Tonight is Robert Scobles Cheesy 40th Birthday party.

Happy belated birthday and have a great time.

The big 4-0 was one my favorite birthdays (so far.... )

http://www.AcehAid.org

and here is the link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5552696499

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have had an old Micron laptop hanging around for years that I can't give away. Nobody wants it. It only has 40MB of RAM and it is not possible to increase it. Therefore you can't put Windows XP on it.

However, today I am upgrading it from Win95 to Win98SE, putting IE6 SP1 and Office XP (extra license) to give to a family that lives up the road from my parents. Their house burned down to the ground on Thursday and they have nothing. Not even their toothbrushes.

My mom told the teenage boy in the family that helps my her and my dad with their dogs about the computer (and that it's old and does not have the latest cool stuff on it) and he is beyond thrilled. It was certainly worth holding on to!!! So just remember that next time you look at that old hardware that you think is too dated to be of value to anyone.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Big thanks to the guys at thinktecture who found themselves a little late to reply "YES YES OF COURSE!!" to being in the first .NET Celebrity Auction to Aceh Aid at IDEP. They have offered to cover the eBay seller fees that Stephen and I have to pay for this auction. We have tried to contact eBay about removing the fee of 1.5% for any amount our auction recieves abouto $1,000 (that's the total not the 30 individual donations). eBay is very careful about trying to protect buyers from the many many fraudulent "charity auctions" and unfortunately it has made things extremely complex and difficult for Stephen and I in trying to make this thing fly.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Update: it was cancelled

In case you were wondering about the status of the mini Code Camp this weekend, it is totally on, regardless of the forecast.

Thom Robbins has said that if for some reason they do decide to cancel (sounds highly unlikely) he will post something over here on his weblog.

http://www.AcehAid.org

VTdotNET member Zachary Kent has set the date for the first Vermont Code Brew. It will be February 2nd from 6-8pm.

Zach has created a Yahoo Group to help manage this.

Group name: VTCodeBrew
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTCodeBrew
Group email address: VTCodeBrew@yahoogroups.com

The first meeting will be at his office so except Root Beer not Draft Beer!!

He's getting the knack of the blog world since his first Yahoo group post points to Bill Evjen's Code Brew post and Robert Hurlbut's Boston Code Brew post!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Just an FYI - PCConnection has a rebate up until 1/31 for a 128MB thumbdrive ($4.95 after rebate) and a 128MB SD card ($1.95 after rebate)! (plus shipping)

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just went through an interesting process with Michael Stiefel who is also presenting on WSE2.0 at the Web Edge conference.

What we are doing is basically a part one and part two talk.

His talk, "Securing Service-Oriented Architecture with Microsoft's WSE 2.0" is a more advanced version of my part two though it covers a lot of the same ground.

So after talking back and forth about it, I finally decided that I can just literally remove the 2nd half of my presentation. It was hard to do. All of my hard work at trying to learn this stuff so I can explain it - gone. My nature is to want to stay in the room for the entire day and tell people every single thing I know about a topic. But our allotted time is only 50 minutes! So this was the realistic approach. At least Michael's talk is at the end of the day, so he actually can go long if he needs to. I added the subtitle "laying the groundwork".

For all of us very independent people I think it's a good exercise to do something like this. Hopefully it will help me in the future where I always feel like I am being remiss if I am not telling every single detail of my topic.

http://www.AcehAid.org

One of the groups that is intimately involved with Aceh Aid at IDEP is the local surf guides from Sumatran Surfariis.

Okay - yes they are adorable and hunky young guys, but that's not my point. They are part of the amazing effort that is being made in Sumatra. They have been writing about what they are doing and seeing and it's really interesting reading. Right here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is  a LOT going on around the Web Services Edge East Conference that is in Boston from Feb 15 - 17th.

Right now there is still a $300 discount available until Jan 21st.

15% discount to MSDN Subscribers (that's on the registration page).

There are a TON of special events that are free.

So, you can register for FREE to get an EXPO Pass (normally $50, but free courtesy of Microsoft) which also gets you into the Keynote (Ari Bixhorn from MS and Matt Ackley from EBay are doing keynotes).

Or you can register for that and the FREE tutorials.

All of the above is detailed on the registration page.

The INETA Sponsored Cabana night is free and requires no registration.

If you are in the Boston area, you should DEFINITELY at least take advantage of all of the free events going on!! Stay tuned for more details about the INETA Cabana night (Wed 2/16 6pm - 8pm).

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have a new client that I am doing some mentoring for. I think that I love this more than any other form of billable work.My mentoring clients are mostly companies that are just now getting started with .NET, so with my nearly 3 years of .NET experience and a bizarre memory of many resources ("oh yeah, I remember there was an article on that by so and so last summer"), I can really help VB6 developers leapfrog past a lot of their learning curves for the specific tasks they need to do (including planning and architecting the program).  I really really enjoy doing this. Getting paid for it almost feels like a bonus.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Awesome, thans Sofwaremaker for checking this out!

I am very excited to update to dasBlog 1.7. I know that Omar and Scott and their team have been working their butts off on it!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Lora reports that there are 4 tablet pc's being given away at the Windows Anywhere conference, which is co-located with VSLive in SF Feb 7-10.

The first tablet will be given away at the pre-con.

The second at the end of the first day of sessions (Tuesday)

The thrid at the end of the 2nd day of sessions (Wednesday)

The last at the post-con.

Collect raffle tickets at each of the sessions (including mine, on Wednesday morning!)

Very cool.

http://www.AcehAid.org

They just don't work for me.

