Well, since all 4 of the guys (of the 4 guys from Viewpoint) have kids (some having more than others, well really only me having more I guess, but I think the others will eventually catch up), I think all of us can appreciate this article (that Rickem sent me but failed to post since no one ever posts for some inexplicable reason) of some new Father’s experiences (although obviously their political views are different, but you can still enjoy the humor Sean)

New Fathers: A Round Table discussion

Here are some choice quotes:

As for what happens when the baby cries at night? Well, I once read an article about useful foreign words that had no English counterpart, and it mentioned some language (I forget which) that had a noun meaning “the state of two people each waiting to see if the other will volunteer to address an unpleasant situation that has recently arisen and could be handled by either but which neither wants to do.” If the English word for that was canderflabble, I’d say that my wife and I spend a good portion of our nights engaged in canderflabble.

And then a more touching one since I’m tenderhearted like that:

Years ago I met a cab driver who had nine kids, and his position was basically that every kid increases the amount of love in your family. And in my few lucid moments, when my son isn’t screaming on the kitchen floor because I won’t let him put a Ginsu knife into the electrical outlet, I think: OK maybe that guy was on to something.

I’ve dedicated this post just to the marvelous wonder that is the internet. Basically, when you think about it there’s a website for just about everything. This I know to be true from a fairly recent experience. You see my parents live on a farm, but have bought a new computer and joined the World Wide Web somewhat tentatively in the not so recent past. During one of my various phone calls with them, my father was telling me how he was finding some great farming sites (being a farmer, you can see why that might interest him) so I casually said, “Yeah, doing a search through Google or any search engine would probably turn up a lot of hits for farming“. I said this more of a way of continuing a conversation, kind of a filler comment, more than any attempt on my part to say something intelligent. However, there were a variety of words I used that my father was very curious about. “Google“, “search engine” and “hits” were very unfamiliar to him and he preceded to explain to me that when he’s looking for something he just types www.[insert subject you are searching for].com . . .

Yes, that is a true story and apparently there are websites for everything. I did teach my father how to expand his world on the internet and he can now successfully use a search engine. But the point being, almost anything you type in will take you to a page and this post is dedicated to just that idea.

Enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Hope your wives are all cooking your meals and you’re on the couch doing diddlysquat. If not, tough luck for you but congrats to the rest in finding a “good” woman. (Ok, enough male chauvinism for now!)

Anyway, just to get a holiday post, I just grabbed this funny little top 10 list I got in the e-mail the other day and pasted it into this blog for everyone to enjoy and/or be offended (it’s really your decision isn’t it?)

So here it is……

Top 10 Things That Sound Dirty at Thanksgiving

10. “Talk about a huge breast!”

9. “It’s a little dry, do you still want to eat it?”

8. “Don’t play with your meat.”

7. “Just spread the legs open & stuff it in.”

6. “I didn’t expect everyone to come at once!”

5. “You still have a little bit on your chin.”

4. “How long will it take after you stick it in?”

3. “You’ll know it’s ready when it pops up.”

2. “That’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen!”

1. “How long do I beat it before it’s ready?”

So, in developing the architecture for a new Portal project that the 4 Guys are working on, we decided to be as nice to the future developers on the project as possible (aren’t we such sweethearts?) And part of being nice to a developer is giving him as much intellisense as possible in the code. Well, in trying to deliver this very nice feature to the developers, we decided that function parameters should have intellisense as well, whenever possible. And here is the method we came up with for providing this. Our question becomes, is there a better method out there?


‘An enumeration of the names of the various User Controls
Friend Enum UCName As Integer
    UCHeader = 1
    UCFooter = 2
    UCLogin = 3
    Temp = -99
End Enum

Friend Function GetUserControl(ByVal Name As UCName) As UserControl
‘Returns a UserControl based on the Name passed in to the function.
    Try
        Return CType(LoadControl(GetUCPath(Name)), UserControl)
    Catch ex As Exception
        Throw
    End Try
End Function

Friend Function GetUCPath(ByVal Name As UCName) As String
    Try
        Select Case Name
            Case UCName.Temp
                Return “~Temp.ascx”
            Case UCName.UCFooter
                Return“~BaseUserControlsUCFooter.ascx”
            Case UCName.UCHeader
                Return“~BaseUserControlsUCHeader.ascx”
            Case UCName.UCLogin
                Return “~BaseUserControlsUCLogin.ascx”
        End Select
    Catch ex As Exception
        Throw
    End Try
End Function

So, if a developer wishes to load a particular UserControl from anywhere else in the project, the can just call the function GetUserControl like this.

