One trap that developers need to be wary of is the mentality of the Hammer Truism. This states that

When something tragic befalls a friend, or even an acquaintance, I used to wonder if expressing my condolences and sorrow really meant much to the afflicted person. It certainly is different from person to person. For Akumi and me, I think the answer to that is yes, it is helpful. We certainly felt some degree of comfort knowing friends and even strangers who read my blog were sending us well wishes and thinking of us.

I know the timing is pretty crummy, but here it is. It is required, yes required, that I give you a true geek birthday salute (i.e. a blog birthday greeting).

Four friends who hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, reunited at a party. After several drinks, one of the men had to use the rest room. Those who remained talked about their kids.

A soccer buddy, and Doctor, sent me this interesting report. Here’s a snippet…

I swear I never do these stupid quizzes or memes or whatever you call it, but this is only three questions. If it’s good enough for Sam Ruby, it’s good enough for me.

One of my friends from our weekend pick-up game sent around this quote from Nick Hornby’s novel, Fever Pitch (which was regrettably turned into a movie about baseball, rather than soccer as it was written).

Yesterday we drove down to the San Diego area to spend the day with Akumi’s dad in Chula Vista, right on the border with Mexico. Trips to visit her dad end up being culinary expeditions of the highest quality. For lunch, we had some of the most delicious Ton-Katsu since Japan. Unfortunately we stuffed our faces so much that by the time we went to dinner, we were still a bit full and couldn’t enjoy the meal. Which was too bad because we went to the best Sushi place in San Diego. Perhaps the best in Southern California. Sushi Ota.

Today, the esteemed Dare Obasanjo, MSN Maestro, RSS Bandit Ruler, XML Guru Extraordinaire, Social Software Seminarian has just completed his 27th trip around the sun.

UPDATE: Whoops! I linked to the wrong versions of putty and pageant. I corrected the links.

Alright, it’s time for me to pull this ratty old thing out of the closet, dust it off a bit, and step onto it. Yes, my pedestal.

For the past several days, I’ve been consumed with working on the Subtext blogging engine (not to be confused with the Subtext programming language). It’s been the most fun I’ve had writing software since, well, since working on RSS Bandit as a matter of fact. ;)

This just cracks me up. Especially after reading #1 through #3 and then you get to #4, I can’t stop laughing. If you’ve been these various venues (rave, dance club, hip-hop club, etc…), you’ll totally get this humor.

This is quite possibly one of the coolest music videos ever.

Today has been an awful day, starting just past midnight, I lose the database for my site. Later, I played in the most dreadful soccer game ever. We only fielded ten players, but the other team only had seven showup to start! Yet, they managed to put three in the back of the net by half-time.

As a developer, I like choice. For example, WiX doesn’t currently support managed custom actions. You can hack it together, but they won’t support your endeavor. Personally, I want the choice to shoot myself in the foot with a managed custom action. Hand over that gun!

Yes, THAT Hilary Rosen. The RIAA’s former top attack dog Hilary Rosen is complaining about DRM on music. This is an interesting topic for her first post on Arianna Huffington’s new blog. Does she not realize the inherent irony of her complaint?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a professional developer, it is that “TIP” is bad. Never Test In Production! Unfortunately in my case, it was past midnight, I was tired, and I had two query analyzer windows open, one to my local host, and one to my website’s database, both with the same database name

Jon Galloway delights with a meaty post outlining a method for creating a SQL Server database cache dependency without the use of triggers. It’s an interesting read and worth looking into.