I have always wondered what happens to all of the unused hats and shirts from the NFL's conference championships and Super Bowls.  You know, the ones they print up before hand to hand out to the team once they win the game?  So both teams have them printed up, and one team doesn't get to use them.  You don't really see them on ebay.  I can't find any Carolina Panthers NFC Champion stuff from this year.  I always figured that they shredded them or recycled them or something.  They must get rid of them some how because you never see them floating around and you figure someone could make some decent money selling that stuff.

According to this article on ESPN.com (read toward the bottom of the page), that the NFL boxes up all those unused clothes and ships them off to third world countries.  Well I guess that makes sense.  (Insert joke about Buffalo Bills being favorite team of third world countries here.... the author of the ESPN article did).

So I'm really hesitant to say anything about the Seahawks.  This football season, every college and pro team that I have rooted for has done terribly.  That's not to say that they were all blown out or anything, but they all lost.

Witness:
Oregon loses to Oklahoma, 14 - 17
Georgia loses to West Virginia 35 - 38
USC loses to Texas 38 - 41
Colts lose to the Steelers 18 - 21
Bears lose to the Panthers 21 - 29

...And then there are the Seahawks.  I realize that it is rather fair weather fan-ish of me, but I'm excited these days.  Seahawks in the playoffs!  Wow.  Seahawks in the championship game!  What the....  I haven't paid them much attention in, oh I don't know, forever.  Living in Oregon, they are really the closest NFL franchise around.  So from a young age you learn to root for them.  Then you realize that they suck.  At the end of each season you say "Next year will be better.", and it isn't.  I think the last Seattle jersey or shirt I owned was in second grade.  I imagine it's like growing up in the mid-west and rooting for the Cubs.  Ha, ha.  Our team is nicknamed the "lovable losers".  Only in being a fan of Seattle, it didn't feel so much loveable....just the losers part.

Anyway, I'll just lay my curse down right now.

GO SEAHAWKS!

Microsoft has some Virtual Labs up and running.
Actually, they may have been running for a while now.  I think that I saw somebody else mention them on a blog a while ago.  They are pretty nice.  Basic, but nice.
It's neat because you actually remote into a machine at Microsoft to do the work, at least on the one that I did.

One thing that wasn't so nice, was after I completed the lab it went and crashed at the step that I'm assuming would have gone to the evaluation.  Juuuuust great.  You see if you attend a lab and fill out the evaluation you get entered in a drawing to win a Pocket PC.  Well, there's one chance out the window.

If you attend four labs in a month and you are one of the first 5000, then you get some fancy action figure.

Guess I'll be doing five this month.

Oh, I suppose you want a fancy action figure too?  Here's the link to the MSDN Virtual Labs page.

So supposedly this bar down in the Mission district in San Francisco has a photo booth where you can have your pictures uploaded directly to Flickr.  Seems like a cool idea.  Here are the results:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shinesf/

[via BoingBoing]

Parent Hacks is a weblog that collects tips and wisdom from parents all over about raising their kids.  I thought it was kind of interesting.  [via boingboing]

http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspxEach year you see those "Children of the 80's/70's/whatever" lists float around the internet.  But you want to see something that will really make you feel old?  Pay close attention to the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.  Hot damn, give me one of everything! 

Most of the info I've been reading covering the show (and most of my gadget info in particular) is coming from engadget.  Two postings that really got me excited for the future were the Bill Gates Keynote post and the Sony Press Preview post.

As I sat there reading the coverage of the event, and looking at all the pretty pictures I had a flashback to my buddy Darrell and I sitting in the den at his parent's house playing on a TRS-80 and listening to some of his dad's 8-Track tapes.  Granted the 8-Track was really before my time and was old by the time that I started listening to it, but we did still use it.  Now I think about my sons, and the fact that by the time they get to the point that they are buying music or other forms of media, it will probably all be streamed directly to some device or at the very least be burnt onto some super high definition DVD/blue ray/something or other.

In the future I'll probably be asking them to help me get some music onto a tape so that I can play it on my very first ghetto-blaster (or I guess the preferred term is boom box?) circa 1981, which I still use out in my garage.  I'm sure after my iPod Mini dies off and is discarded, the ghetto-blaster will still be pumping out music.

UPDATE:
Speaking of the Bill Gates Keynot above, you can actually watch it here.

Another thing that I have been working on lately was getting my web site cleaned up. 
Although it's not nearly done, one of the first things I did was make a final decision on my blog engine.  I already talked about that earlier.

One thing that I definitely wanted to do, was take all of my old posts along with me.  I initially took a look at the basic XML files that dasblog creates.  It looked simple enough, so I started writing a quick program to convert all of my old posts (which resided in a SQL Server) and write them out to XML files that dasblog could use.  Luckily, within the first few minutes I stopped and thought "You know, I can't be the only person that has done this before."  Sure enough, Scott had a great post talking about the basics of migrating blog data from a random blog engine to dasblog.  It made the conversion super easy.  If you are considering converting from your current blog software to dasblog, you might want to bookmark that link so that it's handy when you finally get around to making the move  ;)

When some of this year's football games got too painful to watch, I spent time surfing the internt.  One thing that I really found interesting was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers.  Most of what the article talks about is common sense.  But it is nice to review sometimes.