Not too long ago I announced that my wife and I are expecting a baby this year as part of our world domination plans. Adding fuel to our plans is the discovery that this year is a special year according to the Chinese Zodiac.

K. Scott Allen, Jayson Knight, and Keyvan Nayyeri all tagged me, so despite my general antipathy towards these viral questionnaire memes (they remind me of that silly slambook fad in grade school), this one is interesting enough for me to respond.

Here’s wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays. For Christmas, I received a defective video card as a warranty replacement for my defective video card. Thanks Dell! The replacement card was more defective than the one I returned.

No, this was definitely not a good sight for me. With my team pressing the attack, an unfortunate turnover left our defense out of position to help as the opposing team quickly capitalized. (Click on any pic for a larger view).

Clean drinking water piped to my house is something I take for granted (yes, even in Los Angeles). When I stop to think about it a bit, I can’t imagine how tough it must be to not have clean drinking water.

Today my team had a friendly preseason game against Hollywood United. They fielded a mixture of a few players from their 40 and over team, but most of the players were from their main team.

I don’t suffer from classic OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), but I do sometimes have OCD tendencies. Just ask my poor wife when we’re having dinner while my mind is still trying to resolve a thorny programming problem. Earth to Phil. Are you on this planet?

Here we are already looking ahead to learn about the language features of C# 3.0 and I am still finding new ways to make my code better with good “old fashioned” C# 2.0.

Steve Harman just announced the release of Subtext 1.9.3. This is primarily a bug fix release, though there are a couple of small improvements.

According to Brad Abrams, it looks like we’re going to have us another PDC in 2007. For those of you not in the know, PDC stands for Professional Developer Conference. These are conferences in which Microsoft shows off upcoming technologies that us developers will be using.

Subtext has a pretty sweet Continuous Integration setup using CruiseControl.NET running inside a virtual server inside a real computer in my home office. The man responsible for this setup is Simone Chiaretta, who just unveiled his new English language blog, CodeClimber.

Google Code Search is truly the search engine for the uber geek, and potentially a great source of sublime code and sublime comments.  K. Scott Allen, aka Mr. OdeToCode, posted a few choice samples of prose he found while searching through code (Scott, exactly what were you searching for?).

Just thought I would highlight something I mentioned in my last post because I thought it was particularly funny. I wrote about joys using Google Code Search to search through source code for interesting comments. Definitely a geeky pasttime.

UPDATE: Looks like the DNS issue is starting to get resolved. The fix may not have fully propagated yet.

My favorite unit testing framework just released a new version. Andrew Stopford has the announcement here and you can download the release from the MbUnit site.

Ok, I could use some really expert help here. I really like using the built in WebServer.WebDev Web Server that is a part of Visual Studio

1. For one thing, it makes getting a new developer working on Subtext (or any project) that much faster. Just get the latest code, and hit CTRL+F5 to see the site in your browser. No pesky IIS set up.

Recently while picking up a few items at Target, I decided to buy a cheapo soccer ball. Now those who know me know I’m a bit of a fanatic about playing soccer, willingly paying good money for a quality ball.

In his essay No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Fred Brooks makes the following postulate: