Congrats to Scott Hansleman and his wife Mo on the birth of their new baby boy, Zenzo.

And to Keith Pleas for gettin' hitched! This was one guy who had "bachelor" stamped on his forehead. Yay Jenny!

MSN Virtual Earth will be renamed Windows Live Local. I guess that it won't be confused with Google Earth's name that way . There have also been some enhancements as reported by the Kelsey Group by way of Dare - better driving directions, Birds Eye imagery and user pushpins are among these.

Hmmm no word about ink though...nobody from Microsoft has ever asked me how I did it. 

Vermont Technical College is looking for a full-time tenured track position in the Information Services and Technology department. We also have several part-time teaching positions at the Blair Park campus in Williston and at the Randolph campus. Please contact Brent Sargent, Dean of Williston Campus & Northwest Region, VTC, 201 Lawrence Place, Williston, VT 05495. Phone 879-2321, email bsargent@vtc.edu.

Note from Julie: Vermont Tech is an incredibly fast growing school and is where Vermont.NET currently has it's meetings. It's also right across from a Starbuck's !

Matt Cassell will be interviewing me for his new Academic .NET Radio podcasts and we'll be doing it over Skype. Ok, I guess it's time for me to take the VOIP plunge! [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I'm very excited to be speaking at WeProgram.NET tomorrow night in Virginia Beach. It will be my first presentation as an INETA speaker! Thanks to u.g. leader Darrell Norton and Hampton Rds SQL Server group leader Susan Lennon for bringing me down.

I'll be trimming down my now very long "what's new in ado.net 2.0" presentation and focusing on ADO.NET 2.0 Integration with SQL Server 2005. Inspired by Pablo Castro's teched session (which I used in Africa), I have added some new touches to it. I learned how to work with XML Data types and some of the CLR integration in SQL Server. So I'll get to show some of that as well.

I'm already in Virginia Beach as this allowed me to visit my brother and his family for the first time since they moved here. It was nice to have a beautiful walk on the beach yesterday. That has been one of the things that has bummed me out each time I have been in L.A. and San Diego over the last few years. No chance to get to the ocean.

whaa, me too. I was changing the fore color of a label on a winform with very few controls on it. The label's color changed. Then cross hairs cursor appeared and started flashing. Then I got the hourglass. Then it all stopped and the ol "(Not Responding)" appeared on the windows title.

This is on a machine that was totally repaved prior to installing RTM bits.

ah well...

I was, however, able to close and save the app.

I have just one question: why? Why why why?

Over the past nearly 4 years of Vermont.NET, I have given away hundreds of books donated by publishers. Early on, I enabled the VTdotNET website so that the recipients of those books could post reviews of them. Here is our book review page and our software review page. It's the least we can do in return for receiving the books.

After about a year, I gave up on begging, harrassing and otherwise attempting to get people to review books and even software licenses - sometimes valued in the thousands.

If you have a book that you got from VTdotNET, we would still appreciate your review. It doesn't have to be your life's work. Here are some great tips from O'Reilly about writing book reviews.

Welcome to Roma.NET, by way of Lorenzo Barbieri

G.B. is our cat. He snuck out the door last night at about 11pm as I was letting the dogs back in from their pre-bed pee. And he bolted. I knew he would not come back for hours and hours and I after making a few attempts to lure him back to the house with the sound of tapping a spoon on his beloved cat food bowl, I knew that there was nothing I could do and went to bed with the window cracked so if he came back and meowed, maybe we would hear him.

It's a scary place for cats around here at night. He is allowed to go out during the day time, but we always feed him at 5 and he does not go back outdoors after that. Our back yard leads into the mountains and who knows what cat-eating critters laying in wait. We know there are coyotes and foxes and occasional bears. Also Fisher Cats (originally brought into Vermont to help wth the porcupine problem) are notorious cat killers.

But luckily for all of us, Rich woke up just before 7am to the sound of G.B. saying "yo! I'm home. It's f'in cold out here. I'm covered with snow and I want my damned breakfast!" or maybe it was just "meow meow, let me in pleeeeeeeeeeze!". After he finished his breakfast, he ran up stairs to snuggle under the covers for a while and warm back up.

We will have to be that much more diligent now that he has had the taste of an exciting night out. I sure wonder what he did for those 8 hours.

I admit that when I tested out the migration tool, I had limited time, so chose a whimpy app to migrate.

Dave Burke is working with a much more complex app and is frustrated.

Last month, I noted an article about HP trying to bring technology into impoverished communities in Africa with the hope that access to information will be a big help. Perhaps in some insulated cases, the benefits will be measurable. However, you may have noticed the many references yesterday (AIDS awareness day) to the fact that South Africa has the highest rate of AIDS in the world. Will people in those AIDS striken AND impoverished communities benefit from access to the internet?

Caterina Fake, on misbehaving.net, points to a counter argument by a woman from a different part of Africa, Cameroon.

Update: Dare Obasanjo, who is from Nigeria and someone who has my utmost respect,  chimes in.  Dare certainly knows more about Africa, as a continent, politically and socially,than most of us who are looking at this issue through our small and distant portholes.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This post by Charles Petzold goes in the "why I don't want to write a book" column...

I could a) do without the pressure and b) probably not focus that well.

I think Mike Campbell needs a little help with his VB.NET poetry. Go help him list all the great things about VB.

Some spam entertains me so. Really, I'm so excited about my new career options!

You have been chosen for enrolment in the Career Alteration Program (CAP)

You have the choice of three new professions which are currently hiring. You will have qualifications within 2 weeks for automatic acceptance.

1) Technical Power Engineer Management. Salary starts at $89,000 annually.

2) Trade Commercial Consultant. Salary starts at $74,000 annually.

3) Labor Manufacture Production Officer. Salary starts at $102,000 annually.

Please contact us immediatly in order to receive your certificates to start in one of these careers.

I finally take the dual monitor plunge.... read more

[A DevLife post]

We are getting into the really awful winter days when it is pitch black by 5pm. Since I work out of my house and do not have patterns of 8-5 or whatever to follow, this always takes adjusting. I tend to work until it gets dark and then think about dinner. In the summer, this makes for some unhappy campers in my house - hungry dogs, cats and husbands start whining around 8pm if I'm heads down (or worse yet, they decide to do the cooking - burritos are okay, but Kraft Mac & Cheese does not float my boat.). In the winter, I start thinking about dinner at 5 and have a difficult time sitting still in front of my computer and continuing to work. (So there's always the blog to procrastinate with.) I have never been a "winter blues" type of person, but I do need to think about shifting my schedule so that I spend some time outdoors during the day while it's light out.

I know that Don Kiely, who lives in Alaska and has much more drastic daylight patterns, tells me that folks up there really make the most of daylight. Play by day and work by night. Now if only I can get my clients to shift to that schedule too and not expect me to be here from 9-5 (or more like 7am - 11pm).

This is from the site of one of the largest software consulting shops in Vermont, Competitive Computing, aka "C2". I believe they may also be the only Gold Partner in Vermont (but I could be wrong).

C2 wins Microsoft partner award!
Microsoft has awarded Competitive Computing with its "Microsoft New England Quarterly Area Partner Award" for exceptional performance. Carolyn Edwards, President and CEO of Competitive Computing, received the award at a special luncheon at Microsoft's New England Executive Briefing Center on October 20, 2005.