Friday Five

1. Do you wear any jewelry? What kind?

I wear my gold claddagh wedding ring.

2. How often do you wear it?

I only take it off when I'm swimming / diving.

3. Do you have any piercings? If so, where?

I have a pierced ear, but haven't worn …

I had fun over the holidays, jazzing around with genetic algorithms, C#, and the Pocket PC. Time to go back to work and finish some articles...

Why is pingback / trackback a good design? Why isn't the referer [sic] header the way to automatically track pages that link to you? I was thinking of writing a pingback server for .NET, but on closer look, it seems inelegant. I only had a few hours sleep last night / this …

Friday Five:

1. What was your biggest accomplishment this year?

Writing Thinking in C#, a 1,000-page technical book. Although I started it in September of 2001, I did 80% of the work in 2002. * *

2. What was your biggest disappointment?

Despite having the content of Thinking in C# essentially …

MS Must Ship Sun's Java

Mmmm.... DirectX from C#...

According to the Register, Microsoft is lining up to buy Macromedia. It's Flash they want. via [Scripting News]

Ah, now this makes sense. Not because of the anti-J2EE nonsense in the Register article, but 90% because of Flash and 10% because of Cold Fusion. The Price:Book ratio for Macromedia …

Joe Strummer, RIP. The one time I saw Joe Strummer in concert was when he was singing vocals for The Pogues. Oh man, that was a good concert. Well, I guess I know what's on the turntable today...

DirectX 9 Released. Including managed libraries and C# support! Woo-hooo! Note that you have to download not just the DirectX for C# SDK, but the DirectX SDK 9.0 Developer Runtime in order to get the Managed Direct X (MDX) libraries.

But that doesn't mean I'm not happy to see you, too

The LAT notes the conviction this week of a man who smuggled rare monkeys into the U.S.--in his pants. Upon discovering four endangered birds and 50 exotic orchids in his suitcase, officials at Los Angeles International Airport …