I read a very interesting post on Brydon's blog this morning. His post addresses an aspect of business that is very near to my heart. That is: life. When I graduated from high school and began working fulltime, one of the first reality checks I had was that there are no more summer vacations. It had never really occurred to me before my first real job that once you're out of school you don't get any significant time off. The second big reality check for me was the realization that I never was "going to arrive."

What I mean is this; without consciously thinking about it, I was always working toward sometime in the future when I wouldn't have to work again. My guess is most people are that way. Some may not even realize it until it's too late, but for most of us, we’re not going to ever “arrive.” For us, the journey is it’s own reward.

I realized this one beautiful spring evening as I drove home from work. The sun was just starting to cast late afternoon shadows and the temperature was perfect. As I drove home with my windows down I passed through what is known as restaurant corridor. The smell of various foods cooking all blended together with the perfect temperature and gorgeous sunset to provide one of those perfect moments. I immediately started dreaming of how nice it was going to be when I could experience this all the time.

That's when it hit me. This was a moment, not a lifestyle. The Lord gives you moments in life that are to be treasured. Instead of always looking for that time in the future when life will be perfect, I realized that I need to treasure 30 seconds here, 5 minutes there, whenever they come.

Work is like this. Unfortunately, no matter how much you like your job, for most people it is just that; a job. Either outwardly or secretly they’re looking for that time when they can do what they really want to do.

For instance, I *love* to write code. I still sit back sometimes and think "I can't believe I get paid to do this." On the other hand, there are many days I hate what I do. It's monotonous. It's frustrating. It sucks the life right out of me. On those days I want to quite and do something else. That's why I love Brydon's article so much. It addresses this reality of work being part of life.

Everybody needs change at some time. It doesn't matter how comfortable a chair is, you've got to get up and stretch after a while. It doesn't matter how much you like to sleep, you're going to get sore after being the bed for too long. Work is the same way. No matter how much you love what you do, you just need to give your brain a break sometime and do something different.

I really hope I can create an environment for the people who work with me that is like this. Whether it is my family in our home based business or others who come to work with us; I want to be able to provide an environment that breathes life into people not suck it right out of them.

Furthermore, I want to figure out how to extend this concept to our family. Surely there is a lesson to be learned here about encouraging our children to get the most out of life while at the same time being the most productive and helpful that they can be in their daily lives.

Thanks for the article Brydon. You've motivated me.

This evening I was going to do something very simple: bind a couple of columns in a DataRow to a Repeater control on one of my ASP.NET pages. I coded everything straight through and compiled without thinking much about it. However, to my surprise I got a runtime error when I opened the page with the control on it. Much more to my surprise the error was stating that a column the DataRow I had bound to did not exist. Problem is, the column did exist and was spelled exactly like the column being reported as an error.

DataBinder.Eval: 'System.Data.DataRow' does not contain a property with the name dtCommentDate.

I looked at the documentation for DataBinder and it looked just like mine. My code looked like this:

<asp:repeater id="_rptComments" Runat="server">
   <ItemTemplate>
      <asp:Label ID="_lblDate" Runat="server">
         <%# DataBinder.Eval(CType(Container.DataItem, System.Data.DataRow), "dtCommentDate")%>
      </asp:Label>
   </ItemTemplate>
</asp:repeater>

which matched what the documentation said exactly. So, I beat my head against a wall for an hour or so trying to figure out exactly what was wrong.

After spending much time tweaking the syntax, getting some things to work, finding most failed, I noticed something about the above error that I had not caught my eye until this point. That is the word "property." I had assumed that the DataBinder.Eval() call was attempting to bind against a column or Item or something that used the "dtCommentDate" as a key. However, this error is telling me that "dtCommentDate" is being bound directly to the DataRow object as a property accessor. With this in mind I tried one last syntactical change:

<asp:repeater id="_rptComments" Runat="server">
   <ItemTemplate>
      <asp:Label ID="_lblDate" Runat="server">
         <%# DataBinder.Eval(CType(Container.DataItem, System.Data.DataRow), "(dtCommentDate)")%>
      </asp:Label>
   </ItemTemplate>
</asp:repeater>

Notice the parenthesis that surround the dtCommentDate. Since the contents of the second parameter are directly bound to the DataItem object, in this case that means that the Item accessor syntax of the parenthesis is necessary.

In my looking around the Internet for a solution to my problem I did not find an example like this so I wanted to post it here in hopes that it will help someone else.