Larry and his wife live in Hawaii. For a reason. This is an amazing story!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

.NET plumber, John Bristowe’s, twin sister Ashley having a baby. John is very close to his sister and I always love seeing how proud he is of her and that he is able to share that with the world on his blog. Not a lot of guys do that.

His latest post was written as he was leaving to go to the hospital with Ashley and her husband last night, so hopefully by now, he’s an uncle.

Congrats Uncle John!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

And I don’t mean he’s going to another class! Awesome Kent! Big Congrats!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thanks Mike G for pointing this out.

With verification/validation from Brad Abrams (Microsoft), Paul Vick (Microsoft), Tyler Whitney (Microsoft) and Erik Porter (MVP), Cory Smith has put together an excellent document on VB.NET Coding Guidelines. We all tend to get lazy and should probably take a look at this monthly!

Why this is on his blog and not on the VB Developer Center, I’m not sure. Yo, Brad!!! Lookee here…

http://www.AcehAid.org

well, a simulator – but the thrill is far from simulated. Here’s Jeff’s post. I love reading about his passion for planes.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Boy did we have a blast! Rod  Paddock flew into Boston for Code Camp III where he did 3 back to back sessions on Sunday. He drove back to Vermont with Laura Blood and I. We forgot to pause in NH so he could “touch down” and claim he has been to NH, now. We met up for dinner at my favorite Montepelier restaurant, Sarducci’s, with Mario Cardinal and Eric Cote, our GUVSM.NET buddies who were also at Code camp and on their way back to Montreal.

Yesterday Rod treated me to my first Best Buy experience. I have never been there before! Then I toured him around Burlington a bit and off we went to the meeting.

Rod did a talk on creating custom data types for SQL Server 2005 using VS 2005. He is a fantastic presenter.. I could tell that the VTdotNET members were  very interested and engaged because of the many questions. Jean Rene Roy came down from Montreal to pick up Rod since he was heading there next on his world tour. After the meeting Rod, Jean-Rene and Marc Heinzer who is doing awesome work at Gardener’s Supply (the largest mail order and online ordering gardening supply company in the country), had a little more geeking out at The Daily Planet and off they went to Montreal.

Rod is speaking tonight at Montreal’s Foxpro User Group and then tomorrow night in Toronto at the Toronto VB User Group. He started at home in seattle so he will have a lot of miles under his belt at the end of his mini-world tour.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Prepare to read this probably on every single blog! It’s VERY newsworthy!! They are not really purchasing Ray Ozzie. They will be hiring him as the one of their CTOs.

*thanks for the clarification Mike!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Mike Gunderloy, one of the most prolific technical writers on the planet, has been doing reviews and columns for ADT for quite a long time. Mike is now going to do the reviews on his own larkware blog and you have probably already seen them. He has also done something that I think he totally deserves to be able to do and I have waited a few weeks to see what I thought of it. And I think it’s totally fine. He has sponsors on his Daily Grind blog posts. This is not the gross sponsorshop that a number of “a-list” bloggers recently did by contracting to find something to say about one particular totally unknown company in their posts periodically. I really did not like that one bit.

But having totally relevant companies subtly added at the end of the Daily Grind’s works for me. Mike works pretty hard on that feed and it is full of relevant and interesting information every single day. I also much prefer having the reviews come to me. I’m not one to go looking on a website every day to see what’s new.

How he finds time to explore so much software and so many books to do these reviews is beyond me.

I do look forward to Mike airing more of his opinion[ated :-)] pieces on the blog. I think he does a great job of keeping many of us in line!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Must be nice to have Fritz Onion living in your backyard! Though Vermont is nearer to Maine than, say, California, it’s a long drive!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Drew Robbins, who I have known since the beginning of my INETA days as a very involved user group leader as well as someone who has been a great community leader in Ohio, has just become the D.E. for Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky. Many of you may also know Drew as the co-creator of PDCBloggers.net and TechEdBloggers.Net as well as a few other compilations.

Drew replaces Alex Lowe who has been, from all accounts, an awesome D.E., but just couldn’t resist the call to go work with his ASP.NET homies at Telligent Systems.