From the VT Tax website:

"The majority of states with sales tax and the businesses who sell into most of these states developed an agreement to simplify sales tax administration for states and to reduce the burden of tax compliance for businesses. The Agreement primarily focuses on businesses with limited or no connection that sell to the states’ citizens through mail order, catalogs and the Internet."

and...

Will canned software become taxable even when delivered electronically?
Yes, effective January 1, 2007 canned software delivered electronically is subject to the sales tax in the same
manner as software purchased in tangible form (CD-ROM, disk).

Group looks at keeping workers in Vermont

Published: Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Minding Our Own Business
(published 12.06.06)

Ideas for fortifying Vermont work force praised

Published: Sunday, December 17, 2006

Perhaps it's time to look for the "list of things that won't be supported on Vista". In the meantime, thanks to Kate Gregory for pointing out this one.

On NPR this morning, Philip Baruth was lamenting the upcoming ABBA museum in Stokholm, even though he loves ABBA.

What I loved about his commentary was this quote:

"ABBA is like Coca-Cola for your ears... effervescent." 

read all about it here....

[A DevLife post]

We're closing in on it!!   Read more

[A DevLife post]

Tasha turned 13 years old last week. This is a pretty significant milestone for a Newfoundland. Because of their large size, they don't have a long life expectancy. Tasha is getting acupuncture and lots of love and short strolls. Her weight is as low as we dare get her, but this puts so much LESS stress on her legs and her organs. So this has been another attribute that has helped. She does have a hard time getting up but manages. She's pretty darned happy and as far as I can tell, her secret to long life is "as long as there is food on the planet....".

Not to discount Daisy, who will be 12 in January. Daisy is in amazing shape and can still run around. Her only obvious sign of age is her beautiful grey eyelashes and her worn down teeth.

Here's a pic of the girls I took a few months ago. Daisy (aka Daisy Dog) is on the left and Tasha (aka Boo Boo Bear) is on the right.

The VTdotNET Holiday potluck party was at my house in the boonies last night. Someday I will learn how to use my camera but flash photos never come out right. Nevertheless, here are a few. Note the [not yet decorated] tree with all of the GEEKY gifts underneath. We got a pile of books from WROX and I also put lots of other books I've had around for a while and a pile of t-shirts. I noticed there was competition for two items under the tree. One was WROX's gazillion page ASP.NET 2.0 Pro book and the other a particular hilarious but slightly naughty bright orange t-shirt from telerik.

Here's Laura & Neal Blood of Blue Note Computing and Bob LoCicero of Inside Edge Software. In addition to attending almost every VTdotNET meeting since its inception, Laura co-runs the VTSQL user group along with Roman Rehak. Dave Burke brought his accordian and regaled us with the unique sounds of accordian style christmas songs. The bottom pic is Neal Blood again with Carl Lorentson of Rennaisance Info Systems (Carl also serves on the VTSDA board with me) and Rob Hale (well, his back) and Dave Friedman, both from GE Healthcare, talking with Chris DeGuise, co-founder of Pragmatic Technologies. Tasha and Daisy laid on the floor near the table and waited for any food that might get accidentally dropped on the floor. My smart doggies!

When the tech we have been working towards is now common at the local mom & pop store, what's next?

[A DevLife post]

cool!

Come across Anders Hejlsberg's birthday in wikipedia and wonder how you could possibly be nearly the same age when he has accomplished so much? Not that he looks old or anything.

We got nearly 3 hours with Anders Hejlsberg at the ASPInsiders Summit last week. He went over language innovations in C#3 and how they feed into Linq. I can't do a full brain dump in a single post, but here is some of what he talked about (with some added VB examples too for fairness, since the new goo in  C#3 and VB9 are usually discussed mutually exclusive of one another, though they do have a lot of innovations in common).

[A DevLife post]

I've been using, writing about and talking about ASP.NET 2.0's OnClientClick mostly in relation to some of the Ink on the Web work I have been doing. OnClientClick (who's functionality you could achieve in the past with control attributes) allows you to associate client side script AND server side code to the click event of a button.

One thing I hadn't run into and therefore wasn't aware of was the OnClientClick conflicts with another one of ASP.NET 2.0's new features, Cross Page Postbacks. Teemu Keiski explains why the two won't work together in this blog post.

I'm at Microsoft in Redmond for the ASPInsiders Summit, three days of training by various members of the ASP.NET Team as well as experts in other relavant fields. Most of what we're looking at is what's coming down the pipes in the near future and in the longer term. Yesterday was the first day and it was an amazing amount of content. I've written about some of the things I learned that I hadn't known before over here....

I'm writing a WinForms app that is only for me to use, so I decided to see what it's like to use the drag 'n drop databinding wizards for the first time ever. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

I was trying to clean up old unused folders on my website but there were empty folders that I just could not delete. The error message was that the folder was not empty. But it sure looked empty. I finally was told by my webhost that there were hidden files in there. Mostly the evil frontpage _vti_cnf folders. After a little googling, I found the secret to seeing and deleting these little devils.

In WS-FPT (I'm using the 2007 version, but this is not new at all), what you need to do is use the masking feature and in doing so, tell the app that you want to see hidden files by masking on "-la".

The way to do this is make sure you have the File Mask showing on the Command Bar. Then type -la in the little File Mask box. Now when you dig into folders, you can see and then delete hidden files and folders.

I was supposed to fly to Seattle today (that's a cross country trip for me) by way of Chicago O'Hare. O'Hare was closed yesterday with something like 400 flights cancelled because of the weather, so I was a little nervous about what might happen with a 7:30am flight out of Burlington, where we were also having nasty weather and a forecast of snow in the morning). So I changed my flights to Monday (United was letting travellers do this without penalties) and freed up my seats on today's flights for some happy person stuck in Chicago.

I looked today on the United site and saw that both of my flights went without a hitch and on time. But, it was still a great thing that I happened to do this since our power went out at 6pm last night and didn't come back on till 8am (very high winds and big nasty storm - trees down everywhere!). So I would never have been able to get my act together to get out the door at 6am this morning for a week long trip anyway.

Happily it was a nice day today so I got to spend it with my hubby doing errands (including finally replacing my 12 year old UGLY ski jacket!) and going for a nice walk out to some hidden falls in the forest behind our house. He had never seen them before and I had only seen them for the first time a week ago. I forgot to bring my camera though. (Next time, I promise, so I can share.) Becaue of all the rain in the past days, the streams and rivers around here are wild so the falls and the streams around it were amazing!

Sad news to see Deer Leap Books, a wonderful independent bookstore in Bristol, VT (nearby town) closing. I've definitely tried to do my book buying there when I can, because I want to see these shops succeed. Bristol is a community that loves and supports their local businesses. Another wonderful business, Angel Heart, is closing too. Very special store. The owner has lived in Nepal (or somewhere like that) for many years and buys fabulous stuff there and ships them back to the U.S. for the store which her sister (a true New Yorker that amazingly survived in small town Vermont!) ran. They also have the best collection of ageless toys that we had as kids and is fun to buy for our nieces and nephews. And some awesome classic "joke gifts" too.