In the past, the December "meeting" for Vermont.NET has been a pot-luck gathering at either someone's office or house. This year, with other (less stingy? ) folks than myself in charge, we are having a real party! It's going to be at Parima Thai in Burlington which has a really cool private party room designed in the feel of Frank Llloyd Wright. And member, Paul Swider, has somehow gotten his friends from Pine Street Jazz to play at the party! It's like a real office party. Appetizers will be provided and there will be a cash bar. Parima is even offering a discount to any of our members who want to have dinner at their Thai Buffet before or after the party. We will still do our pot-luck in the form of desserts as well as collect food for Vermont Foodbank.

Thanks to Parima and Pine Street Jazz for making this affordable and to local c-tech, Knowledgewave, for their sponsorship!

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In addition to having a great time presenting at WeProgram.NET last week, there were two other things I wanted to share.

When it's possible, I try to bring back a local beer for Rich. Unfortunately, there was no bringing a 6pack of Castle back from South Africa, but in Virginia Beach, the local brewery is St. George. I had to find them via google, but was able to grab a 6-pack at the local market. Since my laptop is not too heavy, it wasn't so bad carrying it back home in my backpack.

While there, my brother brought me to one of his favorite lunch spots, the Warriors Grill, which does a buffet in the style of the Mongolian warriors of centuries past. I love the history of this, described in ther menu and got a good laugh out of "at the Warrior's Grill, we do the gathering and preparing for you. No need to place the meat under your saddle to tenderize it as the Mongol Warriors would sometimes do."

At the restaurant, you pile prepared vegetables and meats along with a great variety of oils into a bowl and then they are cooked on a hot surface.

Unfortunately, the whole history is not on their website, so here's a quick scan for you.

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GridviewGUY.com

GridviewGIRL.com (that's Marcie)

Notice the color schemes of the sites, too. Blue for boys and pink for girls.

(Not battle really going on here. It's just more info for us!!)

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Etienne Tremblay is a real VSTS wonk. (Etienne is French Canadian, so I should be sure to remind him that "wonk" is a good word..). He works at EDS, which is one b-i-g company, and is excited about the fact that Microsoft has just changed it's Team Foundation Server recommendations from "Teams of up to 500 users" to "Teams of up to 2000" users. That's a lot of programmers mucking with your code. But one has to understand that I am an independent so it's basically unfathomable to me....

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At DevConnections, I had a fun lunch with 3 great (and smart, man oh man!) young guys who's names all start with R and work for a company in Chicago. They love their job and their company was named as the 3rd best place in Chicago to work by Chicago Magazine. And they are looking for some help... read more on Ryan Rinaldi's blog and Ray Jezek.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

A number of noteworthy items related to women in the .NET development community crossed my radar this week and I thought I would set them down in one place. (Read more...)

[A DevLife post]

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Susan Lennon picks me up in her BMW Z4 to speak at WeProgram.NET in Virginia Beach! Zoooom! (read more...)

[A DevLife post]

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When someone told me that the AGP interface for plug in cards for my PC was "like pci but better" I made the assumption that it would plug into my PCI port. Dumb me. After 20+ years with computers, I should know better.

AGP is different from the ground up and requires it's own interface on the motherboard.

PCIe (PCI Express) is also different and is even newer than AGP.

These two are mostly for the high intensity graphics that are used in gaming.

PCI-X is not another way of saying "PCI Express". It's totally different and was an enhancement to PCI.

My Dell 170LN does not take AGP or PCIe. I was lucky to find a dual DVI card that can plug into my PCI slot. It took me a long time to find it because when I saw pictures of this one, I passed it by. It only has one port to plug a cable into. However, it is designed to sort out sending signals to multi-monitors. You only need a special Y cable to plug the two in.

So if you are stuck with "Conventional PCI" but want to use dual digital monitors the thing to get is an NVIDIA Quadro4 VNS 280 PCI card. This is made by PNY and also HP. You also need a separate Y cable. Be careful because you can get Y cables that have one VGA and one DVI or one that has two VGAs or one that has 2 DVIs.

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I did an experiment a few months ago by putting some google ads on my blog. I was just curious what would happen. I replaced one of them after Katrina with a more worthy cause than my own, but left the others there. I have basically forgotten about them until I had a nice email from DonXML with some suggestions about how I could make the ads more effective.

This reminded me to go check my earnings. Here's where they stand:

You can't collect on this until you reach a certain amount  (is it $50? I forget). Maybe sometime next year, I'll collect the $50 and donate it to a local Vermont charity. I get free hosting from Alentus (thanks Alentus) so I have no real need for the adsense anyway.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

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!

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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. 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

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 !

Posted from BLInk!

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]

Posted from BLInk!

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.

Posted from BLInk!

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.

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

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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.

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6pm eastern time

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Welcome to Roma.NET, by way of Lorenzo Barbieri

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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.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org