I decided to go a little meta for this year’s XML DevCon:

10. Top 10 List of Top 10 List of Top 10 List Ideas (a little too meta)

9. Top 10 Reasons that XAML Uses XML (Couldnt figure out a good representation of gradients in EDI)

8. Top 10 Secrets of the CLR (Boxing was almost called Richtering)

7. Top 10 Members of the XML Community Least Likely To Fit In At Burning Man (I don’t want to see Doug Purdy showing up at the ice tent in his thong…)

6. Top 10 Members of the XML Community Most Likely To Fit In At Burning Man (Wasnt Rory born at Burning Man?)

5. Top 10 Similarities Between Team America Characters and XML Community Members (XML: Heck yeah!)

4. Top 10 Reasons That Raw XML Programmers Exhibit More Animal Magnetism Than, Well, Anyone Else (Tim Ewald is really all the evidence we need…)

3. Top 10 New Enterprise Features in Visual Studio Orcas (Clippy: It looks like youre designing an insurance agency schema. Can I help you with that?)

2. Top 10 Reasons Democrats Are More Likely To Be XML Programmers Than Republicans (89% of the angle brackets should not go to the top 1% of programmers!)

1. Top 10 Reasons That The Red Sox Are Going To Kick Butt! (Just pandering to the crowd…)

Chris Sells (with help from Scott Hanselman, Tim Ewald, Matt Powell and Scott Bloom)
Applied XML Developer’s Conference
Friday, October 20th, 2005

I just found the most awesome site: http://grouphug.us. So far, this is my favorite.

“More and more people I know know more and more people I know.” –Melissa Sells

An Esquire magazine author hires not one but two Indian assistants and outsources practically everything but watching TV to them. By the end of the article, he’s outsourced writing the article. I don’t know if it’s true, but it is funny (and scary).

A story about how the world would be if MS never existed.

I come from a world where I had a Mac at home and a Unix box at work, giving me the best of both worlds in the late ‘80s. After that, I got a job at Intel programming Windows 3.1 and wondered why the hell this piece o’ crap ran most of the world. 15 years later, I’m a happy Windows user and programmer. Did I change or did Windows?

Aha! I finally figured out where I know Shepherd Book from and I now understand the references to the fact that he wasn't always a Shepherd. At one point, when he was much younger, Book was Det. Ron Harris from the 12th precinct in Los Angeles! I believe the low point in his career was in episode 135 and 136 (a rare two-parter) where Harris turns a low-budget pornography investigation into a major motion picture. The series only survived another 14 months before Harris changed his name and joined the clergy, eventually ending up on the Serenity. It all makes sense! That Buffy guy is quite the genius... : )

IMDB: “8.4/10”

Oregonian: “A-”

Wired News: “And it’s those human elements — the undeniable chemistry between the crew, the tense standoffs between good guys and bad, Mal wrestling with his conscience — that make Serenity work.”

New York Times: “Scene for scene, ‘Serenity’ is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas’s recent screen entertainments. ”

I never knew about the series while it was new, but have seen it 2.5 times since it came on DVD, loving it all the way through every time (last weekend, we watched it straight through). And not only that, but my family loves it, too, which is why I haven’t asked my geek friends to come along to this one with me; this is a sci-fi movie that my whole family is looking forward to. How often does that happen?

These light sabers look very cool. It'd be nice to give my boys something that they could fight with that didn't break in 5 minutes (of course, I might need one, too, just as a backup...).