Scott Hanselman suggests a new term to use among us geeks to save time. Scott propose:

We need a word that says "I know tech" when you're on the phone with tech support, you'd just say "Fizzbin" and they'd know.

His preferred conversation would go like this:

"Hi, Internet Tech Support...what's your issue?"

"Fizzbin."

"You have an IP?"

"No. Your DHCP isn't passing out IPs. Am I banned?"

"Looks like your MAC is xxxx, you've been running a torrent?"

"Yes, I'll stop."

"Cool. You're un-banned. Fizzbin."

"Sweet. Catch you later."

Neat!

He's done it again! Torbjørn has a new Contiki strip out featuring Dan North. Check it out yourself here: http://flickr.com/photos/kjempekjekt/2818284229/sizes/o/in/set-72157605618999330/

Only hope Dan think it's as funny as I do

Just so it's clear; Dan left quite an impression at Contiki and everybody had I great time. I think Dan did to. I just hope we get the chance to invite him back some day.

Update: More on this story here.

I've been playing around with an email tool that I've created to send out emails to NNUG members. It's just a simple command line tool sending an email to each person in a list to avoid using bcc which sometimes get hooked in a spam filter. Another thing this tool does is to take an html page (an html formatted email), scan it for images and embed the images using the AlternateView class and its LinkedResources collection for sending as an html email.

The emails sent by this tool looked ok in Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail on every test I did. Except for when I decided to use the tool to send out an official NNUG invitation to 300 members! The only change I had done was adding one extra image. I noticed that the email I got on my Hotmail account had a wrong image at the end. The image used was the same as the second image in the email. The reason was not hard to find.

When I add images to the LinkedResources collection, I name the images/files nnug[someNumber].jpg like this:

nnug0.jpg, nnug1.jpg, nnug2.jpg etc.

This worked fine for all images up to nnug10.jpg. Can you see why nnug10.jpg did not work and what the bug is? The last image that was supposed to be nnug10 was showing up as the second image instead (nnug1). E.g. nnug10 = nnug1! Hmmm.... Come on!

Then my apology. To all members of NNUG with a registered Hotmail account and to Christian Weyer:

I'm sorry that I did not discover this bug before, so I could have changed my algorithm. Sorry to you Christian for being nnug1.jpg! You replaced the NNUG logo, resulting in the email ending with:

  Kind regards [image of Christian]

instead of

  Kind regards (image of NNUG logo)

...giving the email a bit different meaning than I intended

Btw. don't forget to sign up for the NNUG events by Christian Weyer and Dan North 25th and 27th August!

Found the Complexitor comic through PolymorphicPodcast. This looks like it has great potential, so go over and subscribe. He (Scott Fletcher) will try to have a new strip ready every Wednesday. Really looking forward to how this one is going to turn out. Man those graphics looks great!

A great friend and colleague of mine, Torbjørn Marø, have created at comic strip (the contiki strip) with people and stories from the company we work for, Contiki. For us this is great fun, but I suspect we're not alone. Great work Torbjørn!

As of now there are two strips available:

Btw, this is me :

Looking forward to the next one!

At Contiki we have a lot of fun. Both with programming and other things. One of the activities we do a lot of is fußball (aka. table football). Fußball has become such an integrated part of almost everyone's day that if someone don't play at least once during the day, something got to be wrong. It's a really a nice game for breaks. One game takes from 5-10 minutes.

Programmers (and others too I guess) often tend to work for long periods of time in front of the computer, without taking a break. Research has showed that taking frequent breaks improves productivity and lessens the risk of injuries. There's probably a lot of writing about this topic, but one interesting article I found was this: Take a Break and Refresh Your Productivity. Fußball is a great way of having this small break once in a while. So that was the excuses, now to the fun stuff!

Last week we finished a 10 month long league. Torbjørn (our Web lead) has created a great app for entering and keeping track of scores. During these 10 months I've played 350 games, some played more others less. Take a look at Torbjørn's blog for more about the app (in Norwegian). Now however, he's extended the app to support a Contiki league and I'm looking forward to a great season of fußball!

I don't know how big fußball is in Bergen or Norway in general, but I would really like to know. Do your company have a fußball table? Let me know! I like to think we've been quite good at it and it would be fun to challenge another company in a game. Anyone up for it? I also have a plan to do some fußball stuff through NNUG, but I'll blog about that later.

Our table

THE table we would kill to get

Our glass fußball room in the middle of the working place

Worlds biggest fußball table

And to end this off, here are some inspiring fußball videos: