Here's a market for someone to figure out how to capture. While I was in South Africa, I was talking with Microsoft S.A.'s Lillian Serobatse about buying clothes on the internet, trying them on at home and shipping the rejects back. This works well when you live in the boonies and retailers like Patagonia have their big annual sales online! Lillian was surprised. "You bought clothes on the internet?" I was surprised (at her question). "Don't you?" I asked.

Lillian explained to me that e-commerce has not really taken off in South Africa. One of the reasons, she tells me, is that like many South Africans, she LOVES to shop. The shopping trip itself is a good part of the fun - as it is for many here in the U.S. I personally hate shopping. I only go when I have to find something very specific. I don't like wandering around from store to store just looking at stuff and maybe buying something I didn't really need.

I imagine that purchasing stuff from outside of S.A. is cost prohibitive - think of the shipping! So it would be South African retailers that would benefit from this more than anyone. Perhaps a retailer in Jo'burg that does not want to open a storefront in Capetown or Durban (or visa-versa).

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rob Howard has come to Vermont on a cold, gray, cloudy, blustery day. Maybe we can make it up to him with a great pancake breakfast!

Rob is presenting at Vermont.NET tonight (thank you INETA!!) and will be giving a talk on ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks. We are very excited to have him here!

Addison-Wesley has donated 6 copies of ASP.NET v2.0 which Rob co-authored, to raffle off at the meeting! Plus we will be raffling off a copy of Infragistics Net Advantage.

Our .NET Newbie session is by Mike Soulia who teaches .NET development at Vermont Tech and also owns two awesome retail stores on Church Street in downtown Burlington (www.kissthecook.net and www.applemountain.net) which he built .NET e-commerce sites for in the very early days of ASP.NET (you may recognize the UI ). Mike will be talking about Extreme Programming concepts.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

gotta love them. I am always SO happy it's them flying the plane and not me. I am terrified of flying and every bump and jiggle the plane makes turns me a little paler. I have learned to remind myself that these guys and gals know what they are doing and I don't need to be so afraid. .Yesterday was a windy day. We didn't get the tornadoes that were further south but it was still wicked up here. Landing in D.C. was a little unnerving, but the flight in a smaller plane between D.C. to Burlington was worse. As we descended through the two cloud layers towards the Burlington Airport we found ourselves in very gusty winds. I know up at our house it was anywhere from 30 - 50mph. The plane was bouncing around a lot. I could barely contain myself when the pilot had to bank the plane a few times to circle around and line up with the runway. Even as we were merely hovering over the runway, about to touch down, the plane was still bouncing a little - side to side. That was really scary. Poor Rich sitting next to me. I was clinging to his pant leg pretty tightly (...he said I didn't hurt him). But even with all of that, they landed the plane with no problems (and I made note of the fact that there were no fire trucks and ambulances waiting on the runway  so it was really just business as usual.. )

This is what they are trained to do! It is just *me* that doesn't know how to fly a plane in turbulence. You should have seen me on the overnight flight from Frankfurt to Johannesburg. It was a really bumpy ride. I was in a cushy business class seat with Kate Gregory sleeping peacefully in the seat next to me, but I coulnd't sleep. Eventually I dozed off but was startled awake by a big bounce and then spent a good hour or so wondering how I was going to get back on the plane again to come home. Such a worrier. But I'm still here to talk about it! Yay for pilots.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Funny post from Jeff Prosise!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Adnan Masood is a lucky guy - an attendee at DevConnections who fully took advantage of his time there. He not only attended a great variety of sessions, but documented his experience very well. Lucky for me since I spent most of my time there fine tuning my sessions. You, too, can experience DevConnections ...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Many speakers have big problems with timing, especially in a conference setting when you cannot go long. Though I have practiced talks against a clock, this does not really help me when I'm in the session - if a question takes more time than I should have allowed or I ramble, then the time I took in practice means nothing. I'm sure other speakers have ways to deal with this, but I inadvertently came up with something on my own that helped me enormously last week and wanted to share it. It is probably not a new idea, but it worked well for me since I thought of it rather than trying to follow someone else's suggestion.

