Rich and I saw Borat last night and I couldn't agree more with Charles Petzold's assessment:

If Mr. Cohen's intent is to explore people's reactions in intolerable situations, then it makes no sense for this movie to have scenes of Borat by himself, or with his "producer." And yet, Mr. Cohen has obviously become so enamored of his fictional creation that the movie really becomes about Borat rather than his American victims.

I found the movie nearly intolerable myself. Excluding a few scenes that seemed pretty real (the homeboys teaching him how to dress a little more homey and the very human Lunelle and everyone's incredible patience) Cohen's version of "Candid Camera" was over the top, but not really in what I saw as an intellectual or enlightening way. His outrageous public behavior was just outright mean and not funny. So much commentary of the movie is about how he tricked people on camera, but the ruse goes much further. He tricked us into the movie theater to shock us too. I'm pretty liberal and extremely tolerant, but there was way more in that movie than I felt like witnessing and nearly walked out.  I truly feel duped that I got lured into the theater with all of this promise of some fascinating expose of human behavior. And to top it off, I have now paid my $8 and brought my husband (who was hoping to see James Bond instead), and therefore contributed to the success of the movie. The joke has been on all of us, not just the "characters" in the movie.

No, this is not a Koolaid induced post. It is really true. I have been saying it to friends and realized I should blog about it. So I did over here.

[A DevLife post]

I have posted the powerpoints and demos from my four talks at DevConnections last week.

They are all on http://www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx.

Each session is listed alphabetically. At the end of the session description you will find a link for the PowerPoint deck and for the zip file with the demos.

The four sessions I just posted are:

• Advanced ADO.NET 2.0 (3 hour post-conf workshop)
• Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers
• Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Applications and Web Services
• Persisting Ink on the Web
  

I LOVED this book. It is one of those that I found myself reading until 2 or 3am in the morning (and then sleeping late because of it). I won't be going, but just thought I would share in case other locals read my blog but not the Free Press where I learned about this.

Vista madness (that which comes when Vista is released to MSDN subscribers....(yesterday)) is not quite like Playstation madness, but I'm sure lots of people will be so eager to get their new bits that they might forget this very important piece of information.... read more

[A DevLife post]

The front page of the Burlington Free Press showed a guy pitching a tent for his second night camping out in front of Best Buy in Williston (where all the big box stores are just outside of Burlington). Sheesh. Not the swarms we've seen on the national media though. Just 20 or 30.

GEM Resourcing emailed to let me know they have a bunch of .NET jobs all over the country. If you go to their job search, filter the category to "Information Technology" and then type ".NET" in the Search Words, that shows 13 jobs from Pennsylvania to California.

Oh, I like this. No longer do I have to wait for Word or Excel to open up. It's a lot faster. I can just take a quick look at an attachment in Preview mode. Images too. Not PDFs though.

As noted in my previous post, I have flagged and forgotten over 500 emails since 2001. With Outlook's new UI, flagged items are up front and center and now really useful, but not with 500 dead emails floating around in there. So I started going through them and got it down to 200 so far. Then  I got even more inspired. For the first time ever, Iused the archive. I always thought archive meant that it would be stowed away somewhere but difficult to access. Now I see that it just mean creating an addtional PST file and putting emails in there (duplicating my folder structure also). My main PST is now somewhat smaller and much more responsive. What the heck took me so long to do that?

After installing Office 2007, I decided to downlad the newest OneNote to see if it will finally do the trick in getting me into the habit.... read more...

[A DevLive post]

Office 2007 arrived on the MSDN Subscriber downloads this afternoon. It's 70% downloaded on my machine so far.

In a previous blog post, I moaned about TechEd 2007 being moved to Orlando rather than the originally scheduled New Orleans. Many of us were so happy that it was going to be in New Orleans for the sake of supporting the economy there. The reason had something to do with the airport saying they couldn't handle the traffic for such a big conference.

I just received this comment from Matt Brewer and it really makes me wonder....

The past two days at DevConnex have been busy indeed. I got a chance to write about them while waiting for my midnight flight home. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

I have two talks to do today - one for ASP Connections and one for Mobile Connections. Therefore, this morning I decided to treat myself to room service breakfast. I learned years ago from Kate Gregory to have a good breakfast and protein when you are speaking. Kate is one of the best presenters I have ever seen (and usually one of the highest rated at conferences) so I pay close attention to her advice! Rather than stuff myself with the yummy bagels and breads they have for us in the speaker room, I ordered eggs benedict. Yummmy. At about the right time, I could hear the room service cart bouncing down the hallway. The hallway is long with stretches of carpet followed by a stretch of marble. So every time it went from carpet to marble from mrable to carpet, it would rattle. I could hear him approach my room and went and opened the door and there was the poor guy kneeling on the floor next to the metal box that is used to keep the food warm. The box had fallen off the cart as he bounced off the carpet on to the marble in front of my room. Eggs all over. The guy really felt bad, but I assured him it was not a problem and after he poured me a cup of coffee, headed downstairs to get me another plate of breakfast. In the meantime, I have sun streaming into my room and can look out at the beautiful range of mountains past the airport.

My first two days at DevConnections have been busy. Read all about it here. Now I need to get back to making sure tomorrow's talks will be great.

[A DevLife post]

Lots of news in the last few days! Here's a list of all that has rtm'd and what is finally very imminent: read more...

[A DevLife post]

Who else but the energetic Stephen Forte! HEre's his account of running yesterday's marathon. Now he's on his way to TechEd Barcelona. I'm on my way to speak at DevConnections in Las Vegas. But my marathon was a marathon weekend of sitting in front of my computer.

Getting SqlDependency to work takes an enormous amount of orchestration up front - especially with regards to SQL Server permissions. Steve ran into a problem which made SqlDependecy work only intermittently. He finally got to the bottom of it (was related to the dbo owner) and has blogged about it here.

Something to write home about! 

(It's my mom)

Torn between wanting to just get 'er done and wanting to have a complete comprehension of everything that is going on under the covers? That's the line I have to constantly wrangle with when giving conference presentations and it's truly hard to please everyone, though I do know who I'm aiming for. Read more...

[A DevLife post]