Dim lnkFooter As New UCFooter
lnkError = CType(GetUserControl(UCName.UCFooter), UCFooter)

No need for the developer to remember the path for every user control, (no need for the developer to even remember what user controls are available since they can just scroll thru the Enum to see what exists). So what do you think? Is this a good practice and worth the extra overhead and work to provide this intellisense or is there a better method out there?


So after seeing a commercial last night on TV for a new DragonBallZ game, I thought to myself, when was the last time I played a fighting game? I remember playing Street Fighter I and II in high school along with Mortal Kombat and then I played Tekken 3 a little in college, but I remember being very tired of the genre. It was always frustrating to me to learn all of the moves and then be beaten by a button pusher or to fight someone who knew all the moves for a particular game (when I didn’t) and have the fight be over in a matter of seconds.

It seems too, that the action got faster, more things happening on the screen at once, which to someone who’s picking up the control to that game for the first time, is a little overwhelming (Street Fighter vs. Capcom comes to mind for an example of that). Basically I have these gripes about the genre and I haven’t been really interested in playing a fighting game for a very long time.

So, coming back to my opening line, I saw the commercial, thought about how long it’s been since I played and thought, what changes could be made to the genre to make me interested again and I actually came up with a few.

1. Extend the life of the combatants. I know you can modify the hit levels so less damage is done in most games, but I mean REALLY extend the life of the combatants. Make it so that even if the guy is just standing there you can’t be the tar out of him in less than 4 or 5 minutes. I think that will give everyone the chance to get the hang of the game and fights can start swinging both ways in that length of time.

2. Change it so you can’t always be on the attack. Make the player tire out so they have to switch to defense to regain energy. In real life you couldn’t just wail on the other person non-stop, your arms get tired, your fists start hurting, you have to back off and circle the guy, giving yourself a little break. I mean adrenaline does play a part in a fight, but it’s just for small bursts, it eventually wears out too. I was thinking that depending on the intensity of the punches thrown, the complexity of the combos and special moves delivery, actually cause the player to start panting, make his punches and kicks to get weaker, make him fall down if he tires himself out too much. I think by making this change you will add a new element of strategy to the game, forcing players to learn to play offensively a little smarter and push into the forefront the importance of defense in any fight.

So there you have two suggestions for breathing new life into a genre that for me lost its luster years ago. Maybe I’m wrong about it all and people like the fighting games the way they are, but I personally think it’s time for a change.

What do you think?

So last time an MSDN event rolled through town, it gave everyone a glimpse of the brilliance, wit and humor of its presenter, Rory Blyth. Well, yesterday, another event was held in Hillsboro [If I had actually posted this when I started it, “yesterday” would have been correct, the event actually took place on 11-18-2004] and once again Rory was in rare form (in spite of recovering from his temporary blindness bestowed upon him by the gods to remind him of the gifts he has been given and not to combine a plate full of nachos with sherbert ever again). This time during the recap of the event, I plan on focusing a little more on the information covered instead of just random Roryisms since a lot of what was covered in the event was pretty valuable.

Basically if you’ve never attended one of these events, it starts off pretty regularly with a discussion of the titles bestowed upon the Microsoft Employees. Microsoft apparently has some kind of knighting program and in this case Rory was a Champion, he quickly tried to move on before the engineers become bogged down by the fact that “he wasn’t wearing underwear on the outside of his clothes and a cape” so how could he possibly be a champion.

Then in Rory’s case he filled everyone in on his current condition (“I feel pretty hung-over, kind of like I do with most of my talks, except this time I didn’t cause this”) in regards to his periodically going blind but relaxed everyone by letting us know that his famous “mumbling things are going to happen.” Good to know that even a randomly blind Rory is still a Rory.

The beginning of the actual MSDN discussion started with an Introduction to Object Oriented programming with VB.NET. Basically, the whole discussion could be condensed into one line.

Do NOT continue the bad programming practices you were using in VB6 and try to implement them in VB.NET!

