But clown vans are even more scary.

Click for larger view... IF YOU DARE (dum dum DUM!).

Pictures we took at Ground Zero when we visited in December of 2001.

More on SmugMug.

A couple of folks with some extra time have put together a medly of some of the Internet's most popular songs including "All Your Base are belong to us", "Peanut Butter Jelley Time", "Badger, Badger" and nine others.  So, as Disturbed sez, "Here's a little someting for your earhole."

Way back in the day ICQ allowed people to put a little snippet of HTML anywhere they liked and it would show their presence.  That was very cool.  Yahoo can do it too. AOL offers it. Now Skype is doing it too.  Why, for the sake of all that is geeky, can't we (Microsoft) do this for messenger? 

Wait, I know, I'll use a buzz-word: it's viral! (it'll happen for sure now).

I started my first blog back in 2002 on Blogger but switched to using dasBlog in late 2003 when I was wanting more control of my site.  I've wanted to migrate the content over from the old site for a long time but never could find a tool to do the heaving lifting... until today when I discovered Nick Schweitzer's "Coding Monkey" site.  Nick has clear instructions as well as a GUI tool to help switch from Blogger to dasBlog.  The process was quick and painless and his instructions were straight-forward.  If you've been looking to import your old Blogger content into dasBlog but weren't sure how, check out Nick's instructions.

It's more for me than anyone else... but if you want to find my old posts, you can just click on the "Old Blog" topic on the right.

Bug Bash started life as an internal MS comic strip by cartoonist and program manager, Hans Bjordahl.  It has a ton of great commentary on the software development process and has also been available outside MS for a while now.  My favorite series of strips is a set of "Meeting Busters - Surefire ways to sink your meeting".  Within that series, there is this beautiful cell: 

Some more back story: when we lived in Colorado my wife (well... girlfriend at the time) and I loved Hans Bjordahl's comics in the University of Colorado school paper (I wasn't going to college there, Paula was).  When I started work for Microsoft I noticed the "Bug Bash" comic in our internal newspaper had the same character style (which led me to dig up the old clippings I had... and lo!).  When Hans left Microsoft this year I worried we'd loose the regular dose of laughing at the software development industry but Hans has continued to write and publish Bug Bash (this was the only sentence without a parenthetical).

I was reminded of it this morning when I came across a CNet article (from February) on how the Internet is changing the business of cartoonists.  Tag line:

"See you in the funny pages" takes on a new meaning for cartoon artists who are making a home on the Web.

Here are direct links to the Meeting Busters strips:

• Meeting Busters
• More Meeting Busters
• Yet More Meeting Busters

SmugMug now offers a 14 trial which doesn't require a credit card.  You now have no excuse to go try out what I think is the best photo site on the net.

Back when Omar turned me on to SmugMug a credit card was required to do the free trial, turning a bunch of people away from the site.  While requiring a CC caused resistance, the number of people who stayed is worth noting: of the people I know who did the trial, over 80% of them stayed with the service.  With props from PC Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Macworld, Newsweek, Businssweek and Forbes you can be sure you're getting a great product.

Oh, and once you sign up (because you will sign up ), be sure to download Omar's Send to SmugMug tool (Windows only, sorry).  Send to SmugMug makes the process of uploading pictures a simple task.

Das Keyboard, the ultimate geek keyboard... it's totally blank so you better know your stuff, no poseurs allowed.