I had ended up with one of the one hour session slots at the end of DevConnections for my WSE3.0 Overview talk and knew that posed a problem.

I looked at the powerpoint deck and divided the presentation up by topic. Then, off the top of my head, wrote down how many minutes I thought each topic (including demos) should take. Luckily, this added up to 55 minutes!

Then in a notebook (notebook is a tip I got from Ingo Rammer) I wrote down a name for each section and then, based on how long I thought the previous section should take, what time it should be when I started that section.

It looked like this:

Start	2:45
Turnkey	2:55
Programming Model	3:15
TCPIP	3:15  (the previous was only 1 minute, so it was easier to just write down the same time)
MTOM	3:25
SecureConversation	3:35

The session was supposed to end at 3:45. I knew I was cutting it very close for Q&A, but since it was a short session, I told them at the beginning that we would not have a lot of time for Q&A and could continue it in the hallway or online afterward.

So this worked for me like a charm. I had my little travel clock right on top of the notebook and it was easy enough for me to remember to take a very quick look over there as I started each section to see how I was doing. In this way I was able to determine if I needed to speed up or if I was okay.

I wish I had come up with this prior to TechEd South Africa where we had one hour slots but were told to leave 15 minutes for Q&A, making the presentations only 45 minutes long. But now I know I can do this from now on and hopefully it will help someone else.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I cannot find a link to show you where in South Africa this particular village, but HP is working with the government to bring technology into villages like Dipichi as another attack against poverty. This is not about teaching people how to use word processing programs, but how to find information. Here is a reuters article on the project and their hopes.

Skeptics asked what use a computer was when people were hungry, dying of AIDS and too poor to send their kids to school?

But as multinationals start to invest in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, they are touting technology as a panacea for development.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Angel's Landing at Zion National Park is at the tip of this mountain:

and begins with this warning:

I am terrified of heights and have Vertigo, but up we went.

After a while of normal switchbacks and through a canyon, we hit the famous Walter's Wiggles - a series of very tight switchbacks that are built up for support.

Sometimes, there is no edge on Walter's Wiggles:

Eventually, we reached Scout Lookout to be greeted by these happy little one-holers...

 

and another warning...

but on we went... to this

 

I went up a ways, but eventually was pretty scared and knew that going down would be harder. So I turned around and Rich went on. Here are a few pictures to his journey over this hump, up the next...

 

then across this narrow precipice (with a 1500' drop!!!)

and on to the glory of Angel's Landing and this view.

Then he had to come all the way back to where he left me still recovering from my few feet on the rocks. Yay Rich!

Last night at about 5:30 we were headed out of Zion and there was a spectacular sunset. Because of the clouds in the sky, the red rocks were glowing red from the reflection of the sun off of the clouds. We pulled over in a spot near the entrance where there were a lot of people taking photos. I went to the bridge to try to take a picture but my camera battery was dead. Uggh. Anyway, I was standing next to some people who were all set up with the tripod etc taking pictures. I took a double take at one of the men - could that be Robert Redford? But of course - how could it be - just some man who was beautiful in the same way that Redford is (and just keeps getting better and better ). Today we realized that there is a film festival in Zion (www.ziffutah.com), so just maybe....

Posted from BLInk!

Last year, prior to the fall DevConnections conference in Las Vegas, I spent a few days in Zion National Park with Kathleen Dollard. I loved it so much that I promised myself that if I was invited back to Las Vegas, I would return to Zion and bring my husband with me. So, here I am in Zion where we have had a few great days already. One thing that I really wanted to do this time was hike up the Zion Narrows - the canyon river. So this morning we rented the proper gear and did it. What a great experience!

Here are two photos from the Narrows.

 

I have sent all of the revised powerpoints from my 4 sessions at DevConnections to be put up on the Connections website. If you were an attendee, there is information in your book on how to download these. I will be packing up the demos and getting them off to the conference organizers as well. This won't be for a few more days though.