Next idea: Rich has made me a mini-white board that is on the wall right next to me.

Next time I get an email or a phone call of something I am saying "yes, I'll do that" I can just write it down on the white board.

We'll see how this latest attempt pans out.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Update 2/10/05: The auction raised an amazing $10,138!!!
Thanks to everyone who bid and helped us promote it.
We will hopefully be having another one soon.

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1/23 9AM EST: WE WILL BE LIVE - GO HERE FOR DETAILS and LINK!

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[I will put the start date here the moment we are able to and then I will put the link to the auction right here when it goes live, so if you are interested in the auction, bookmark this post!!]

PLEASE SEE STEPHEN FORTE'S BLOG POST REGARDING DETAILS OF THE 30 CONSULTANTS AND UPDATED DETAILS ON HOW THE AUCTION WILL FUNCTION.

30 of the top trainers and consultants in the .NET community will be auctioning off one hour each of their consulting time in a big EBay auction that will start sometime in the next few days (or early next week). Watch this space (and those of the auction items <g> for the date to be announced.

The auction is to benefit Aceh Aid at IDEP who is doing amazing disaster recovery work in Aceh Province Sumatra. All of the money goes DIRECTLY to helping the victims since Aceh Aid at IDEP is a local organization in Sumatra.

You can learn more about what they are doing from the above link, by reading Susi Johnston's weblog or by filtering on Asia in my own blog. This is the group that Keith Pleas and I have been working with so closely since the Tsunami disaster hit.

Who is in this auction?

Lots of INETA speakers, Regional Directors and Wintellects!!

From Wintellect: Jeffery Richter, John Robbins and Jeff Prosise

A slew of amazingly brilliant RDs: Michele Leroux Bustamante, Jonathan Goodyear, Andrew Brust, Richard Campbell , Kimberly Tripp, Adam Cogan ,Malek Kummou , Jackie Goldstein, Goskin Bakir, Hector M Obregon , Patrick Hynds , Fernando Guerrero , Kate Gregory , Joel Semeniuk , Scott Hanselman , Barry Gervin , Clemens Vasters , Jorge Oblitas , Stephen Forte, John Lam, Edgar Sánchez, Thomas Lee, J. Michael Palermo IV, Vishwas Lele

And if that's not enough, a few more brilliant stars: Deborah Kurata, Ted Neward and Kathleen Dollard 

This is a wonderful contribution by these people and demonstrates what I love so much about this community.

So open up your hearts (to enable Aceh Aid at IDEP continue with their phenomenal and necessary work - it is still a horror story in Sumatra and we cannot let up), open up your minds (to having access to some of the most talented .NET programmer consultants in the world) and warm up those credit cards!

Also, since there are many more wonderful and brilliant people in our community that I am sure will want to do this too (we just had to limit ourselves for this first one) I hope that we can do more of these in the near future!

How this will work

This will be ONE BIG FAT auction. The top 25 bidders will win. Bids start at $100. The auction will last 10 days. Unlike a typical "multi-item" auction, where the winners would pay the amount of the lowest winning bid, in THIS auction, the TOP bidder will get first pick of consultants and then on down the line. You will pay your winning bid directly to Aceh Aid at IDEP's PayPal account: acehaid@tides.org.

Due Diligence

Online Donations are made via PayPal donation to acehaid@tides.org. The Tides Foundation is a US-based 501c3 non-profit, permitting tax-deductible contributions and supported by many corporate matching programs. PayPal takes most credit cards. For people who cannot use PayPal , there are other ways to make the payment. Money can be wired directly to Aceh Aid at IDEP or (for the 501c3 payment) checks can be mailed to Tides or money wired directly to them. So don't worry about not being able to participate. If you can do any of these 4 options, BID BID BID!!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is just a reminder

Tomorrow's meeting of VTSDA will feature a  panel of software business owners and marketing experts discussing effective marketing for our businesses.

The meeting is from 11:45 - 2:00 at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington.

See the VTSDA website for more details.

http://www.AcehAid.org

We all know that John Robbins, Jeff Prosise and Jeffrey Richter are .NET Rock Stars. But now it's official!

I also want to commend the author, Esther Schindler, on a great set of questions.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Digital Bridges is a program at Middlebury College and they are putting on a full day workshop wtih professionals from many different businesses that either do business on the web or provide infrastructure. Sounds interesting.

Here's more info on the event.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am doing this talk at Visual Studio Connections on an inspiration from my painful experiences of diving into C# on occasion. There are a bunch of things that bite me over and over since I don't use C# consistently enough. I also remember spending about 1/2  hour trying to figure out how to say "OR" in C#. Lots of syntax things like how to construct IF may not seem hard, but if you have been doing it a different way for 5 or 6 years, it really is hard to sort out brackets here, parens there, brackets sometime, not others. And all of the problems that cause compile time errors that are not picked up by intellisense are huge pain points as well, especially when the compile time error message isn't really telling you what the problem is. Sure there are extensive books on the differences, but I am just going to try to point out the things that a VB6 dev probably uses the most frequently and the most naturally, and try to ease some of the pain of the transition. This isn't so much for the purpose of converting VB developers to C#, but being sure that folks are at least somewhat fluent in C# even if they go the route of VB when they make the move to .NET. This talk will actually be pretty much the same as if I were doing it VB.NET vs. C# as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Strategies for Winning Government Contracts - Practical Tips and Hands on Help for Small Business

Wed Jan 26

8:30 am to 4 pm

Capitol Plaza Hotel, Montepelier, VT.

More info

brochure (hang it by the water cooler!

http://www.AcehAid.org