Sara Ford has started a bit of a humorous thread on her blog. Some really cute techno-jokes going on. For example:

Two strings walk into a bar.  The first one says, “Bartender! Bartender! I want a drink!”
The second one says, “Bartender! Bartender! I want a drink too! blaaaaaaaaah Eeeeeeeek yaaaaaaak oooooooh.”
The first one says, “Please excuse my friend.  He isn't null terminated.”

Head on over! And, find other funny quips through my humor category (especially the Joel on Software link from November!).

Jim Blizzard, the father of the Nerd Dinner, has written an open invitation to Linus Torvalds to begin attending the Portland Nerd Dinner. I second that invite!

Linus and his family are moving to Portland next week and I can't imagine a better place for him to get to know the region's nerd population.

Last night was the OIT Senior Project Software Exposition. It was Great!

I was really impressed by what we put together for this year's show. I went to last year's and heard from others that had been in previous years'... This was a much bigger and better presentation.

First, we rearranged the room to better accomodate all of the presenters and attendees. A classroom layout doesn't really fit for doing several software presentations.

Second, every student made up a poster for his or her project. All of these posters looked good and added an extra bit of professional feel to the whole show. We also used the poster images for a rolling slide show on the room's projection system.

Third, every project was very demonstrable. The two game developers even had multiple computers involved to really show off what they were doing.

Fourth, we had refreshments available. Much more pleasurable for those attending.

Finally, the invites went out to people beyond the school. The event was very well attended and I'm sure will set a standard for future senior software fairs at OIT.

And well it should!

Ironically (or is it?), I was thinking just last night that I should ping Jim to see when he wanted to do another Nerd Dinner. It's been too long for those of us who weren't in San Diego.

Apparently, Jim could sense the disturbance in The Force because I woke up this morning to find the next PND announcement:

Tuesday, June 29 @ 6:30
Washington Square Food Court
and of course, Be there and be square!

What surprises might be in store this time?

Well, did I have a rude realization this evening. I went to do some work on a web service project and Visual Studio wouldn't load the web service project.

Okay, maybe IIS isn't running correctly or I've screwed something up. I try some other /localhost/.../.aspx sites and they don't run either. Restart IIS to no avail.

Then I realize that I just upgraded ZoneAlarm yesterday (or was it two days ago?), so I shut it off temporarily. Ah, now everything is working. Time to fiddle with the settings in ZoneAlarm and figure out what isn't correct.

I tried just about every setting there was and found nothing to work. Finally I got frustrated enough to go looking for support. When I use their help system, it mentions that ZA isn't compatible with Win2K Server... I'm running WinXP. Then I try the forums and search for IIS... Oh boy, there you go.

I didn't find one person running IIS on a local system that been able to keep ZA 5.0 going. A couple even claimed that this was a prominent beta issue that has gone unaddressed.

I've now downgraded to version 4.5 until this problem is resolved. What a shame, too... I like ZoneAlarm. Hopefully, they will get it resolved soon.

In each edition of the LangaList, Fred Langa includes a “Just for Grins” entry. The latest was a link to an American Express advertisement site. It's a series of “ad-ventures” starring Jerry Seineld and Superman.

Need I say much more?

I found the Flash version somewhat lacking and clicked the “Trouble with Flash? Go to HTML.” link that gave the option for either Quicktime or Windows Media versions of the clips.

Very funny. As good or better than Super Bowl ads.

The days are counting down quickly... in just thirteen days we will be conducting the Software Exposition for the 2004 Senior Projects at OIT. There are nine projects coming to a close and all will be displayed for others to see.

If you have a chance, it would be worth stopping by to see the applications that have been built. Who knows? You might just find your Next Great Developer while you are there!

