This was the Dilbert in my daily pull off calendar yesterday:

Great video by the folks at Devshop.

Via Max Pool.

I'm waiting for someone at work to blame aliens...

Scott Hanselman is working on a new project for parents out there called Baby Smash:

As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can't get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and Shift-Ctrl-Alt-O brings up the options dialog.

Its written with WPF, and looks pretty cool, as well as pretty useful.  I don't have kids, but a coworker of mine just recently had his second child, and his first is 2 and pretty rambunctious from what I understand.  So I sent him a link to the program.  Here was his response:

Does he have any programs that will prevent my kid from drawing on the walls? :)

Hey... computers can't do everything you know.

The names, as always, have been withheld to protect the innocent...

Coworker 1:  I haven't exactly seen numbers showing .NET running circles around VB6 performance wise.
Coworker 2:  You haven't?  I'll go find some right now.
Coworker 1:  But not from Microsoft.
Coworker 2:  Why?  They created both, so they should be unbiased.

On Saturday when I was out with the Cream City Flickr Group on a photo walk, I happened to take a picture of this sign outside of La Fuente, which if you don't know, is a fantastic Mexican restaurant in Walker's Point.

Now I remember that the "heart" character is in the extended ASCII character set, but can you actually type it in the address bar of a modern web browser?

Incidentally... their website is actually www.megustalafuente.com which I suppose is a close approximation to the sign in Spanish.

Here is this morning's Dilbert:

'nuff said.  And yes... Wally's description of an architect is amazingly accurate.

A coworker of mine sent me this link, and I just have to share it with the rest of you:

Our Caller, who art on the stack frame
Hallowed be thy Parameters
Thy Address Space come
Thy I/O be done
In Registers, as it is in Memory
Give us this day our periodic timeslices
And forgive us our page faults
As we forgive those who pass invalid parameters
Lead us not to unconditional JMPs
But deliver us from segment registers
For thine is the Address Space, the Registers, and the I/O ports
Jmp $
Ret

There are some other good ones there, so go visit.  My only critique would be to change "As we forgive those who pass invalid parameters" to "As we forgive those who page fault against us"... but that's just a minor quibble.  That's right... I used to write assembly too.  Sometimes I'm amazed at the vast numbers of languages and technologies I've actually used in my relatively short career.

Lately I've been enjoying I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER quite a lot, and have even tried making a few of my own images to submit to them.  But today I discovered that there is a group who are trying to create a programming language out of "Kitteh Speak"!  It's called LOLCODE, and it's further along than you might think.  They already have a 1.2 specification, and there are several alpha implementation for compilers... even one for Visual Studio!

Here is an example for Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Can you imagine how many of the world's problems programmers could fix if we didn't have these kinds of side projects?

Great advertisement for the iPhone from the Onion...

I'm not jumping on the iPhone bandwagon yet.  I'm very picky about my cell phones, and I don't think this will revolutionize the phone for people the same way the iPod revolutionized the MP3 player.  For one, most people don't want to spend gazillions of dollars on their cell phone.  Most people just take the cheap one you can get with a contract on your plan.  That means right away, Apple is only fighting for a small percentage of the cell phone market... the market for advanced users.

Second... I'm not convinced this thing will stand up to the wear and tear I put my phone through.  I have a clam shell model for a good reason.  I keep my phone in my pocket.  I don't want something I have to have a belt clip for, or that I'm afraid will autodial someone because it bumped into my wallet.  I also have a feeling the screen on this will get easily scratched up until the display is hardly usable, and will be broken just as easily.  I could be wrong... but my fears are enough to keep me from being an early adopter on this one.

I'll wait at least 6 months before I even consider one.  And by then, the Microsoft Mobile phones will have caught up to the same usability standards, in a package I'll probably like better, and for less money.

I hadn't seen this one before today... but a coworker just showed it to me and I thought it was hilarious.  Nice to know that the good folks at Microsoft can take a good natured poke at themselves.

Now then... will they take any of these lessons to heart?

It's this thing you can look at that comes to you using a series of tubes!

A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like "Web site" in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.

Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

For God's sake... even my mother knows what a website is.

I recently discovered a new (to me) blog, which you've probably been reading for a long time.  But if you haven't been reading Worse than Failure, you ought to be.  It's nice to be able to look at someone else's code now and then and say "I can't believe someone would do that!"

If vdResult.IsValid = True Then

I have no idea what you'd want to do if that happened.

You just can't stop watching... even if it is 10 minutes long.  So let me get this straight... voice recognition is supposed to make things easier... right?

Via Omar.

You might recall that some time ago I pointed to the the Code Monkey song by Jonathan Coulton.  Recently I found out that there is also a music video:

Excellent!

... you're talking to a woman who mentions PDA's and the first thing that comes to mind are "Personal Digital Assistants".

Yesterday my resource manager (my boss at the consulting company) came to my client to say hi to me.  She was dressed, very convincingly, as the grim reaper.  Having been through a lay off I wasn't exactly expecting once before... let's just say that seeing my boss dressed as the grim reaper isn't as funny as you might think.  However, since I'd just gotten a great review, promotion and raise a couple weeks ago, I had no fear.  I wonder how the rest of the people she visited fared.

She made up for it by bringing Halloween cookies.  That makes up for everything.

Via Samantha Burns comes a bunch of really good geeky links.  First there is the Geek Hierarchy Tree.  I've examined it, and it seems pretty close to me.  Then there are some great computer quotes for you to enjoy as well.  They're pretty good quotes, but nothing beats this collection of Computer Stupidities which I've had in my favorites list for a long time.