I've been reading The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam and it's a great book on visual thinking. He provides some structure to common problem solving skills that involves drawing. However, I found a video where Kermit the Frog shows the dangers of this kind of visual thinking.

Kermit and friend demonstrates the dangers of visual thinking.

Ok, not really, but I got my Evil Mastermind t-shirt from Source Gear. The payment was that I had to post a picture of myself wearing it. I don't really like getting my picture taken, so I created this picture instead (hopefully it's good enough).

If you want the full story for the picture, read the Evil Mastermind comic book.

[image lost due to blog update]

The picture of me was created with the Simpsonizer. I added the Evil Mastermind image and the text using Paint.Net.

Source Gear (the company that sent me this t-shirt) is run by Eric Sink. Eric has also written a book called Eric Sink on the Business of Software, coined the term Micro-ISV, and has a great blog that I read regularly.

According to the NFL, watching the Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (sounds like stupor troll) this Sunday might make you a violator of copyright law.

According to numerous news articles I've read lately, the NFL has asked the Fall Creek Baptist Church to halt their plans for watching the game by citing violations in copyright law. According to these articles, the NFL has stated that watching the game on a television larger than 55 inches is a violation of copyright law. I hope you kept your small screen TV around :). Apparently it's against copyright law to use the name in a promotion as well. I'm sure there is more to the story than what is reported, but I was unable to find a copy of this policy on the website for the Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

I can understand them getting upset at people that charge admission to watch the game, but it seems that this is a bit ridiculous. Does this mean you can't have your neighbors over to watch the game? You can't watch the game if you bought that 61 inch TV? I would like to see them try to enforce something like this. It would be interesting to see if a court would uphold the screen size or limit the number of guests for a party that included showing the game. Does all copyrighted material have similar restrictions?

It will be interesting to see if angering Christians just before the big game will effect the ratings. I've already received emails from people asking me to boycott the game. I certainly won't be watching the game on Sunday. Of course, I don't watch sports anyway so it's not much of a threat :).

If you do watch the game, let me know if the Go Daddy commercials are any good. I am all for the "sex sells" philosophy of advertising :). Their website includes commercials that have been rejected by whoever it is that approves the commercials (thank Gore for the Internet).

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all my loyal readers that helped me achieve this award. Special thanks go to my wife, Christine, and family that have sacrificed so much so that I could write these blog posts.

Person of the Year- You

Is the government hiding something from us?

Germany - Google Maps

I haven't worked seriously with web application development for a number of years and recently decided to try my hand at it again.

On the whole, I like ASP.Net 2 and master pages. ASP.Net 2 is much more like the original ASP which allowed for rapid development of web applications. I'm not saying that ASP.Net wasn't an improvement over ASP, but they did move away from some of the core benefits of ASP (such as being able to view changes to code without recompiling).

However, in my recent exploration of web development I decided to try out tableless layout, basically using divs and CSS to create a layout instead of using tables (Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important). After playing with it for a few hours, It seems that CSS (and CSS compliance) still has a way to go before this becomes as robust as tables are. It's difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get divs to work the way I want (often things that were trivial using tables).

[Table Senryū...]

Tables are so lovely

so easy to design

now they are no more

Now you know why I'm a programmer instead of a poet :).

Here's my new fake identity...

Christopher M. Gibson
4106 Stonecoal Road
Grelton, OH 43523

Email Address: http://spambob.com/search.cgi?addr=Christopher.M.Gibson (link is now dead)

Phone: 419-550-0656
Mother's maiden name: Clark
Birthday: April 27, 1973

Visa: 4556 8616 1018 8182
Expires: 5/2007

Fake Name Generator