Caffeinated Coder

It turns out that my co-workers have found a new hobby. They’ve been secretly practicing this dance routine at lunch time. Thanks to Grif for helping to capture this secret footage.
NOTE: If no window displays below, then you will need to install the flash player. If your connection is slow, then the video might also randomly pause. If that is the case, just pause it and give it a chance to completely download before viewing it.

Update: Temporary issue importing video from old blog. Jib Jab video can be seen here

I only got 4 out of 10 on the Programmer vs Serial Killer Quiz. I either need to brush up on my profiling skills or else make it a general policy not to hang out with programmers any more.

I met a lot of amazing people at the ALT.NET conference, but the one that impressed me the most was Scott Guthrie. Besides being one of the nicest and most unassuming alpha-geeks I’ve ever met, he had an uncanny understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of not only Microsoft technologies, but a vast array of other technologies, languages, and open source frameworks.

In some ways, the ALT.NET Conference was the ultimate testament to the effectiveness of his soft-spoken style. Despite presenting to a crowd that tends to be vocally critical of Microsoft, he had clearly won the respect and undivided attention of almost every attendant by the end of his presentation on the new MVC framework. Even Scott Belware, who frequently publishes rabid anti-microsoft rants like this one, made a comment indicating that he wished Scott Guthrie was the top dog at Microsoft.

Although being a soft-spoken gentleman has its public relations benefits when interacting with the developer community, I fear that his current image isn’t quite as hip as some of his competitors, such as DHH, the creator of Rails, or Steve Jobs, the flamboyant founder of Apple.

In order to make this developer icon of Microsoft more competitive in the public relations realm, I’ve taken it upon myself to do some pro-bono image consulting and attempt to jazz up his image a little more.

Introducing the new developer face of Microsoft…Scott Guthrie…starring in his new action hero role…Unnecessary Force.

NOTE: If you have trouble seeing this video, try visiting my old blog here to see jibjab video.

A special thanks to Scott Hanselman, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Scott Bellware, and David Heinemeier Hansson for their riveting co-starring roles.

No, the fact that Rob Conery may or may not be partial to stealing underwear is not the commonality I had in mind . So what is their connection? First a little background for those of you not familiar with either of these characters.

For the culturally illiterate among you, the underpants gnomes are characters from a classic South Park episode that satirizes Starbucks, large corporations, and people who assume mom and pop shops are inherently better than giant corporate chains like Starbucks.

The gnomes are little men who sneak into the room of a hyper-caffeinated character named Tweek and steal his underpants at night. Of course, nobody believes Tweek when he first tells them about the thieving underpants gnomes. But, eventually the gnomes are caught in the act, at which time it is revealed that they are really businessmen who know all about corporations and have a three step master plan to make profit.

There is one slight catch. When questioned about step 2 of their plan, which consists of only a question mark, none of the underpants gnomes actually knew what step 2 was. It seemed like a little bit of an oversight to the characters of South Park, who did not immediately grok the connection between stealing underpants and making profit, but that didn’t seem to bother the underpants gnomes.

That brings us to Rob Conery, who is best known for being the creator of SubSonic, a popular open source framework that does Railsesque database scaffolding and code generation. He’s also an excellent blogger and the most recent addition to my top 10 blog roll because of posts like these.

He recently announced that he is going to work for Microsoft and that he would possibly be paid to work full time on SubSonic, which is surprising because Microsoft isn’t exactly known for its patronage of the open source community.

Following Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman, Rob makes the third popular blogger in as many months that Microsoft has wooed to join the Micro-Collective. Does anyone sense a trend?

For those of you who haven’t had your morning coffee yet and still don’t grok the obvious connection between Rob Conery and the underpants gnomes, I’ll spell it out for you.

Thanks to them, I now have a solid three step business plan of my own, which includes the following steps:

1. Drink lots of grande, triple-shot, non-fat lattes
2. ?
3. Make a huge profit by becoming a popular blogger and subsequently getting hired for Microsoft.

Following the lead of the underpants gnomes, I’m not going to fret too much about step 2 of my plan. The important thing is to figure out how I am going to spend my big fat Microsoft signing bonus that will soon be coming my way…at least what’s left of it after I buy the Glambo Signature Series “My Little Pony” M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight.

May I suggest the Glambo Signature Series “My Little Pony” M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight?

You might want to also consider the Good Luck Bear Molle-compatible modular armored vest for those urban warfare play dates.

For more pure surreal goodness you can visit GlamGuns.com. Start saving your pennies!

01001000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101011 01100101 01100101 01110000 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 01101101 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00111111 00100000 01000111 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101000 01101001 01101101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01101111 01110100 01110100 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101111 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101001 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 01110011 00100000 00100010 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00101100 00100000 01110010 01101001 01101110 01110011 01100101 00101100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00101110 00100010

An oldey but a goodey. I personally would have thrown an FingersSwollenLikeRaisinsException after just an hour, but who am I to judge?