Basically, if you do that then you should have stayed in VB6 and never migrated to .NET because you really aren’t taking advantage of what .NET has to offer you as a programmer.

Here are some of the high points of the discussion:

One misconception is that “real” programmers write in machine language. These programmers argue that there is no reason to use OO because they would rather just solder the whole application directly onto the circuit board. As Rory put it, “There’s a misconception that manual bit twitters are the “real” programmers, however application development needs different rules.” Try programming an entire Accounting application in 0’s and 1’s and you won’t get my respect, I’ll just wonder why you don’t take advantage of the tools available to you. It would be like trying to lift a heavy boulder by yourself for years just hoping you build up the strength to do it all by yourself because you’ll be such a man then, when really if you used this really cool trick involving pulley’s and counter balances you could probably get the boulder lifted and moved very rapidly and continue on with your life.

Some of the higher point advantages of OO programming are maintainability, extensibility, reuse, testing and the ability to integrate with the rest of .NET

o Maintainability – “Don’t play Jenga with your code.”

o Extensibility – give yourself the ability to create code that can be used for similar tasks, not only just the same tasks.

o Reuse – by creating self-contained objects, you given yourself the freedom to pull an entire object (the class) from one project and place it directly in another with no changes necessary and the full power of the object that you create ready for use immediately.

o Testing – probably the weakest of the arguments, I think one thing Rory didn’t touch on here is that if you think about it, because of the code reuse, in actuality the code has already been tested to a degree. If the classes in your new project have already been through the gambit of testing when released in your old project then in theory a large portion of the backbone of your project has already been examined and it’s only your use of this backbone which will need to be tested so testing does in a way become an argument, but I agree with Rory on this one, a very small benefit because it still needs to be tested.

o Integration – if you’re developing in .NET then you “want to play nice with the rest of .NET” and to do that you are going to have to start implementing object oriented programming practices in your development projects.

Basically, in Rory’s opinion (and surprise, surprise, I agree with him as well), “OOP has gotten bogged down in Academia.” I think that is where a lot of the confusion about this topic has stemmed from. The terminology used when discussing OO is high-faluting and cryptic, I think Rory did a good job at the event in taking this pseudo-complex topics and showing just how simple they really are to implement.

Abstraction: keep semantically related items in one place. Organize things by meaning in your code, don’t get lost in the details.

Encapsulation: separation of concerns, need to know what it does, don’t need to know how it does what it does. It’s a black box. On example to explain this a little better would be your digestive system, You have an interface to the digestive system, your mouth, so you can put things in your mouth and it nourishes and strengthens your body and does all the necessary things that need to be done to keep you healthy, but you don’t need to know what it’s doing you only need to feed it.

Inheritance: Some entities are general; other entities are specializations of those. It’s finding the general and structuring the hierarchies beneath it. For example you could define in general an animal as “Something that is warm and squishy on the inside and has the qualities of life” you could then define as an animal so it would be warm and squish on the inside, but it can be specialized to also include the properties such as Evil, Expensive, Rood and TearsUpFurniture because although I love cats, let’s face it “Cats are Evil”

Polymorphism: entities behave differently based on type, similar interface, and different implementations. For example a home phone and a cell phone. Similar functions and interface, same results but they implement it differently. “That in a nutshell is polymorphism….kind of”
So, now that you know the properties that make Object Oriented programming what it is, how do you implement it in Visual Basic.NET? Well, that is achieved with Classes and Objects.

Classes are the blueprints for an object. The Object is the creation from the blueprint.

“New”, creates a new instance (or Object) based on the blueprints (or Class).

Your classes are entirely autonomous. Every new object you’ve created based on your class blueprint; get its own properties and functions and changes made to that object affect only that object….

Well, except you can declare Shared and Static variables in a class. That is the one time that classes are not autonomous, changing the value in one would change it in all. One useful feature for this would be for example an auto-incrementing ID for an employee, so as you are working with all the employee objects you create a new employee and update the static NextAvailableEmployeeID variable. All the classes would have that value updated instantly so they would all know what the NextID that could be use would be. No fancy footwork would have to be done to figure that out every time. A pretty lame example, but one I thought of pretty quickly.

There was a brief demonstration of creating classes (Rory, I was honored) Showing how with implementing procedures in the class you can hide the complexity of what is actually going on to get the end results of the procedure.

