I have been noticing the ads for Disc Stakka in MSDN Magazine and it got me thinking. Disc Stakka is  something like a jukebox that you can put 100 dvds in and somehow it's got some built in knowledge of MSDN Subscriptions. It's pretty big - for all of those discs.

Wouldn't it be cool if they could make read only thumb drives (when they get cheap enough) to distribute MSDN subscriptions on? I don't mean the magazine, I mean all of the software in a subscription. The thumbdrives are getting up to 2 GB now. Eventually they will become consumables like DVDs are now --  a lot cheaper and maybe more cost effective than producing and shipping the dvd's every month.

Of course, I am not a hardware geek, so this could already exist and I wouldn't even know it. 

http://www.AcehAid.org

From Andrew Conrad's post about DataSets and Null values:

[because the features are currently broken], the DataSet behavior WRT to nullable types will either be changed or not supported for RTM of VS 2005.  However, it is very probable that it will be supported some time in the future.

see my previous post about Nullable Types and ADO.NET 2.0 to see why this interests me..

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

The BOFS are live! INETA will once again be sponsoring and managing the Birds of a Feather sessions at TechEd 2005. This year we are being helped by Culminis, who works with IT Pro groups. Stuart Celarier is our supreme BOFologist* as he is heading up the entire effort of organizing them.

So you can start submitting sessions and voting, too!

Remember the key concept of the BOF's - these are NOT presentations, they are discussions that are led by one or more people. Everyone who attends the BOF is invited to participate in the discussion. Don't even think of asking for a projector to show your powerpoints.

*coined by Dave Noderer

http://www.AcehAid.org

I saw via The Daily Grind that there is a new service pack for WSE 2.0, though without installing it to see the change doc, I didn't know what was in it. Of course, WSE FAQ has all the details!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Actually - not much of a story here as many of the non-Microsoft.NET speakers that I know who usually speak at TechEd are not speaking at the 2005 event. Only a small handful got accepted. And among those,  in some cases, their abstracts weren't chosen. Instead, they are being asked to deliver Microsoft directed content. Even though there are plenty of developer tracks and sessions, there is still a buzz going around that TechEd is really heavy ITPro this year. But it seems only that people are whispering it to each other in dark alleys.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Jackie Goldstein is featured in DevSource's next ".NET Rock Star" Profile. Being a VB guy, Jackie is asked the obvious question about the language issues. Jackie has been programming for a long time, and Devsource came up with some great questions that expose us to some of the breadth of his experience. Read it here!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Well, it almost came to fisticuffs at the Web Services Edge conference when I asked Thom Robbins, who is the New England Developer Evengelist for Microsoft, if he could come to Vermont.NET and give us the wonderful Visual Studio 2005 overview presentation that I was watching Doug Turnure, the Atlanta area D.E., do during one of the workshops.

The battle was because, well, as we all now, Vermont is a really nice place to visit! Especially in May. Doug said "I'll do it! I'll do it!" (His wife loves Vermont) But I guess Thom won since Vermont *is* his territory and I haven't had him speak at the group in a while.

When we started the user group I probably could have filled up 2 years of our schedule just from inviting Russ Fustino (back when he was ours - boo hoo hoo), Joe Stagner and Thom who are always very happy to come to Burlington. It's too bad that the MSDN events are not coming here any more, but those are expensive to put on, whereas it's not a big deal for those guys to buzz up here (they don't mind the drive in their nice cars) and do an overnight or visit clients.

I guess we'll have to find some other excuse for Doug to come to Vermont.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Many people are talking/writing about Richard Grime's farewell article especially about his comments about VB not being the true .net language. Boy, the advertisers over on that website must be happy campers!! 

I only want to respond to one point that he made - about the fact that VB is in .NET only for marketing purposes.

I was very happy to learn .NET first with a familiar language and syntax. I had plenty of learning curves to attack as it was. If VB.NET didn't exist, there is a very good chance that I would have stopped programming. I'm not kidding or exaggerating.

