Trading Card

I was recently IMing with my colleague Rob Caron, who has a couple of neat cartoon caricatures of himself that he uses for his blog and his IM avatar, which reminded me of my own "comic book" character, which was created as a part of a promotional series of trading cards put out by Microsoft Press to promote the first wave of MS Press .net books, of which my book ASP.NET Step by Step, was one. The series was called "Masterminds of the .NET World" and told the tale of how this group of intrepid .net superheroes, led by MASTERMINDS leader Charles Petzold, fights against the evil Dr. Density.

So I decided to add my caricature to my blog, just for fun. Here's a thumbnail of my trading card. Click for the full-size version:

The funny part was that each card included a description on the back. I won't go into detail on mine (it began with "Raised in a commune"), but the description was pretty far off from my personality, probably in part because the whole promotion was dreamt up and executed without any input from me. I only found out about it after the cards came out. Still, it was very cool to get my own trading card, and an unexpected honor to be in such company as the rest of the authors in the series.