Thanks to Rob Conery’s shenanigans for inspiring this thigh slapping good time.

In case your binary is a little rusty, here is a snippet of Boo code that will do the translation for you (posted by Ayende on alt.net newsgroup). You can simply paste it into a Boo project using the SharpDevelop IDE or quickly translate it yourself to C#.

code = “1110000 1100101 1100001″ #paste binary data here
words = code.Split(char(’ ‘))
for word in words:


Of course, you can also google for binary converter web pages, but what fun would that be?

Thanks to Dewayne Christensen, I have finally picked a name for Caffeinated Coder Jr. (or Little Miss Caffeinated Coder), who is due to arrive at the end of March. If it is a boy, we were thinking of naming him Alexander, but now I’m going to give my wife the hard sell on naming him “Alexander;); Drop Table Students;–”.

I got the idea from this comic he sent me from xkcd.com.

I just discovered that the birthday prank I wrote about last week is actually somewhat of a tradition around here. In order to commemorate the last week of a fellow employee who was leaving, an email was recently circulated that reminisced about some of the more memorable moments during his three year tenure. Here is an excerpt from the email along with some of the picture that were included.

…as many have come to see first-hand recently, birthdays at SF can be challenging for the birthdayee. So some people who would like to remain anonymous decided to hit him two-fold… first they took each item in his cube and “foiled” it. I will point out some of the highlights… like the foil tissue paper… or the foiled poster of Lt. Deanna Troi in her bathing suit on the beach of one of the Moons in the Beta Portalan System… or each book and coin being foiled. Then after that was done… someone else took a bunch of Dixie cups and filled them each with water… so full that the water was actually higher than the top of the glass*… such that he couldn’t even move any of the glasses without spilling some water….

* When water is higher than the top of the glass, it is a phenomenon known as Grif Full ™. There is currently a patent pending on this complicated process by Grif Sims, who I can only speculate is one of the evil geniuses behind these birthday shenanigans.

Needless to say, I was quite impressed by the prankster’s attention to detail. I especially like the foiled Kleenex.

NOTE TO SELF: Take a couple of weeks of vacation around my birthday next year…

I would like to wish Jacob Shafton from StoreFinancial a most festive birthday today!

When I came in this morning, this is what I saw in his cube. The opening was closed with Saran wrap and the cube was filled nearly to the top with shredded paper (we’ll call it Enron confetti). Keep in mind that he is well liked here. I hate to see what they do to people who get on their bad side.

There have been a lot of criticisms of ALT.NET by bloggers like Colin Ramsay who claim that the nascent movement is elitist, divisive, and exclusive. Several of the attendees have balked at this view, but I will offer conclusive proof that the truth is much more dire than outsiders like Colin could have ever imagined. Here are shocking photos from the ALT.NET conference that prove just how far these ALT.NET’ers are willing to go to keep the movement pure and free of Morts.

Scott Belware’s first order of business at the conference was to make all the participants take a 6,000 question standardized test over obscure open source trivia to prove their worthiness.

The test must have been too hard for Martin Fowler, the author of Refactoring, because here you can plainly see him trying to cheat by sneaking a peek at someone else’s answers.

Scott Hanselman was so upset when he failed the test that he went on an all night drinking binge. He tried to cover it up by claiming that he didn’t drink and walking around the bar with a coke instead of a beer, but does this look like the face of a sober man to you?

Joe Ocampo from LosTechies passed the test, but his score was too low for him to learn the secret handshake. This picture shows how distraught he was after Scott Bellware broke the news to him.

James Newkirk, lead developer of NUnit 2.0 and author of “Test Driven Development in Microsoft.NET”, also managed to pass the test, but was kicked out after he expressed his disapproval of the Behavior Driven Development approach to testing. James takes his revenge here by dropping a water balloon on Scott Bellware from the top of this balcony.

Fearful that he would soon come under attack by a gang of angry morts, Scott Bellware suited up in his gladiator outfit to defend the ALT.NET secrets. He also gathered a gang of gangsters to do his bidding. Below, several tough looking goons surround Martin Fowler because he didn’t know what Ayende’s favorite color was.

The incident that finally caused the conference to deteriorate into pillaging and burning was Scott Guthrie’s declaration that Scott Bellware was a mort.

The ensuing riot led to the majority of the attendees spending the night in jail. If you don’t believe me, just look at the police lineup photo that I uncovered. The witness successfully picked out the ALT.NET public enemy number one, David Laribee, who started it all with this post where he coined the phrase ALT.NET. His clearly anti-Microsoft body language probably gave him away.

The next time you hear something bad about the ALT.NET group, just remember that the reality is probably far worse than the mild claims floating around the blogosphere