I've finally gotten my new blog started. Up until now, I've posted all my thoughts to Ward's Wiki, which has been a great host. Technology marches on, though, and I wanted a site I could call my very own. There's still a lot of great stuff on Ward's wiki, though, so if you haven't seen it before, check it out.

Unlike the content on the rest of this site, my blog entries are going to be informal, half-baked, and even a little wacky. I'll start by relating the story of the USB chicken.

Every programmer has experienced strange little problems in their programs and development environments. (Users of Visual Studio see more than most, but that's a rant for another day.) When I was working with my first XP team, we used voodoo to solve the problem: we would do a clean rebuild, restart the web server, etc., etc. Far too often, this would solve the problem, but we'd never know why. When we did this, we said we were waving a dead chicken over the keyboard.

Later on, I got an actual rubber chicken to act as our build token. It quickly became the tool of choice when we needed to use voodoo to fix a problem.

In 2001, the chicken got a major upgrade. I proudly present: The USB Chicken! Plug this in, and you never need to worry about your tests failing again.

Notice the green bar. :)

(I warned you this would be a little wacky. Head to the Articles section if you want something serious!)

Thanks to Rob Myers for his part in creating The USB Chicken and for digging up the picture. Sorry to have dragged you into this, Rob. ;)