only intending to hit it this way for three weeks. After three weeks, I will be switching things up a bit and taking advantage of a gift certificate that Carrie got for me for Fitness Together (a private trainer place in Wheaton). That will go for three weeks (during which I will continue Couch to 5K), and then I will re-evaluate.

Need some input

With all this additional exercise, going super low carb doesn’t seem to be the right choice. I know I need to consume some more carbs in order to have energy for my workouts. My biggest challenge right now is no longer WHAT to eat (while I’m a little scared of carbs, I know the “good carbs” to eat, so I am not worried about pigging out on white bread), but WHEN to eat. What do  you guys think? From your experience, when is the best time to eat (especially knowing what you know about my workouts and the timing of them). Any other advice you might have would be totally appreciated.

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Let me just start out by saying that I think that SharePoint 2010 is pretty darn awesome. The user experience is three billion times better than previous versions, and the list of amazing features is miles long.

That being said, I’m starting to think that Microsoft didn’t really do a lot of testing of this product in a multi-domain, one-way trust scenario. Let us assume the scenario below:

In this scenario, the domain SERVER trust ACCOUNT, but not vice-versa

My SharePoint 2010 farm is in Server, but all user accounts are in ACCOUNT. This is a one-way trust, and a fairly common corporate scenario.

The Search Symptom

After configuring SharePoint Search and successfully crawling some content sources, I was never able to return any search results. People results would show up, but no content from the SharePoint sites. Additionally, when I looked at my Scopes in Central Admin, they showed no items…but the crawl log showed all the results.

For Admin Eyes Only!

After spending hours trying to debug this (going so far as to even completely delete the Search Service application and recreate it), I came across this post on MSDN:

At first, I thought this didn’t apply to me, as I was connecting at ACCOUNT\USER, who was a farm admin as well as a site collection admin. But then I came across another post:

I wasn’t seeing that exact error, but it made a bit of a lightbulb go off for me. On a whim I tried logging in as SERVER\ADMIN…and voila! Search results appeared!

So now what?

This was all well and good, but it didn’t solve my problem. I needed ACCOUNT users to get search results too. The issue seemed to be that the app pool for the Search query component was running as a service account in the SERVER domain…and that account didn’t have any rights in ACCOUNT to determine the security trimming for the user doing the search. Long story short, I needed that app pool to run as an ACCOUNT account.

That being said, when I went to register the ACCOUNT account as a managed account, it wouldn’t take it. Because, you know, the farm account (I suppose) didn’t have rights in ACCOUNT to pull up any properties about this user:

PowerShell to the rescue!

The GUI wasn’t going to let me add this managed account…but would PowerShell save the day? Turns out that yes, yes it would. Following the insight from Bill Baer’s blog post, I was able to add an ACCOUNT service account using PowerShell…which I could then select as the app pool identity for the Search query component. And after doing so…voila! Search results worked like a charm.

Where do we go from here?

This is just one of the several issues I’ve encountered in our one-way trust scenario with SharePoint 2010. The maddening thing is that all of these issues worked FINE in MOSS 2007…but it seems that with all of the infrastructure changes that happened with 2010…a lot of this stuff got lost along the way.

My lovely wife Carrie and I were married on May 26, 2007.

On Saturday, almost exactly three years later, we stood in the same place, but this time, with two amazing little boys who were being baptized in the same church, and by the same priest, where we were married.

Happy anniversary to my partner and best friend in the world. We’ve come a long way!

Hi blog readers…I know I’ve neglected you horribly (I posted every almost every single day in February, but only twice in March…and here it’s halfway through April and this is my first post). But the good news is, this post is full of pretty pictures.

Back in March, I joined up with fellow local photographers Louis Parks, John Morrison, and Allie Osmar for a fun photoshoot project. We all met up at Chicago’s Millennium Park, and took it in turns to shoot the same set of models. The theory behind the project was to see how different photographers captured the same subjects in the same location in the same conditions.

The experience was really fun – I was nervous at first, but once we got into the swing of things, it went smoothly. The biggest issue was making sure that there was always someone “off” to keep an eye on our gear so that it didn’t walk away. And it was super helpful to rotate through the photogs in such a way that someone was always available to assist. As you can see here:

Louis holds the diffusion disc for John

There was quite a variety in the looks of our models. The first person I shot was Jenn, who was going for a “college student/social media junkie” theme.

Intensity, defined. I really love the crisp contrast of the white letters against the blue

Another model was Phia, who went in a different direction…much more vintage.

So I go a little overboard with Lightroom post-processing. It's okay...because it matches the theme, right?

I also did some portraits of Allie, although I never did shoot Jess (who was our third model). Things got a little confusing. But this is proof that even photographers can make great subjects!

Allie, being way more comfortable on the "other side" of the lens than I would ever be

Overall, this was quite a fun shoot, and I can’t wait to try it again. I highly recommend checking out the rest of the group’s shots here – one of my very favorites is this one of Phia that Louis shot. It’s really quite incredible.

Photo by Louis Parks, all rights reserved

Are you excited? This is my very first video Tech Tip. It’s a walk-through on importing photos from your digital camera or memory card into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Let me know what you think of it!

Some notes on the video…

• This took at least six “takes”. The first version was over 10 minutes long, which is just ridiculous. Lesson learned from that first take? Write down notes, or else you’ll start rambling. I think there’s at least 2 minutes in that version of me going on and on about the DNG format.
• I had quite a few takes that only got about 45 seconds into it, and ended with me saying “crap!” (or other words less pleasant).
• One attempt was interrupted by my wife calling me from downstairs because my son projectiled all over her and the couch.
• I’m really kind of annoyed by something I say towards the end of this video, but I was NOT going to start over. And then when I went to edit it, I didn’t have the energy to cut it out.

Today is my wife Carrie’s birthday. She’s a delightful woman, and I’m so happy that we’re continuing to build our family together.

Carrie and I first met on October 4, 2003 at my friend Lou’s 30th birthday party. She won a prize for a contest for kissing the most people at the party, and I was one of the organizers of the event.

Our first date (technically) was meeting for drinks on October 10th, 2003. My evaluation at the time was “we really don’t have much in common, but we got along really well, I think. Which is neat, but weird.”

This isn't from our first date, but it's shortly afterwards...New Years Eve 2003

However, I prefer the revisionist history of our first date being Game 7 of the NLCS at Wrigley Field on October 15, 2003. Our plan had been to go to a bar to watch the game together, but earlier in the day my awesome friend Heather called me to hook me up with press box tickets to the game. I called Carrie during the day and asked her if, instead of going to Parrots, she’d rather go to Wrigley.

“You mean, hang out in the neighborhood around the park?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “I figured we’d just go sit in the press box instead.”

Needless to say, despite being the beginnings of the relationship with the woman who would some day become my wife, it was the worst night of my life as the Cubs managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Despite the fact that I very nearly cried that night, Carrie still ended up wanting to date me.

This picture was not from Game 7, but several years later - and a much happier Wrigley experience

Carrie and I dated on and off for a few years. But then, for her birthday in 2006, (after much cloak-and-dagger espionage type planning) I proposed to her at the top of Rockefeller Center in New York City (full recap). We were married at Old St. Pat’s in Chicago a little over a year later on May 26, 2007, and celebrated our honeymoon in Costa Rica.

Almost immediately after this picture was taken, Carrie got stung by a scorpion. True story.

Kicking and screaming, we moved out of our beloved city of Chicago into the suburbs in September of 2008. We knew we would miss the city, but we wanted to be able to buy a house that would be big enough for the family we wanted to have, and the suburbs were the way to that. We also wanted to be closer to our family out that way, which we knew would be useful once we had kids (and we were right!)

After spending a long time trying, we finally were successful at getting pregnant. Our two beautiful sons Henry and Joey were born on December 30, 2009 (and they just turned 2 months old!)

The whole family!

I love my wife more than anything. I am wishing her a super happy birthday today (her first as a mom), and I know that this year will bring even more joy and happiness and awesome fun for her than ever.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY!

I’m going to take this opportunity to wish a super happy birthday to one of my best blogging buddies, the always awesome @curiousillusion!

Of course, you can’t talk about @curiousillusion without talking about her photography. So here are some of my favorite photos she’s taken (used with her permission of course).

All images are all rights reserved, and used with permission. Do NOT reproduce these images or use them without explicit permission.

If you’d like to know more about @curiousillusion, the Library of Congress recommends these links:

Blog - http://curiousillusion.com
Twitter - http://twitter.com/curiousillusion
Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousillusion/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/curiousillusion

The game Bejeweled is deceptively simple and VERY addicting. It is the single app on my iPhone that probably gets the most use, second only to my email inbox and calendar. Easy to learn, but tough to get good at, I’ve discovered that there are lessons in life that can be learned from playing this game.

Focus on what’s in front of you

It’s really easy to get distracted by the “multiplier” jewels in the game, and waste valuable seconds trying to figure out a way to match up colors to activate them. The problem is, by doing so, you miss easy opportunities to move the game along in other areas of the board, and chances are, clearing other jewels will eventually get the multipliers activated. Outside of the game, this holds true too - always be aware of the attractive goals, but pay more attention to what you can do now – and the pretty shiny will take care of itself.

Work from the bottom

Your chances at multipliers are increased by the more jewels that clear in one move. Clearing jewels at the bottom of the board will cause longer drops, which have a greater chance of firing off bigger chain reactions. This extends to non-game tasks too – dig down to the root of an issue, and it will have positive repercussions higher up in the chain.

Use two hands

This really only applies to the iPhone version of the game, where you can make moves with both hands at once, increasing the amount of jewel swapping you can do at any given time. Efficiency is key in a game of speed, and it’s key in the game of life as well – working efficiently saves time and allows more energy to be focused on the things that are important to you.

Start early

One trick that most players might be aware of is that Bejeweled will let you get in a good two-three moves before the game even starts. While the starting countdown is still running, a quick player can swap several jewels, and might even triggers some power gems before the minute timer is running. Plan to start activities and projects before their planned time when it makes sense to do so, and you’ll literally be ahead of the game.

Defriend anyone who is better than you

One of the “strategy” suggestions from a lot of Bejeweled tip sights is to simply delete better players from your Facebook friends list. This is definitely easier than getting better at the game. One might say the lesson to be learned here is “only compete on a field where you’re the best”.

But I disagree with this tip. I think it’s amazing when I discover friends of mine who have scores that double or treble my highest effort. These competitors give me something to shoot for. And I carry this over to my professional life as well – the best job I ever had was the one where I worked with people who were smarter and more talented that I was. You can’t get inspired to excel without surrounding yourself by people who are excellent.

When I first came up with the idea for this post, it was intended as a joke – but as I thought through it more, I saw the actual value in some of the ways that a simple game can reflect upon larger things. We all want to improve at something – and maybe the first place we start is by scoring over 300,000 points in Bejeweled. But the challenge is taking the same energy and focus and applying it to something more tangible.

Unless you are a professional Bejeweled player. In which case, I have nothing to teach you.