Posted from BLInk!

If you are doing evals for sessions at DevConnections or any conference, comments are really helpful in addition to filling out the checkboxes. If you liked our talk - what did you like about it? If you didn't like it - it is extremely useful to know why! The same goes for the other questions that are asked, such as about presentation skills. The goal is to always improve... as it benefits everyone ...  so metadata (even if it is not love) is very helpful!

Posted from BLInk!

Christian Weyer convinced me not to update my demo computer from WSE3 October CTP to WSE3 RTM when I have my WSE3 session this afternoon. I promised not to. BUt that just takes all the fun and challenge I could have added to my day (read just a little sarcasm into that statement...)

Posted from BLInk!

Dan Appelman and I had a fun time talking about casing with some C# developers over lunch at DevConnections yesterday... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

Sushi with Charles Petzold, Kathleen Dollard and Esther Schindler ... [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Posted from BLInk!

Technical Connection is recruiting for to full-time Burlington area direct hire .NET positions. 

Position one is for Project Manager/Quality Assurance Manager full software development lifecycle in a .NET environment.  Salary in $70 K range with full benefits.  Must be able to pass US security clearance.

Position two is for a .Net Developer C# language Salary to $80 K and full benefits.  Must be able to pass US security clearance.

Contact:

Chris Johnson
Technical Connection, Inc.
Vermontjobs@aol.com
802-658-TECH

Posted from BLInk!

Shirley & Gary Brothers (who run DevConnections) invited the speakers up their amazing suite in "THE Hotel" at Mandalay Bay for cocktail hour this evening. Here are some photos... We are such good and reponsible speakers though and had to leave so we could work on our talks!

Evjens

 
Active Nick, Brian Noyes, Paul Litwin, Juval Lowy, Robert Green

Kathleen Dollard, Dan Appelman

 
Charles Petzold, Kate Gregory, Torsten Grabs, Active Nick

Robert Green, Shirley Brothers, Bernard Wong, Ken Getz

 
Our Wine Steward!

In my Sql Query Notification session, I had an odd problem. My SqlCacheDependency demo did not receive it's invalidation. This happened when I set it up in code and also when I set it up in <%Cache> directive on the page. This is a demo that I have done many times in the past year so I was not only mystified, but a little heartbroken.

The only thing that was different was that I had run a SqlRequestNotification demo right before it. This demo listens for the notification on a separate thread.

Now playing with it some more, I see that after I end the first demo (SqlRequestNotification) and start up the SqlCacheDependency... when I change the data, I hit the event handler in the first demo. So that was still hanging around.

What I think is happening is that even when I end the demo and close the page, the file based web server is still there (I can even see it in my system tray right now). The app was still alive and the listener was still listening. So now I am going to have to dig further into SqlRequestNotification in a real scenario even though it is not something I think I will not use frequently. If it wasn't the web app, it is likely that in this non-best practices demo code, I am not disposing enough things (though the listener's main task is within a using statement) or something along those lines. Most importantly, it is not a likely scenario to run these two things back to back and therefore this is an unusual problem that I encountered.

I couldn't really take the time to think this through in the session and probably wouldn't have come to this conclusion under the small pressure of the clock ticking and those expectant faces in the audience. So I just had to go with "I promise you this works! This is the right code for you to use..." and move on to wrap up the session.

Posted from BLInk!

Really ... I wish I could just go to all of the amazing sessions around me. So many things I haven't explored yet in VS2005 that I could  be learning!! Though of course, I'm thrilled to be able to share what I have learned by giving the sessions. So I will just keep working at making my own sessions as good as I can.

I did sit in on a bit of Kathleen Dollard's "Polishing your Winforms Apps" session this morning. There is just so much to learn...

There are a LOT of attendees here this year. I overheard someone (not official) say something like 3000. That would be amazing. I think it was 1600 last year.

Posted from BLInk!

I plan to show off this mega visualizer in my Debugger Visualizer session today as well as the DateTime visualizer that John Mueller wrote for his DevSource article.

Posted from BLInk!