I was pissed that Microsoft had pullen the proverbial rug out from under me and sent me tumbling from being a very advanced programmer to feeling like a beginner again. This was preventing me at first from seeing the great advantages that .NET was going to give me as a developer. Sure VB has evolved, but still it was familiar. Everything else was different. It would have been a much bigger struggle for me to learn .NET if it was 100% new. In fact, I was *so* mad, that I bought JBuilder. I figured if I had to start from scratch again and use semi-colons, wtf - I may as well use Java and forget about Microsoft. (Remember, this was also the same time we were hearing all about Hailstorm and Microsoft taking over the world with it.) I had already gone through a big learning curve in moving from FoxPro to VB, when FoxPro became Visual FoxPro. Big learning curve... big pardigm shift... so I figured it was a good time to totally switch. I did NOT want to go through that again.

But after a few months of mucking around (I edited that word for google) with jBuilder, I looked at .NET again and realized that because of VB.NET, the learning curve was not going to be as bad as I had thought. At least I didn't have to relearn 100% of the syntax. VB.NET gave me an anchor into .NET.

I still do most of my coding with VB.NET, though I am getting more and more comfortable working with C# when I need to, and there are things about C# that I really like, but not enough for me to switch to it as my predominant language. I am just more proficient in VB. That's really all there is to it. I don't care if it's marketing or whatever the reason is. If .NET had only been only C#, there is a good chance that I would not have been willing to start ALL over again after 18 years of programming. Maybe I would have just stopped programming, taken back up my long lost love of being a potter, spent more time cycling and skiing - you know, had a life. That sounds pretty dramatic, but it is not exaggerated as I truly was pretty close to walking away from it all. Of course, there was that mortgage to worry about.... As it is, I have never worked as hard in my life as I have since .NET came out. I used to work about 30 hours a week and bill most of them. The rest of my time was spent bicycling, skiing and hiking. Now I work about 80 hours a week and bill about 30 of them. Not having VB would probably have made it more than I was willing to do.

As for VB.NET not being VB... I have no problem with it. I am a .NET programmer, and I use the VB language to write my .NET applications. I am no longer a VB6 programmer.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Three cheers for Josh Trupin's MSDN Magazine editorial on the invention of words by geeks that then get echoed in the technical community. His great examples are my own pet peeve, "performant", as in "this method is more performant" meaning "this method gives you better performance". I have struggled with this word as well. I know it's not real, but it just feels more efficient - probably a C# invention. Another gem is the tongue twisting "canonicalize" which someone at Microsoft derived from canonical, not realizing that the word they were searching for is "canonize".  Anyone that is writing or presenting should definitely read this editorial. Or anyone interested in English. Or anyone who just wants to read something funny.

Posted from BLInk!

This was waiting for me when I returned from my latest trip this week

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEngage is aimed at unemployed or underemployed developers. Connie Marthinsen, who runs the big .NET user group in that area  - TRINUG (hey, how did they get Brad Abrams as a speaker for March??? ) and is our INETA liaison for North and South Carolina is heavily involved in setting this event up. (She is also involved with the upcoming Raleigh NC Code Camp) TechEngage Boot Camp is a very interesting concept. You can read more here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Gregory Consulting is one of the top small .NET consulting firms in Canada and Kate is an incredible person to learn from ...not only about programming but this is a woman who has become a true mentor for me. They are looking for an experienced, roll up your sleeves and get to work, developer. Check it out...

Posted from BLInk!

Well, Duncan's are hard shoes to fill, but I am happy to see that Brad McCabe, formerly of Infragistics, has landed in this footwear. I know a LOT of people who were interested in the job of being the content manager for the VB Dev Center, but all too stubborn to move to Seattle. Congrats to Brad and to MSDN for nabbing him!

Posted from BLInk!

If you are interested in debugging, this should be a great chat - with the debugger team...

http://www.AcehAid.org

Now that Omar has turned me on to the perfect earphones for flying, I think it's time to buy either an MP3 or IPOD. I want to listen to dotNetRocks of course, maybe some podcasts and some of my own music cd's. If you know that I'm a Libra, you know how hard it is for me to make decisions. Feel free to comment!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I didn't realize I had to do a 1099-Misc for someone I subbed last year, but it isn't as hard as I thought.

You have to have real paper forms from the IRS (or your accountant, or the business supply store) because they are red. These are the ones you send to the IRS. The black copies go to the Vendor.

