My hubby and I have a new joke. It stems from the fact that he gets up at 6, leaves the house by 6:45 anrd doesn't get home until about 6:30 pm. I do NOT get up at 6. I usually get up about 7 and then of course I have to pet the dogs for about 20 minutes. So he's long gone by the time I'm up dressed and downstairs. We usually chat before he comes home - maybe to have him pick up a pizza or milk or something. Really it's mostly because I just miss him. He has decided to tease me now that I really do that to figure out what time he is getting home so that I can be sure to be downstairs in the office with the computer on so that as he drives up the road and sees the lights and glow of the computer screen, he will be tricked into thinking I have been sitting there all day.

It's definitely a plague of a contractor who works at home. People really think you might just be hanging out or doing anything but working. (Rich doesn't really think so though). Friends sometimes call to chat during the day and I have to figure out how to get back to work without them thinking that I don't love them enough to want to talk to them. If a client calls and I don't answer the phone, they might think I'm out skiing or something. Clients calling in the morning often ask if they woke me.

I have been working for myself since about 1989...that's 15 years. But this never seems to change. Sigh.

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Rod Paddock, Code Magazine editor (and so much more...) is hoping to pull together a geek dinner while in Sioux Falls on 12/7.

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One of the very frequently asked questions on the WSE newsgroup is "what about whidbey". Right now, you just can't use WSE 2 with Whidbey (okay so I'm having fun with these W's...). But (via Matt Powell) Hervey says that some of the worst hindrances have been dealt with and we should be able to start experimenting with WSE & Whidbey when WSE 2 sp2 comes out. Ahh, there go the rest of my Friday nights! Whoopee.

update: chatting with Softwaremaker, I learned that he was using WSE2.0 SP1 with Whidbey with no problem. I had never even tried it!

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Looking for a Java Developer with a strong background as a sysadmin? A girl with brains and spunk to boot? A person with some serious e-commerce experience? Someone who could probably learn C# faster than you could say, ummm, I can't finish this sentence, sorry.  A programmer that would be a lot of fun to have in the office and definitely one that you want on your team if someone is even thinking of bullying you? Look no further....

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Roman is one of my favorite SQL Server gurus. Okay, maybe I'm jaded becuase he lives nearby and is a GREAT cook, too! Roman is now posting weekly SQL Server tips on his blog. I emailed him and said "really?  YOu are going to keep this up every week??" and he definitely plans to. Roman is a wealth of knowledge so this will be great.

This week's tip (2nd week) is about a problem I know personally. Connecting to SQL Server over VPN. I am a good example of someone who did just give up and go with SQL Authentication. Roman explains a work around to use Windows Authentication.

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Here's a Money Mag story on a new chip being developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. Why can't this be done for batteries? http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/29/technology/cell.reut/

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Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'm just kidding. This post inspired me.

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oops. Looks like Target's dummy data got out into the live database. It's definitely hard for large corporations to have a sense of humor about something like that. But as a number of people have noted, the bloggers have really gone to town on this.

So if you're dummy data snuck out onto a website by mistake, what would you be hawking or promoting. I've got lots of job requests with clients like "G.B." (my cat) requesting "feed me, dammit". I would be selling my pets off one by one. I would have speakers at Vermont.NET named Joe Blow who are presenting on fascinating topics like "Al Gore and the invention of the Internet".

I once worked with a company whose place holder error messages somehow got deployed into a demo package. They weren't very flattering to the user who forgot to enter a person's last name in the record data entry.

I dunno - I definitely looked at the Target thing from the perspective of a developer and felt serious sympathy for the person who let that slip through.

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After the XML DevCon was over, Dare Obasanjo said it's time for some best practices on web services, not just "how to". I wasn't the only one to agree.

Don Smith writes today about two Web Services Don'ts. Both things that I Do. Uggh. Well kind of. Don says to put all of the business logic for a web service in a separate dll. I definitely have all of the code in separate classes as opposed to in the code behind of my web service asmx file, but I compiles those classes into the same DLL.

So this is a little different than “how to“. When and why is still one to look for.

Hey, at least I don't fail the highlighted "don't" in the current Glamour's Dos and Donts!

