It’s that time of year again, I haven’t really had much to post lately; I’ve been working alot and playing a little World Of Warcraft.  I have some interesting things going on in the C# front.  I have written a full blown socket server in C# that I plan on making available after the first of the year.  We’ve had some problems with Vectren (a natural gas provider in Ohio and Indiana).  Apparently they don’t like their customers receiving their usage data in any form other than on their site.  I’ve contacted so many people there it’s ridiculous.  We finally decided it would just be better to write a server that parses the HTML on their website and then serves the information back out through TCP to our devices.  It’s going to suck when they change their website but we pretty much have no other options.  In this day and age it’s hard to believe that companies like Vectren refuse to work with 3rd parties from a technology stand point.  What’s the point the of giving customer’s access to data that they can do nothing with??  We’ve worked with so many other companies that are willing to bend over backwards for us to get us their data, DP&L has been awesome for instance – why is Vectren so slippery with their data?