That pretty much wrapped up the talk on OO. There was some discussion on class hierarchies, inheritance, multiple inheritance (you can’t do it in .NET) and polymorphism but my notes kind of started to drift off there because I started paying attention to the code Rory was writing to see if he had to CType everything like I do (he did, but only with the Option Strict on, which it better be on in your projects…it is right?).

The next topic as a web service called MapPoint (and also in a more general sense because Rory has such goodness flowing from within, all Web Services and their benefits)

Web Services are more than a way to cheat remoting. They are really starting to come into their own. With web services, you get access to a huge system of information and methods to manipulate and return that information that you would have never been able to collect on your own (and still have a life outside of your mother’s basement). MapPoint is a huge system that comes to you as an XML Web service. One of its obvious benefits is that “it’s entirely platform agnostic” (provided of course your version of SOAP looks like Microsoft’s version.)

Some of the key developer benefits include:
-Maintenance: You as a developer do not have to maintain and upgrade the web service. New features and new information collected is done on the part of the service provider freeing up your time to actually give your program the functionality built around that information being provided.

-Up Time: Most Web Service provides (Microsoft included) provide a contract stating a certain amount of guaranteed uptime.

-Performance: Typically, you are also guaranteed a certain amount of performance; I think Rory quoted a statistic of now address search in MapPoint will take more than 1 second? (I’m not good a remembering statistics, but the point is it’s fast and guaranteed, not something you have to work on improving yourself)

-Device Expansion: With the power of web services you’ve expanded the types of devices that can do particular task. Because the web can now be delivered to some many different devices, cell phones, PDA’s, Rory’s brain implant, you really have expanded the types of devices you can deliver your applications to by using the Web Service.

One of my big concerns with Web Services (and I should have brought it up during Rory’s talk) is that all of the above listed benefits are also cons aren’t they? I think what I means is that you should pick and choose VERY carefully who you select to be your Web Services provider because it could become a nightmare if they aren’t providing good maintenance, if they are down a lot and if the performance is lousy. Seems to me, that it would be similar to purchasing a third party control (like a grid control) and becoming dependent on that third party to be fixing their own bugs and releasing appropriate fixes. I know a few of my applications had large complaints about parts of them that I could do nothing to fix because I chose a poor third party control to implement that had originally worked fine, but with a future release had introduced numerous performance and bugs into my application. Once you’ve partnered yourself with something like that, it becomes VERY difficult to re-write and untangle yourself from that particular control and I would imagine Web Service.

Some other cons mentioned by Rory (although he didn’t necessarily say they were cons) is that your application does become a little less clean because of how you have to implement the Web Service. A lot of array, of a lot of string types. You kind of have to program a little different because the Web Service has to be able to work for all code bases so it’s playing to the lowest common denominator. Web Services attempt to unite all languages and platforms. It was suggested to get around this sloppy code would be to create a wrapper for your particular platform and language, and I think that is a fairly acceptable solution.
And one other con for now (at least for individuals and small businesses) is that the MapPoint web service is charged in buckets of transactions. Basically the fee is several thousand dollars per bucket of transactions but apparently there is development in the works to scale it down for the small business owner who doesn’t have wads of cash laying around so this con may be gone in the near future and their may already be Web Services that are currently that are a little more economical for the individual.

Next up, was a talk about Optimizing Web Applications. Rory show a few tools (Performance Monitor and Application Center Test also check out Jakob Nielsen and his site UseIt.com) that help you hunt down jut where in your Web App you are taking the performance hits. It’s important to realize that performance is about perception (a.k.a responsiveness); it’s not always about the numbers. When you are optimizing your application, NEVER pre-optimize, you have to find the bottlenecks first before you waste time optimizing code that isn’t a real problem. You must stress test to really find your performance problem, and to really do a stress test you need a tool to simulate stress and load (or a sweatshop of workers clicking madly). It is also important to note that just because intuitively is seems to make sense doesn’t mean it actually is faster.

It is also very important to make sure you are using the data cache wisely. This is a very complex topic and if you are developing web applications, you need to study it carefully. You need to be aware of all the caching methods and then decide for each case you come across in your development which method is going to work best for that particular case.