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Dave Burke noted a phrase that I said on DNR - naked monkeys - which was how I sandwiched Natural History Magazine in between my stints at Penthouse and Playboy some thousand years ago -  that when he quoted it out of context, immediately made me think of one of my favorite albums!

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Mario Cardinal, who is one smart and very fun French Canadian geek, is hosting a web audio .NET talk show in French called BlaBla dotNET. I  know Mario  is completely great to chat with in English! And that's his second language. His first guest was Eric Cote, one of my favorite geeks in Montreal. Next is one of my other favorite Montreal geeks, Guy Barrette. Okay, so I have a bunch of favorite French Canadian geeks... That accent, those chocolate croissants...what can I say?

Darn - my high school french just won't do, though.

Mario is speaking at Vermont.NET in January on the Application Blocks in Enterprise Services. It's a great run down of the application blocks since most people only know about one or two of them.

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50-60 mph winds all night and 20-40 all morning. The poor power guys are still driving around trying to figure out why the power went out in the middle of the night. Probably some stupid poplar tree somewhere in the woods. They snap like match sticks around here. We have a huge one down in our yard today.

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Don is a bit of a rebel, you know, it's the motorcycle thing. He has had is own blog for a while over at dev4net.com but has also just started blogging on msdn weblogs (http://weblogs.asp.net/donsmith). Don's the guy who wrote the first major wse2 security article over on the dev center. He has also been a great help to me while putting together my WSE2 Security for Dummies Humans presentation (and forthcoming msdn online article).

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I finally got Norton Ghost and after hours of googling, gave up on the idea of backing up my 160GB drive which is a slave drive.

I hate using my blog for tech support, but using Ghost 9.0, is there a way to back up a slave drive in a way that I could extract files if needed? You can do that with the backup image of the primary drive.

My slave drive is partitioned into 3 drives. It did seem to find the first partition of the slave drive, called it "unknown drive", let me back it up, but did not allow me to open up and view the contents of the backup image. I don't envision myself restoring a whole drive as much as I'd want to restore a file here or there.

So I'll be leaving for my long drive a little late since copy & paste takes a while with 30 GB.

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When talking with Carl & Rory about INETA on DotNetRocks last Friday, I mentioned (not for the first time) the amazing explosion of .NET in LATAM. It always surprises me. Here is a perfect example for a blog post today.

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Larry O'Brien puts his finger right on it!

Casey Chesnut, who’s my favorite Tablet PC programmer because he does all this stuff apparently without realizing that it’s supposed to be hard,....

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Flipping through a recent issue of Visual Studio Magazine, I see not one but two pictures of the ever fun-loving Shervin Shakibi, an INETA guy and user group leader in Florida. Of course, that would be due to the fact that the article was written by Jason Beres! What a hoot. Hi Sherv!

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Through INETA, I get the thrill of seeing .NET user groups popping up all over the world. Here is Michal Chaniewski, a .NET developer in Poland who is not only translating a 900 page ASP.NET book into Polish, but just won 2nd place in a .NET competition held by Microsoft Poland. Congrats Michal! I have roots in Poland, so this stuff definitely catches my eye!

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Raymond Chen explains why folders like My Pictures would reappear after you delete them.

There's actually something that caught me by surprise in .NET that I learned to accept that is along the same lines. I have some code that needs to look for a file in the Application Data folder area for a particular program. But I don't want to use the CommonAppDataPath, as this creates a new folder for each version of the application. Therefore, I use the GetParent function combined with the folder name I always want to use like this:

dirStore = System.IO.Directory.GetParent(System.Windows.Forms.Application.CommonAppDataPath).ToString & "\filestore"

But this actually creates the CommAppDataPath folder anyway! Maybe there's an overload I'm missing and I learned to accept it. My data goes where I want it to in the long run and the users never look there anyway.

 

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800Response has a Web Developer job listed in www.sevendaysvt.com. They don't have the job listed on their website (that I can find). The job descrip says "must be familiarl with Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash, and have excellent system architecture and application/database design skills." There's more. If you can't find 7Days, maybe email blesperance@800reponse.com for a job description.

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