Quickbooks can print them out if you have it set up properly. I had to mark this vendor as a 1099 vendor and then in Preferences/Tax I had to associate the "Nonemployee compensation" box with the account I used to pay the vendor from - in my case "Subcontract: Programming".

You also need the vendors tax-id. That could be a SS# or an EIN. If you want to be official, you can have them fill out a W-9 that you can download from the www.irs.gov website and give that to you.

Don't forget that you need a red 1096 as well. It is basically the "cover sheet" for the 1099's that you submit to the IRS.

Remember - I am not an accountant, just another business owner. This is only basic heads up info, but check with your accountant first!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

If you have been following the saga of Rob Howard trying to get to Vermont for our 6pm meeting where he was our INETA speaker... Rob was stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight that kept being delayed and delayed. We finally decided he should turn around and go back to Dallas. I think we made the right call!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I realize that I have started referring to the high level policy files you create by clicking on the check boxes in WSE2 Config Settings Tool as “click click policies”. I think I'm going to coin that phrase for myself!

Jerry Dennany sums up his experience with working with WSE2 for a while.

I have to agree with much of what he is saying which is why I have been working hard to try to digest as much as I can and spit it out for other developers to save them some of the pain of learning how to leverage WSE2 beyond just clicking a few checkmarks in the config tool.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Boo hoo

Rob Howard's flight from Chicago was delayed again so as there was no point in him arriving very late and then flying out tomorrow morning, I sent him home to Texas and 85 degree weather.

After a quick concensus of those who rsvp'd, many people said they weren't going to come now (no star, icchy weather, and half of Vermont has some bug anyway - but they *were* going to come if Rob had made it...) so we have cancelled the Vermont.NET meeting.

Rob and I are both very sorry.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Based on the current United schedule, we will start the meeting at 6pm and Rob should arrive at about 7pm with Roman Rehak.

The first hour of the meeting will have the usual "what's going on" and then I will facilitate a free for all .NET Q&A until Rob arrives.

http://www.AcehAid.org

(responding to some emails and phone calls) really - here's why

flight 7960 is en route. It left Burlington one hour late and will arrive in Chicago only 25 minutes late.

It is the same plane, it arrives at gate E2 and Rob's flight departs from E2.

I think they said 3:30 because they did not know when the Burlington flight was leaving (there were computer problems).

Hang in there. Let's give it some more time to shake out.

http://www.AcehAid.org

so far so good. The plane from BTV to Chicago left only a few minutes late. That's the plane that comes back here later with our speaker on it! And currently Rob's flight is scheduled to arrive only 20 minutes late.

http://www.AcehAid.org

My dear friend and college roommate was highly impacted by Hunter S. Thompson's work when we were in college -- I believe even writing one of her two senior theses (she was a double major - my brilliant friend ) on something that involved reading a lot of his work. She went on to do her post graduate work at Medill School of Journalism and is, of course, a journalist who I know will someday get a Pulitzer!

Of course I thought of her immediately this morning when I read that Thompson had killed himself. I thought that my friend's reply was a nice tribute in her journalistic shorthand...

i can't blv he did it. i always admired him and thought of him as an icon but only in last couple years  did i come to totally appreciate and read a lot of his stuff. i wanted to have a beer with him at woody creek tavern but i guess that won't be happening...

http://www.AcehAid.org

Watch here for updates on meeting status! I will feed them to the VTdotNET site as well.

Rob Howard is scheduled to speak at Vermont.NET tonight. Everyone is very excited and I have a lot of RSVPs. But now we have a snowy blustery morning and a forecast for it to be like this all day. Rob's flight is due in at 5pm and the meeting is at 6pm.

I did just speak to Rob on his way to the airport in DFW and he's going to go for it, at least as far as Chicago then we'll figure it out from there.

We can watch his Chicago -> Burlington flight status here. And the weather forecast here.

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

Alex Lowe has just joined Telligent Systems. I'm sure he will be missed as a D.E. in the Michigan and Ohio area, but what a perfect fit!!

Alex has a new blog here

http://www.AcehAid.org

This is such a nice post from Sam Gentile, that I had to point it out...

http://www.AcehAid.org

New Location! VSLive Boston
June 28-July 1 (Web site to be posted soon, check www.vslive.com for updates)

http://www.AcehAid.org

update: However, for the purpose of testing out some basic ink functionality when developing ink-enabled apps, without having to go out and purchase a tablet pc, this might do the trick. I don't think (from my one minute of testing - let's be clear about that) that this will be good if you are testing intensive functions that depend on granularity such as breaking a stroke down or working with stylus input.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Bill Vaughn is blogging

Don Kiely has the best comment on this...

http://www.AcehAid.org

My favorite method of inspecting SOAP messages when I am working with WSE2.0 is Mike Taulty's WSE 2.0 Tracing Utility. Mike had to update the tool to work with SP2. If you use this tool, and have updated to SP2, be sure to grab the new version here. You will need to modify your config files as well.

If you are using WSE2 and not using Mike's utility, I highly recommend that you try it. The messages are so much more disoverable and readable than opening up the log files in notepad..

Posted from BLInk!

explanation?

from the thoughtful Sam Ruby http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/02/16/SHA-1-Broken

action item?

from security expert, Keith Brown: http://pluralsight.com/blogs/keith/archive/2005/02/16/5907.aspx

http://www.AcehAid.org

At Web Services Edge, someone asked me in the hallway about doing WSE2 Security without X509 certificates. Although there is, out of the box, support for Kerberos (which I still know nearly zip about) and you can write custom tokens as well, I think the question was really about how to do security well with login/pw ---> UsernameTokens.

The answer is that you can, but with the caveat that logins/passwords are often (thanks to social engineering and use of passwords like "cat") not the best way to go.

However, if you are hoping to do this with UsernameTokens, there are two important resources you should be aware of.

1) Keith Brown's recent article on the Web Services dev center on Securing UsernameTokens with WSE 2.0

2) To solve another problem - doing SecureConversation with UsernameTokens - which still basically requires a web server x509 certificate - see William Stacy's blog post which accomplished what a number of us have been trying to do for some time!

Posted from BLInk!

Not only is it their 20th anniversary issue, but it also represents a milestone for me!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had a great time at the Edge East conference in Boston over the last few days. I was able to meet some people I know via emails, blogs etc. This includes Philly area D.E. Stan Spotts - who i hope is feeling better, Atlanta D.E. Doug Turnure and Raj Das from Magenic. I also unexpectedly got to catch up with Andrew Duthie. Best of all was seeing all my New England pals  - some of the user group leaders that I konw and others, like Robert Hurlbut. I also enjoyed seeing Michael Stiefel's talk on SOA and WSE2.0. He and I consulted in advance so that our talks didn't overlap. I got to focus soley on the security fundamentals - all concept no code! That talk is becoming my raison d'etre these days!

There were some fantastic session, including the workshops and Ari Bixhorn did a super job of the keynote. Though the keynote was the same focus as the keynote that he did with Eric Rudder at VSLive, he really made it his own at this show. It's always entertaining to get a chance to catch up with Ari!

Thom Robbins got me to actually sit down to do a Hands on Lab with Whitehorse, but I didn't get too far as I was having too much fun chatting with Jim Murphy and Tim Ewald from Mindreef which was right by the HOL area. I got to hear about some interesting features that are upcoming in their already awesome product. I think those guys are going to do a group road trip to speak at VTdotNET after this summer. That will be a blast. What great luck for the user group!

The Cabanas (sponsored by INETA, no less <g>) last night were great. I ended up in the VB room with Carl Franklin and Markus Egger. People asked awesome questions. It seems that STILL the #1 most difficult new concept for VB6 devs coming into .NET is delegates. (it was mine as well...)

I went over this morning for a bit and sat in an amazing (and entertaining) workshop called "Security, the new reality" doen by Patrick Hynds and Duane LaFlotte of Critical Sites. It is a REALLY good thing that these guys are not on the wrong side of the law when it comes to hacking website. I pity any hacker that tries to get into their sites.

All in all it was a great show. Thanks especially to Derek Ferguson and Grisha Davida!!

And I can't complain about the very clear weather for driving to Boston and back either!

http://www.AcehAid.org

KDP, financial invesment firm in Montpelier is looking for some with good web skills for a 3 month project. The job is listed in detail in Seven Days (www.sevendaysvt.com) but not on their website. Email kdpjobs@kdpyield.com for more info. (Sorry - I have to leave soon and can't just type in the whole job description.)

Posted from BLInk!

Efficiency Vermont is looking for someone to do desktop support.

More info here: http://www.efficiencyvermont.org/index.cfm?L1=9&L2=366&sub=res

Posted from BLInk!

Congrats to Scott Cate and company on a killer feature of EasySearchASP.NET. The tool lets you incorporate a search engine very easily right into your own website. But the new feature is "hints". It is REALLY cool. You can see it best right on the EasySearchASP.NET site by searching for something on that site. On the home page is a search box. Just go start typing in it.....

Cool, huh?

You don't have to rely on visitors knowing how to use google's site:www.mysite.com parameter to search your website.

I like it. But the hints is super duper slick.

http://www.AcehAid.org

There's no AT&T/Cingular where I live.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I always love to see this!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Rick Strahl is the victim of a stupid pet trick on the Acrobat Reader 7 install...

http://www.AcehAid.org

I loved meeting Shawn finally at the WMA conference in San Francisco. While we chatted at the Varnish Gallery (where the Tablet party was being held - excellent choice, by the way, Elliot!) I let him know that I had started pestering my MVP leads (plural because I refer to my current and my former) that he should be an MVP, maybe C#. Although he is known for many tablet pc development articles, he is a whiz bang developer and I'm always impressed by his wealth  (and depth) of knowledge in responding to many questions on the Developmentor list that I am a voyeur on. Well, I guess we can say "great minds think alike" - because he told me that it's a little late for MVP since he had just committed to swallowing the red pill. He is going to work at Microsoft and will have a very very cool job - as the PM on the team responsible for integrating Tablet PC platform into Avalon and WinFX.

Although I'm a little embarrassed (though highly flattered) by something he says in this post, I need to link to it anyway so you can read more...

Congrats Shawn!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I heard this dialog in a conversation:

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer) : "developers just don't understand BizTalk:

.NET Developer: "yeah, but why should I? BizTalk is for IT Pros"

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer): "See, that's because you don't understand BizTalk"

I could have very easily been the developer in that conversation, and it's true, I don't understand it at all. Unfortunately, I'll have to leave it to the BizTalk guru for now.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Isn't that the way Hallmark worked it out?

http://www.AcehAid.org

Robert Hurlbut is going to come to Vermont.NET for our April 11th meeting and teach us about TDD, Unit Testing and using NUnit.

Really I know we all just need to read Dr. Neil's Extreme .NET.

But I like the idea of having someone explain it to me.

http://www.AcehAid.org

The 2/16 meeting of VTSDA features a membership roundtable discussion on Business Development & Sales. This is a lunch time meeting at the Ethan Allen Club in downtown Burlington. Please see the website for details as well as how to rsvp (important to do so they can pre-order enough lunches).

http://www.AcehAid.org

When I wrote my blogging application, I had a few learning curves to get over: new ideas for tablet UI, working with blogger and metablog apis, learning how to ftp in the background. But the most challenging thing I had to deal with was coding with XMLRPC for lack of samples. What was out there was in C# so I ended up also doing a LOT of C# coding which was the most I had ever done at that point.

Dave Burke just went through the XMLRPC learning curve as well, but he did something very smart (and very kind). He posted his code, which gets some more sample code out there. Here it is.

http://www.AcehAid.org

oh darn. I was thinking it would be fun to listen live and hang out on the IRC channel but it's not good timing for me. Not when we got a foot of new fluff overnight! We have to go out on our snowshoes and pack all of our trails back down for skiing.

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

I don't use my tablet on an everyday basis and I am hardly a tablet power user. I am a programmer who is curious about the tablet as a way to extend my user's relationship with their applications.*

However, for mass market ink appeal, I don't understand why Josh Einstein's extension to Outlook isn't getting people more excited. Everyone uses Outlook (please don't take that literally). The market is already there. This may not be the killer app that will drive people to purchase tablets, but once they are using them, they should be damned glad to have a tool like this.

Eventually people won't be choosing between tablet and not tablet. They'll just be buying their mobile pc and one of the common features will be ink. And don't forget, another will be speech recognition. Believe me, Josh is thinking about this too!

*If you have ever had to do tech support for your applications, you probably know why "relationship" is an appropriate term here.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I just realized that the box sitting in the corner of my office which came while I was out west was filled with copies of the Mar/April 2005 issue of Code Magazine. EPS is kind enough to send issues to Vermont.NET. (We also get mags from ASPNetPro)

In this issue is my first .NET article that has been printed on paper - not just online. I did have a few FoxPro articles in FoxPro advisor many years ago.

The article is "Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005" a very cool and underplayed feature in the next version of VS.NET. You may have noticed that I have written quite a few blog posts on this topic in the past so it was fun to formalize it as well as to update it for some of the nice changes that were made as of the November CTP bits.

The article has all samples in both VB and C# because of the big differences between creating attributes, inheriting objects, etc in the two languages. In fact, as far as I know, these are the first VB samples for debugger visualizers in print. Even the MSDN Library still only has C#.

There were two articles written on this previously - Scott Nonneberg wrote one on MSDN Online based on Beta 1, and Morgan Skinner included visualizers in this early article which based on pre-Beta 1 bits.

I was hoping to get a chance to drill into this and a few other of the new debugger display attributes at TechEd but it looks like that won't be happening. I see only 29 developer specific topics in all of TechEd2005 and it's not one of them.

Anyway, I hope the article is useful to many. There are also articles in there by Juval Lowy, Deborah Kurata and Dino Esposito as well as a few others. It's nice to be in such fine company.

My second in print .NET article is coming very soon - though in a different magazine.

Thanks again Rodman!

http://www.AcehAid.org

here is a  reminder of the "before" on Steve Smith's blog.

And just go right to www.ASPAlliance.com for the "after". Very nice design.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Very cool to see Robert in mainstream media!!

The author mentions tablet pc's in passing:

[At NEC,] Mr Scoble's area of expertise was tablet PCs—laptop computers that allow users to handwrite their notes, and that have been mostly a dud, both then and now.

Sad to see that in the same article since Robert is such a huge tablet pc enthusiast and evangelist.

http://www.AcehAid.org

yes, we (that's YOU, the .net community) have raised

$10,138

for Aceh Aid at IDEP to help with their phenomenal relief efforts in Sumatra.

Thanks to everyone who participated, consultants and bidders.

We are not going to list the winners for reasons of privacy.

Stay tuned for more auctions....

http://www.AcehAid.org

Somehow I managed to get home last night at the scheduled time. The previous plane that was supposed to fly into Burlington was diverted to Albany, so I was lucky.

Powder day today! Though one morning of skiing through heavy powder was more than enough for me.

VSLive/Windows Anywhere was a blast. Lots to learn, everyone to see, new people to meet. Walt Ritscher posted some pictures from Wednesday night's dinner when I *finally* got to get some sushi. Apologies to Sam Gentile since I neglected to call to let him know where we landed after I had had a few too many sakes.

I finally saw a Wacom digitizer that is a small device you can plug into your desktop and have inking capablities. I am definitely going to get one since I spend most of my time at my desk using my desktop computer.

The MS Tablet Team put together a great event Tuesday night at a very cool art gallery called Varnish.

This was after a long weekend in Seattle for the INETA working group meeting which Chris Pels blogged about and a few days of hanging out before heading to SF. I went on the Underground Tour of Seattle with Chris Wallace. It was fantastic and I highly recommend it. What a bizarre history Seattle has!

So now I am just trying to catch up with the emails then I'm off to Boston for Web Services Edge East on Tuesday then NYC to see a client the next week, then back to Boston for  Code Camp a few weeks after that and then Orlando for DevConnections a few weeks after that. That's a lot of travelling for me, but nothing compared to what Kimberly Tripp rattled off the other evening!

http://www.AcehAid.org

After making a small adjustment during an Indigo talk Don Box says: "If I flex, it won't pop off."

Steve Swartz was really hoping that quote would get blogged with no context. Happy to oblige.

Posted from BLInk!

ooops! MSN Messenger site. Monday 2/7 at 4:49 PST.

Posted from BLInk!

Sam Schultz is one of those amazing guys you  think only exist in the movies. BUt he's real. He is one of the amazing people that is working with IDEP to bring critical support into the horribly devastated areas of Sumatra. A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor traveled with Sam and wrote this story.

One man's mission to bring relief to cut-off villages

Galvanized by images of the disaster, Sam S