There were some other miscellaneous tips thrown out such as don’t use datasets everywhere, use a data reader instead, the ViewState is a great convenience for developers but adds a level of potentially unnecessary overhead to your application, but when it all comes down to it, a few tips aren’t going to help you. You really do need to do a lot of research for yourself on optimizing and performance tuning, because this topic is much too big and solutions are just too specific to the particular situation for any global band-aids or fix alls to be thrown out.

So in summary, optimizing web applications is a very important and complex topic, study it carefully and become your own optimization guru.

The last topic of the event is ASP 2.0 Membership and Personalization. I really like listening to these talks, because it keeps me excited about what is coming up in ASP 2.0 and makes it a little easier to but up with the quirks and annoyances of the current version of ASP.NET.

What was shown during the presentation was just how easy it was to implement some of the common types of controls that all developers use. These controls are being developed as easily modifiable templates for developers to just drag and drop into their web application. Seeing some of the new IDE changes is just pretty cool. I am definitely looking forward to the ASP 2.0 release.

And that in a nutshell, is my summary of the MSDN event. Overall, I really liked it. The seats did get a little uncomfortable towards the end, but then again I never stood up during any of the breaks so that might have contributed to my agitation at my chair and all its chairness. The low point for me was the talk on Optimization, it’s just such a massive topic to try and cover in a short period of time. it was nice to have the reassurance that some of the caching techniques for storage and retrieval that I am using in my projects were the ones presented at the event so they kind of have the Microsoft stamp of approval, but there’s just so much more about the topic that I want to learn and the Optimization part of the talk seemed so brief. The highlight for me of course was the talk on Object Oriented Programming. It was nice going with guys who kind of understood OO, but really didn’t get a lot of the terms and seeing them walk away saying, “Oh, I get that now. Is that all that term meant?” That was nice.

So good job Rory, and for those of you out there who didn’t make it, get there next time, it really is worth the trip.

And just because I can’t resist, here’s some more Roryisms:

“I’m not a smart control freak” –Bernard (Rory’s blindness backup was pointing out that if Rory was really a control freak, as he so claims, he would have set everything up from the command prompt and this was Rory’s quick response.

“180/100 pretty damn high” – Rory going off about his blood pressure

“Turn your cell phones to ‘insert spike into side’ or some other semi-silent mode.” – Rory kindly reminding people not to interrupt his talk with William Hung singing “She Bangs”

“When doing your ratings, on the one end, 1 is absolutely horrible, then there’s, ‘I thought this talk was OK’, that’s a 9.” – Rory attempting to explain how his bonus is directly influenced by his lack of anything below an 8 for ratings.

“We’ve got some giveaways back on the table that most of you aren’t going to win.” – Rory getting everyone REAL excited about NOT winning the prizes

“The same broken bits with new broken bits.” – Rory describing the beta software that we were going home with from the event

All of the below Roryisms came up during Rory’s demonstration of creating a Human Abstraction class (involving myself as a separate class of George that inherited the base Human class)

“George is talking dirty to me” – Rory refusing to comment to a room full of developers that I told him he could be “as rough with me as he wants!” You know I love you Rory. No really, I do.

“Our George class doesn’t do a whole lot.”– Rory commenting on the fact that now function existed in the George class yet, much to the amusement of my co-workers seated next to me who agreed with the sentiment.

“Add a method to George called PlayUT2004. You don’t know or care all the stuff that goes on to get him to play; you just want him to play.” - Not really interesting or witty, but I love any mention of Unreal Tournament!

“Programming is sitting between art and science” – one of my favorite quotes by Rory from the whole event.

“George is a human and by inheriting that class he can inherit the qualities of a human once again” – Rory pointing out my lack of humanity…as a class

“A relationship based on antagonism” – Rory commenting on his loving relationship with Stuart, the officially dedicated audience heckler.

“I already talked about this and I hate this slide so I’m just going to skip it, I feel the same way about this one too.” – Rory breezing through the slides a ludicrous speed

“What the HELL is this!” – Rory’s increasing paranoia over the static coming through the speakers

“I went blind on Tuesday, does everybody get that” – Rory’s defensive response when he turned Option Strict on and his code puked.

“They are a beautiful thing” – Rory describing the difference between Exceptions and Errors

“It’s a challenge to the computer to just ‘try’ to run this code.” – Rory talking about what a Try…Catch block is actually doing.

