Our friend Brian Berry is pedaling in the Paris Brest Paris ride that started today. It's a 1200km route that must be completed in 90 hours. That's about 750 miles in 3.75 days. That's about 200 miles per day. The ride is every 4 years. Brian has ridden it before, though I can't recall how many times. He  does a lot of long distance riding. In the past when Brian and his wife have come to visit, he generally leaves their home in Woodstock NY on his bike at about 2am and she drives up. It's about a 250 mile drive to where we lived the first time they did this. The second time, he slacked off and only road to Burlington - just 230 miles. That's about a normal day's ride for Brian. He thinks nothing of riding through the night with lamps. He's a nut.

Brian also often rides in the "BMB" (Boston Montreal  Boston ride) also 1200 km and goes almost right by our house.

RUSA (Randonneurs USA) also has lots of great info on PBP and the riders from the U.S.

“A Technical Community – How Do We Get There From Here?”
Dean Kamen
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
5:00 – 6:20 p.m.
Davis Auditorium
Medical Education Building on the University of Vermont Campus

Dean Kamen, an inventor and entrepreneur and an inspiring speaker, will address a serious issue facing society.

How can we attract the next generation to fields of Science and Technology? Society as a whole needs to start promoting careers in Science and Engineering to our youth.

We live in a technical world. Vermont, like many other states, is having a difficult time attracting and retaining a technical work force, which is essential for the growth of local businesses. If Vermont is to have a high quality of life 20 years from now, we need more skilled scientists and engineers, with a broad vision of the society we want to create.

Also - VT Science Teacher of the Year awards

MORE INFORMATION HERE

My Blackberry "locked up" today and I thought I was going crazy. I was suddenly and utterly unable to call out or use the browser. It told me "Cannot connect. Call in progress." I knew there was no call in progress. All other non-connection functionality was working perfectly well. I powered the phone down three times, but still I received this same message.

When I got home, I jumped online and very quickly found that, as luck would have it, this was a known problem with the Verizon Blackberry 8830. It happens if you are on a call and a another call comes in (which was my scenario). Some believe that if you avoid hitting the green dial/answer button to answer, that will prevent the problem from happening. Otherwise, a soft boot (Alt + Right Shift + Delete) or a hard boot (reseat the battery) should get you back to working order. I did the soft boot. However this is not a good long-term solution since people are having to do it repeatedly.

There is a particular thread on the Crackberry.com forums that has very recent posts on it where I learned all of this. The latest post (from only 2 days ago) suggests that just getting a replacement phone might do the trick.

Other than that, I'm really enjoying this phone.

Here's why

[A New DevLife Post]

New England Code Camp 8

Rise of the Silverlight Surfer

Saturday & Sunday, Sept 29-30 in Waltham, MA

It's free, it's fun and it is filled with great information!

If you have a story to tell, come tell it! You can do a regular presentation or a lead a chalk talk discussion. Prior experience not required!

Submit a talk or register as an attendee.

This is a FUN weekend and we should plan to have an big carpool from Vermont this time!

Read all about it here on Chris Bowen's weblog.

Once again, we could not have asked for better weather for an evening cruise out on the lake! This was VTSDA's 2nd annual sunset cruise aboard the Spirit of the Ethan Allen from the Burlington waterfront. We had twice as many attendees as last year (60 this time). It was great to see our friends from the state there also, including some of our favorite Vermont Dept of Economic Development reps, James Candido and Mike Quinn as well Christine Werneke (Chief Marketing Officer for Vermont). These folks and others from the state have all become great supporters of VTSDA and it's definitely fun to have them at our social events, as well! A new face for us was Ted Brady, who is Sen. Leahy's field rep in Vermont. Though I've never personally met Sen. Leahy, Ted seems to represent him so well. He has a great presence, is quite affable and laid back, and can probably make sure things happen when push comes to shove.

Another special part of this event was that we got to introduce our new Executive Director, Patrick Martell, who started on Monday. It is a huge step for our organization to have gotten to this point. Read the press release here.

I was happy to have my pal Dave Burke there who I had emailed and said "hey, you are a software business, now, Dave. So you should come to this event!". 

The weather forecast looked iffy during the day but we had a beautiful night, a gorgeous sunset and spectacular views of the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains and the lake.

I didn't see anyone swimming away from the boat, so I think everyone had a great time.

Look for pictures on the VTSDA website coming soon.

When John Canning showed us his iPhone a few weeks ago and explained that he bought it in Boston after walking by the AT&T store too many times, we were all surprised at his risk-taking. AT&T doesn't provide service in Vermont and therefore we can't get iPhones here and certainly can't get an iPhone with an 802 area code. His has a Boston phone #.

You could tell he was in love with this phone. I had just gotten a Treo the day before so we were both showing off our phones to the small group we were with. I almost blogged about John's without naming names of course, but didn't want to get John in trouble. (Me, the paranoid rule-follower.)

So I had a good laugh today when I saw John's picture on the home page of Burlington's local paper, brandishing his iPhone. Hey, he outed himself; I had nothing to do with it. You can read about John and some of our wireless woes in the article.

So, I'm curious to see if (or is it "how quickly") John gets his service cancelled. The whole notion of AT&T having exclusive access to the iPhone seems wrong anyway. I understand it as a competitive marketing advantage, but it doesn't seem like good marketing to refuse entry to entire populations of your potential market. (Okay, i know Vermont is not a huge market, but...) I thought a key mantra for sales was about making it easy for people to give you money. But with the case of iPhones (it's the iPhone that John covets, not the AT&T service) users have to be wiling to use em and lose em.

I love that one of the comments on the article that"Vermont needs to get its head out of the sand." I don't know how these things work, but did Vermont explicitly ban AT&T?

Oh, and I traded my Treo in for a Blackberry yesterday (with a GSM chip). More on that later...

Thanks again to Richard Hale Shaw for driving up to Burlington on Monday (even a flat tire didn't stop him) to give VTdotNETters a very in-depth perspective on LINQ. Rather than just open up VS2008 and start pounding out LINQ queries, Richard spent most of the time building up our understanding of the underlying technology that makes LINQ possible. Custom Iterators, anonymous methods and generics. Then when he showed us LINQ, it made perfect sense.

I know that when I talk about "that which is returned by a LINQ query", I have a hard time saying "it's an iEnumerable" or "an iQueryable". Most people don't get what that means. Richard made it easy to understand by his initial desicription of an iEnumerable being a collection with only the enumerator exposed, so the only thing you can do to the collection is iterate over it. That will help me a lot when I do future talks about LINQ and Entity Framework (which is three of my four talks at DevConnections this fall).

In addition to Richard's generosity with his time and knowledge, big thanks to go telerik who made this meeting possible, covering Richard's travel expenses and our pizza, and providing raffles and lots of fun t-shirts. We also had a few great raffles, thanks to CodeZone.

Although I was wearing my new telerik "Geekette" t-shirt, there were only 2 other gals at the meeting. So when we were down to only one Geekette shirt at the end, I was surprised. Rather than take the regular guy t-shirts, the guys were taking the girlie shirts for their wives, girlfriends and daughters. Awesome!

Watch out for a gaggle of geekettes wandering around Burlington for the rest of this summer.

Researchers at RPI are working on some pretty amazing battery technology! Read more...

[A new DevLife post]

Gotta love it!

I'm taking it back. Here's why.

[A New DevLife Post]

Besides being a technical guru and an amazing teacher (e.g. conference presenting and more), Kate Gregory is, to me, somewhat of a sage, a very wise and even-keeled person. So when she diverts a little from her great technical tips on her blog and gives some bigger lessons  -- life advice -- I definitely perk up my ears.

She has written about giving and taking, whether it's on newsgroups or forums, job interviews, interacting with clients or anywhere in your daily work.In the post she also references another post about knowing what you want (which I believe also inspired me to blog about at the time she wrote it).

Rich and I work way too much and sometimes forget why we moved to Vermont. But we had a perfect Vermont summer weekend this weekend.

On Saturday, the lake was calm and we kayaked a 4 mile stretch from a put-in near Button Bay State Park across to Westport NY where they were having a heritage day festival. The wind picked up after lunch and we had a fun paddle against the wind on the return trip.(Yes, that is fun. I'm not being facetious.)

Yesterday we went on a beautiful bike ride in Addison County - lots of rolling hills, beautiful old farmhouses, long stretches through flat farmland and then riding up along the lake.

We ate lots of sweet summertime corn, blueberries, raspberries from around our property, and tomatoes & basil out of our garden. We swam in an amazing local swimming hole and laid out on the lawn under an amazing blanket of stars to watch a bit of the Persied Meteor shower.

It doesn't get much better than this!

I caught this in the Microsoft Download notifications:

Visual Studio 2008 SDK - August 2007 CTP

This CTP includes tools, documentation, and samples for developers to write, build, test, and deploy extensions for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

There are some new vista updates that deal with performance issues and in the list of what they fix I saw two things that had been annoying me. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

This is a big source of pride for many Vermonters.

It's amazing what goes into the process. The trees are selected many years in advance by local foresters and nurtured.

But there's more: fundraising, promotion, etc. THere is a whole website devoted to this cause: http://www.capitolchristmastree2007.org.

Vermont Teddy Bear is looking for a mid-level VB.NET programmer, who is comfortable with OO design principles, using the 2.0 framework and has some experience writing both Windows and Web applications.

Pluses would include writing SQL Stored Procedures, table design/normalization and using XML.

Please forward your resume to Jobs@VTBear.com

I have updated two of my demo Silverlight apps which broke with the RC version of Silverlight that came out last week.

The little embedded drawing surface at the top of this blog has been fixed along with my more full blown annoation application.

All of the changes I made were listed in the "What Changed Between Beta and RC" topic in the Help file that comes with the SDK. The one that had me confused for a while was switching the "\" to "/" in the xaml where I had images in subfolders etc. It confused me because I somehow skipped over it in the list and the error that it threw the error "2210: AG_E_INVALID_ARGUMENT" which didn't tell me too much.

You can read more about updating your Silverlight apps to work with the Release Candidate version here.
 

Social networking comes full circle. FrontPorchForum connects me to my very own neighbors and I am lovin' it! Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

After many years of being an icon of teaching us all how to use Microsoft development tools, Mike Gunderloy decided he needed to transition himself away from a dependency on Microsoft for personal reasons stated in this blog post, the first of his alter-blog "A Fresh Cup".

It was a scary proposition, mostly because he has a family of 6 (including himself) to support.

It's been 7 months and in a recent "status report", Mike seems to be content with his progress, productive with his learning curve and getting work using his new tools.

I'm not sure if I could go through the refactoring that he has done, going from "expert" to starting over again with a new set of development tools. On the other hand, he brings an enormous amount of IP to his adventure which makes the transition that much more interesting.

I think if I were going to make a big life change like this, it would be more along the lines of doing a dramatic life-style downsizing and returning to my love of potting (as in making clay pots and sculptures) and that just ain't gonna happen any time soon.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Mike on many levels and his commitment to following (and following through on) what he believes in is pretty impressive.