Yesterday I did a fun session at the Vermont 3.0 event titled: “Software Developer: Career or Addiction?”.

I’ve had a bad chest cold for 2 weeks and yesterday was actually better day for me than these past weeks.

I took all I could to prevent coughing.

The talks were all being recorded by the local public access channel.

Apparently, according to DanZ (who was standing near the area where the video feed was being monitoried) what coughing I did do (and I don’t recall caughing UP anything, as gross as he makes it sound – eeeew) sounded seriously nasty over the mic. I’m definitely not looking forward to hearing that.

Throughout the day, every time I met someone who wanted to shake hands I had to tell them “oh, no, you do NOT want to touch me”. I even passed up shaking hands with Sen. Bernie Sanders. I didn’t want to be responsible for passing this cruddy cold onto him! (or anyone)

And Dan, thanks for not stealing my car! 😉

I was just bemoaning the fact that I won’t be able to drive to Boston for David Chappell’s special appearance at a multi-user group event at the end of the month when I discovered that he’ll be doing the keynote at the Developer Summit in Stockholm, Sweden where I will also be presenting.

<plug> I’ll be doing a full day workshop on Entity Framework as well as an Advanced EF session and a Silverlight Annotation session.</plug>

For the last bunch of years, Rich and I have subscribed to Netflix during the winter when it gets dark early and cancel it around late spring when we can stay outdoors later, then start up again around Christmas time.

When Netflix introduced streaming this summer, we started looking into options for connecting our laptops (no s-video or DVI) to our TV. We never thought of watching the movies on our computers. At first, the offer was that you could watch as many hours as the cost in dollars of your plan – $19/month for the 3 movies at a time plan meant you could also watch 19 hours online. