So the NCAA tournament is almost here, and you're wondering where you can go to win prizes. Yeah, you could go to ESPN.com or CBS Sportsline, but what's the likelihood you'll beat out 100,000 other people?

So why not try a couple of smaller pools? For my 18+ audience, why don't you try Playboy.com's Beat Dave Kaplan contest? You could win a $500 shopping spree! This one probably isn't safe for work!

How about something that is? Well, there's one at Bracketopia (I love that domain!). It's being run by the owner of Mock Draft Central, a company local to Grand Rapids. Brian and I had lunch with him a few weeks ago. He had lots of great ideas for us!

How about a chance at $1,000,000? Check out Bet Jamaica. If you pick every game right to the Final Four, you could win a cool million!

Last night, we installed Community Server on Tourney Logic's site so we could use the forums to help with support. We have been getting a lot of emails that are very similar, so we decided to get some forums to help facilitate self-help. This helps our you as a user because you can get help for common issues instantly, and it helps us because we can focus on more detailed issues, which means our users get answers faster.

We aren't using the blogs or photo gallery at this point, and it's not skinned to look like our site yet, but we wanted to get it up there quickly. After the NCAA tournament is over, we'll work to get it better integrated and probably migrate our blogs over.

We're getting a few reports that the Go-Live service is deleting valid entries. We are uploading a fix that removes the deletion the Go-Live service does until we get a handle on what is going on.

In the meantime, I suggest ensuring the Go-Live service is off. You can do this by going to the Web Services screen in the admin section, and unchecking the bottom box on the left side. Then click update. This should prevent losing data.

Even though the above should prevent the issue, once the fix is up, it would be a good idea to install that too. When it is up, it will be available here: http://www.tourneylogic.com/products/poolmanager/poolManagerSupport.aspx.

For those who use the Tourney Pool Manager, I just finished loading the teams for this year's brackets. I also cleared out the results, and set the pool to go live at 7:00 PM, and then allow entries after 8:00 PM.

If you installed with the default settings, you should be all set. The Tourney Pool Manager will automatically set itself up to be ready to go live. It will also download the teams the next time it runs.

Then, on Thursday, we'll start loading results, which will also get downloaded automatically.

I'm monitoring an installation right now to ensure nothing goes wrong. If you have any problems, I'll be around most of tonight...send an email to our support account (support@tourneylogic.com) and we'll get it straightened out!

I missed this back in December (which explains why it's under Sagestone, and not under NuSoft Solutions), but Kevin Schultz, Kevin Schuler, and Matt Hessinger have an overview of code snippets using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office on the MSDN site. According to Matt, there are 200 snippets that demonstrate the Office API.

Kevin Schultz works for NuSoft Solutions (who merged with Sagestone at the beginning of the year).

The Director of Shared Source at Microsoft is blogging. And he says the open source community has been more helpful than harmful.

I have a pretty big interest in the NCAA tournament this year. Not just because that's what we do at Tourney Logic, but because I'm a huge fan of college basketball. That, and I think Michigan State will fare pretty good.

Anyway, I'm always looking for strategies for making picks. So far, I've found one good article about just that. Of course, his last tip is don't listen to him. So much for that.

Then, Geoffrey Stein has a couple of nice articles. The first is about favorites that will disappoint, and the second is about the cinderallas. I agree with Geoffrey on one of his disappointments - sort of. I don't know how the brackets will fall, but I'm predicting that eventually Kansas will play UNC, and UNC will lose. How fitting would that be? Roy Williams left Kansas a couple of years ago to go to UNC, shortly after Kansas lost to Syracuse in the championship game. Imagine getting back to the championship two years later with UNC, and losing to the team he could have had!

Ever wondered if there was a free alternative to something you are looking at building or buying? Well, here's a site that lists a bunch of open source apps written in C#.

They have a ton of categories. If enough people use it, the datbase will only get better.

I don't do a lot of web design - if you've ever visited my site in the browser, you'd see why - but if I did, I think I would probably use this site as a nice reference.

There's a ton of links relating to everything from CSS to HTML to SEO. Nice.

Lately, I've posted about interview questions to ask. That's good for giving an interview, but what about getting interviewed? Well, there's the obvious - know the answers to the questions. But that doesn't cover everything. Michal Chaniewski has the details of how to effectively interview for a position.

Personally, I've never been afraid of interviewing, but then again, I haven't gone into many interviews blindly. For the most part (five of seven interviews), I've been recommended by someone already working there. And I've never interviewed and not got an offer (two offers for one of the interviws). And when I have interviewed, I've basically followed Michal's advice.