“Yeah, re-write Google” – Rory commenting on one of his Microsoft colleagues getting a far away look on face and rubbing chin thoughtfully when Rory mentioned, “It’s not like you’d want to re-write Google.”

“too way cool for regular users” – Rory explaining why a not so advanced option was hidden in an Advance button dialog.

“Just for historical purposes, this is where I went blind” – Rory commenting at one point during the presentation just exactly where it was that the gods struck him down briefly for attempting to levitate himself with his mind.

“Design for performance, duh people!” – Rory insulting people who aren’t designing for performance.

“This slide is insulting me so I’m going to skip it.” – Rory once again taking offense from an inanimate object, but being the bigger man, skipping the slide rather than getting in a fight with it in front of the audience.

And to sum it all up, once again I am going to pay tribute to Rory and create an image in his likeness. I know it is a pale comparison to the lovely drawings Rory himself provides on his site, but I have not been a generously blessed as Rory.

This is the first installment in what I hope becomes a series of “Do you know what else Sean hates?” posts. Today’s topic, Liver.

Sean’s words (more or less)

You know what I really hate? Liver. Which dipshit had the great idea to eat the filtering organ of another creature? Oh, you know what must taste good, the poison filled organ in a cow that helps filter the food that cow ate. Mmmmm…..might as well have a big steaming bowl of shit!

You know what my favorite meal would be? Liver, Mushrooms and Broccoli. The poison filled organ of an animal mixed liberally with the fungus that carpets the paths of hell and top that off with some stinky broccoli and you’ve got a regular pukefest on your plate.

And that’s what else Sean hates.

I can’t connect to Neopoleon.com and I’m imagining the worst. I’m imagining that the world will never again read those golden gilded words so artfully typed by one Rory Blyth. I’m imagining that my wife will no longer here me quote the marvelous words typed upon Neopoleon.com. Most of all, I’m worried that I won’t have anything else to do during the day to distract me from work.

Please come back, I miss you!!!!

11-6-2004
OK, the site seems to be back up now, but Rory still seems to have taken a break, which is probably a good thing. Seems like he had quite a lot to sort out.

11-9-2004
Phew! All is well now. Rory is back and puking up words and his guts like crazy again. Thank goodness! Now I can fill in those gaps in my work day where I stared blankly at my grey cube wall by now staring blankly at Neopoleon.com looking up the big words Rory uses on Dictionary.com.

[This post was brought to you by the good people of Dictionary.com, stop on over and look something up. You might be surprised just what that word your boss called you last week really means!]

I just realized that there are very few postings about technology or development of any kind, so I thought I would pose a little question to add some validity to blog actually being the “ramblings of 4 .NET Developers”. So here’s the question, why do you love programming. Just what is it about programming and software development that makes you want to do this job. Why did you choose this career path, what was it about this field that attracted you to pursue a career in Computer Science?

For me it started at a pretty early age when I played Mr. Do! and Zaxxon on the ColecoVision. That pretty much started my fascination with programming. I didn’t really get a lot of exposure to computers growing up on the farm in central Pennsylvania, but in Junior High we did have a BASIC programming class which I took and loved. We programmed on Apple IIg computers and had to boot up with 5 1/4 floppies. It was great!! Taking that class pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to program for the rest of my life so when I graduated from high school I chose Math/Computer Science as my majors. Going to college was a slight surprise for me because I had never used any other computer other than those Apple IIg’s and I wasn’t aware that things had progressed so far. At my college we all got laptops and my roommate got quite concerned when I started asking where the boot up floppy was. I had never seen Windows95 or a mouse before, so I had a huge learning curve to overcome to catch up with the other Computer Science majors at the college. But, I made it and I’ve loved it ever since. I think for me, it’s the creation of something that I like. Also, the problem solving aspects, I mean every single programming task is solving a problem of some kind and it’s that process that I really enjoy.

So, why do you love programming?

Well, after waiting….and waiting…and waiting….to hear why people love to program, I decided to just ask Rory why he did it and he told me he also phrased that question quite a while ago….SO, since he has so many answer already to this quesiton, I thought I would just include a link to his post so anyone that cared could check it out.

And here’s some more from Rory’s ever mentioned “Don XML” character

And yet another answer to the question

And another

And here’s an answer to the question from Georgy Russell, gubernatorial candidate in California 2003

…..and another blogger tackling the question of why they became a programmer

and another

and so many more!!!!