Hey Simon!
I also sent a message about the BlogAgent to Simon Fell the original author of the BlogToaster and an old co-worker of mine at StreetFusion.com (which I just found has been closed. No big surprise there...).
He remembers me even though we were sorta doing different things at the time. It was Summer 1999 in San Francisco during the peak of the dot-com mania and people were nuts to hire whatever programmer they could get their hands on. StreetFusion was building an online calendar of earnings reports for brokers all in MS (my last work for the devil. Hooray!) I was doing VB/ASP stuff at the time and had an interview for a contract there.
To show you how nuts the boom was, I had just had surgery on my mouth to correct my old overbite. My two front teeth were LITERALLY 3/4 of an inch apart and connected by a variety of wires and bands. In addition to this, I had another bar that ran across the back of the roof of my mouth to keep my jaw separated and that gave me a lisp. In this condition, I was interviewing for jobs and ran into StreetFusion. Can you imagine me walking into your office with this horrible face and a lisp that was almost unintelligible?
I remember I had a series of interviews with the people there and it wasn't really going well. Peter Drayton asked me a few questions about how to join two SQL tables and I couldn't answer them (not sure why, it was a bad day. I know SQL pretty well...), gave some sort of bullshit answer about how I always use my IDE to do that sort of thing, and he ended up having to explain to me inner and outer joins. IN the interview. After that I was shuttled off to another guy and thought, "there's no way I got this job. I look like and idiot and can't answer the most basic programming questions."
To my surprise I got the job. Weird. But then they didn't have much for me to do. It was really weird. So I ended up hanging out in the Dev room a lot with the other programmers and studying for my Java certification. That was great. No more Microsoft! woohoo! The other programmers there were really cool: The CafeSF crowd... Andrew, Mike, Connie, Seni, Chris and Eric were quite a group. We chatted for a long time after my contract was over and I left to go do Java stuff. Fun stuff. Good time.
-Russ