There will be free food, fun, and great bunch of people. Below are the details of where and when:

5:00pm - 6:30pm
Tuesday, June 8th

Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Rd.
(185th and Walker Road)
Beaverton, OR 97006
(503) 725-2129

The latest revision of the NUnit Addin now plugs NUnit into Visual Studio. I can't vouch for the stability of this version... I seem to be having some problems myself, but it's looking very exciting.

A good screen shot is available here.

Download is available here.

Check it out!

Mr. Hanselman is helping to improve television for all: He will be making The Apprentice.NET real at TechEd this year! Come on folks - wouldn't you rather see Bill picking an apprentice than old Donald?

Boy, does that make me want to be there.

[Update: Betsy, Chris, Jim, Patrick, and Scott have added their voices to the post-dinner Nerd din.]

I'm tempted to use the phrase 'best Nerd Dinner Yet,' but I've said that before. Last night was the best, though. At the peak, we had 34 people in attendence. That's nearly three times the usual size. Jim Blizzard will go down in history as the father of the great Nerd Dinners.

Chris Sells led an entourage of the MSDN team down from Redmond to join us. This group included Shawn Morrissey, Betsy Aoki, Matt Powell, Duncan Mackenzie, Kent Sharkey, and of course, Chris himself. Not only did they contribute financially to the Nerd Dinner, but they offered themselves up for a panel discussion and allowed all there to provide feedback on how to improve MSDN and the developer experience in general.

The award for the 'farthest travelled' went to the surprise attendee Rory Blyth. Yes, all the way from New London, Connecticut and the .NET Rocks! show. I guess he means it when he says he misses us back here.

The 'youngest' award goes to Patrick Miller... let's just say the junior high school will be lucky to have him.

Another big surprise was seeing Scott Hanselman decked out in a suit and tie:

Who would have thought?

Obviously, there are too many people to mention them all specifically... we gathered a virtual (or is that a physical one?) blogroll of attendees and will probably make that available on Northwest Evening Blend.

Folks - you don't want to miss these events. This was some really good stuff!

A few days ago, Scott chatted me up and asked if I'd tried Skype yet. I was familiar with the software since .NET Rocks! uses it as a way for listeners to call in. If you don't know already, it is a telephony product that works over the internet.

Well, either Scott or the general cosmos have schemed to make Skype the buzz for the week. Several people are beginning to realize the value and quality of the product (examples here, here, and here). In addition, I'm beginning to see talk in the trade rags.

The only BIG thing that I would like to see added is an alliance with Trillian (the consolidated IM client). I would love to have both of these tools wrapped up into one simple package... all of my instant messaging and the Skype telephony service in a single piece of software.

How about it?

I've been reading about pinvoke.net, by Adam Nathan quite a lot in blogs lately. As I am not doing any thing with interop at this time, I didn't feel compelled to go to the site. Well, I did now. My gosh, I'm impressed.

It's not just the content, either. The design and implementation of the site is wonderful, too. You can get to signature pages by searching, by browsing the directory, or by typing the name of the signature into a box at the top of the page.

To top it all off, Adam has created an add-in for Visual Studio that allows one to insert the correct signatures into code directly from the pinvoke.net site.

This is really good stuff!

Jonathan Hardwick blogs about using offline files to synchonize his laptop to his 'real' set of files.

I've been doing this since I got my laptop for school a couple of years ago. All of my school files stay on my server and I access them from the laptop and my desktop. Very little need to copy back and forth between the computers.

He mentions that one is not able to synchronize Outlook '.pst' files or Access files. I came across the solution for this some time ago, but I always forget where. Time to put it in the blog so I can find it again.

KB article #252509 shows how to use the group policy editor to fix this.

At nearly every Nerd Dinner, Chris Sells points out again how wonderful X1 Search is. In fact, he blogged about it last month.

Well, today I got a note from NewsGator that is offering NewsGator at no cost with the purchase of X1! And for those of us who already have NewsGator, we get 30% off of the purchase of X1 (which, not surprisingly, is about the cost of NewsGator)!

It's definitely time to check it out!