Fans of the BBC show "Top Gear" will be concerned.  Everyone else will say "who's that?"

I'm part of the first group.   

Hammond, the handsome, genial counter-point to Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear crashed while trying to break the UK land speed record for the TV show.  Teased for his lack of stature, white teeth and teen-girl magazine pin-up looks, Hammond is a key part of the show staff balancing out Clarkson's searing tongue and May's posh leanings.  I hope he fully recovers... not just because I'm human but because it could be the source of no end of hilarity on the show (plus, the other option sucks).

Top Gear's Hammond badly injured in jet-car crash

LONDON (Reuters) - Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was seriously ill in hospital on Thursday after being badly injured after a high-speed crash in a jet-powered car while filming for the programme.

(more...)

For the full story see: Top Gear's Hammond badly injured in jet-car crash | Reuters.co.uk

Do you think they publish fortnightly or monthly?

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