Last night I set up a trial FogBugz account. FogBugz is a web-based software project management system that combines a wiki, scheduling tools, bug ticketing, and customer support tools. Yesterday I saw a video of Joel Spolsky giving a demo, and I'd found it almost as riveting as a Steve Jobs keynote. I had to try it.

It's easy to set up a trial account. Just go to the main FogBugz web page, scroll down, and enter the name you would like: _____.fogbugz.com. If the name's available, you go through a quick email confirmation and they reserve your account for one day. You don't have to enter a credit card number or answer any "May we contact you about future products?" questions. They just want you to try their product, no strings attached.

Thought it's designed for teams, FogBugz has a lot of qualities I've been looking for in a personal wiki/task-manager. For one thing, the user interaction is really nice. Comparing FogBugz to other systems I've used, I'd say it's like using the iPhone compared to other phones. There's a level of thought behind it that goes beyond the utilitarian.

I suspect the feature that blows most people away is the "Evidence-Based Scheduling." It would have been easy to do what every other project scheduler does, which is add up estimates and spit out a projected ship date that reflects the team's wishful thinking as much as anything. FogBugz models the uncertainty inherent in project scheduling, based on the historical accuracy of people's estimates.

FogBugz has some other cool goodies. For example:

• Screenshot capture. You can download a tool (Windows or Mac) that lets you capture a screenshot, crop it, and upload it to FogBugz in just a few clicks. On the Mac you install it with a .pkg, which I wondered about, but upon closer inspection I understand why.
• Snippets. You can define keyboard macros, which they call "snippets," and customize the key you use to invoke them. You can *group* snippets using a "category/name" format. You can define snippets to be global or personal.
• Easy SCM integration (haven't tried this yet). They give you the scripts you need to install on your SCM server so that links are automatically created between your FogBugz tickets (which they call "cases") and your SCM commits. I've used a Trac system that did this kind of linking, and I loved it, as well as the ability to receive emails whenever somebody commits.

At the special price of $21 a month, I'm almost certain I'll get an account for my personal stuff. I would do it even at the full price of $25 a month. Before committing, I want to play with it a little more, and see if I find any dealbreakers when I get over my initial enthusiasm. It's true that even committing wouldn't really be committing — Fog Creek offers an unconditional money-back guarantee on their products. But I'd rather not have to go that route.

I never thought I'd see the day when an Ajax web app would excite me as much as a major Mac OS release. Leopard is coming out today, and yet the thing I look forward to spending my money on is FogBugz.

UPDATE: In the comments, Eric from Fog Creek pointed out that you can opt for the "Startup and Student Edition," which allows up to two users on your account for free. Naturally, I switched over to that option, and the fact that Eric pointed it out is much appreciated. I'll have more to say about FogBugz when I've used it more — I haven't been able to give it much attention just yet.

I want to like iMovie '08. The cataloging feature looks useful, and the "skimming" feature is clever. But every time I play with it, it drives me nuts. I tried using it for a real project last weekend and within a couple of minutes went back to iMovie HD.

Most of my iMovie projects involve editing together excerpts from a long video that I've imported from DV or VHS. Last weekend I had about an hour and a half of video from a judo tournament that some of my friends competed in. As I usually do for these tournaments, I wanted to create (1) a "highlights reel" and (2) individual videos of complete matches. I found iMovie '08 somewhere between cumbersome and useless for these purposes. It seems like it should have been fine, even fun; but I hated it.

Here's just one complaint: as far as I know, I can't name clips in iMovie '08. In iMovie HD I can type a short name under each clip, which is helpful for seeing at a glance which of my friends is fighting in which clip: "Nina 1," "Germain 1," "Nina 2," "Paul 1," and so on. What I do is, I import the whole thing from my camcorder, then work my way through the video finding where each of my friends' matches begins and ends, and I fill in names accordingly.

In iMovie '08 I have to look at the thumbnail for each clip to see who's in it, which is a pain because most clips look similar (two people in judo uniforms), and I have to squint (or skim over the clip) to recognize faces. This drives me nuts, even with the thumbnails at maximum size.

I'll be shooting video at another tournament tomorrow. I'm going to watch some iMovie '08 tutorials and see if they persuade me to try it again. I doubt they will.

Last Wednesday, my friend Ellen Litman was at the Happy Ending Lounge to read from her new book, The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories.

The event was part of a twice-monthly reading series hosted by Amanda Stern, whose crackling, sometimes raunchy humor made the whole thing a lot more fun than any reading I've ever been to. Besides Ellen, there were two other readers and a singer-cellist (who was a lot more entertaining than you might guess).

One of of the rules of the series is that every performer must take one risk in front of the audience, aside from whatever they're there to perform. The risk Ellen took was to tell a joke — something I'd never, ever seen her do. She's usually the one giggling at jokes, not the one regaling the audience. I confess I was a little relieved that she built the story up beautifully and the audience apparently found the punchline as surprising and funny as I did. In fact, although I'm more of a clown than Ellen is (and will be repeating her joke to a couple of Russian friends), her joke-telling that night was better than mine has ever been.

I've known Ellen since the mid-90's, when we were both working in Baltimore. In those days, she was a software engineer. None of us — and this may include Ellen herself — none of us knew what talent she had as a fiction writer. None of us could have predicted how radically her life would change when that talent was discovered.

Before there was a book, there was a short story, "The Last Chicken in America." When I first read it, I was affected by the beauty of the story itself — the humor, the poignancy, and the clean, vivid language. Beyond that, I found myself with a little extra softness in my heart for my own parents, despite that fact that they are very different from the parents in the story, and I am very different from the teenage girl who is its protagonist.

I've been working my way through the book, and I'm continuing to find that Ellen's compassion for her characters is infectious. I hope you will check the book out and find the same is true for you.