My friend Thomas Wagner has a small epiphany of sorts. At first, I thought he was writing the biography of my first year at my current job. But apparently this is quite common among businesses.

There’s a house on fire a couple of blocks away. It’s a veritable light show down there with nearly 10 or so fire trucks arriving on the scene.

I love Ian’s response to James Gosling’s opinion on .NET’s C++ support and it’s supposed inherent insecurity. It’s basically a “Booyah! In your face” piece as he bit by bit dissects Goslings arguments and presents a Java example that directly contradicts Gosling claim that type unsafety is incapable in Java.

In his latest entry about life as a infrastructure reconstruction project manager in Baghdad, Mr. Serjak describes the security detail that drives him to an onsite location. One detail in particular struck me as funny.

Dare announced the beta version for the Wolverine edition of RSS Bandit (version 1.3.x) today. You can read his announcement to see some of the nice features it includes.

I’ve kept a couple of other blogs before, but this is my first with staying power. My blog new year resolutions include being even more irreverent, geeky, rash, and misguided (if even possible). It’s been one year, and I recently passed the 500 post mark without even noticing (I hate missing an opportunity to party).

You must watch this video.

My buddy Kyle and I both purchased tickets to Burning Man today. Still waiting to hear from a few other friends and other burners who might be in attendance. I went with several years ago and am looking forward to my triumphant return. ;)

Props to any,one who can tell me the song and artist that my subject line refers to.

As if to punctuate my post entitled Image Based CAPTCHA is Fast Losing it’s Appeal, Casey outlines his .NET code used to beat the CAPTCHA employed by many blogs using a Neural Network approach.

Received this comment on my “Blogging Is Pure Vanity” Post.

Every Friday the company buys lunch. Today we all received an email with the list of choices from a Thai restaurant. I replied with “Orange Chicken”. Soon afterwards one of my coworkers thanks me for letting him know I’m having Orange Chicken. Huh?

Oh yes, this is geeky! Craig Wangdera posted the source code he wrote that lights up physical light bulbs with the status of his build using CruiseControl.NET. For example, the yellow bulb lights up when a build is in progress while a green bulb lights up if the last build was successful. See the full size picture and source here.

Colin has a nice little quiz about enumeration on his blog. Basically he asks, how would you implement a class to enumerate through all the letters of the alphabet. Below is my “cute” response.

Found this interesting article via Hassan Voyeau that details the performance penalty when naming your stored procedure with an sp_ prefix in a database other than the master database.

If you’re a fan of good music (I mean objectively, not subjectively) I plan to recommend a few songs here and there in this blog. Never mind the fact that if you end up purchasing the songs via my site, I get paid. I give you my word, a vow, that I will never lead you musically astray. I may lead you astray in other ways, but not in music.

Given that I’ve written much of the documentation for RSS Bandit on the documentation site and have spent a lot of time in the code making a few contributions here and there, I feel a bit sheepish that I didn’t know about this particular feature.

Being married to a Japanese woman, I’ve cultivated a love of tea. Although Koreans have great tea as well, it doesn’t figure as highly in the culture as it does for the Japanese.

Today marks the completion of my thirtieth trip around the sun. And it’s been a scenic ride. Much love and thanks to my lovely wife for putting together a little shindig for me and a few of our closest friends. Great food and drink were consumed and a good time was had by all.

What will the last two lines print. Will they be the same?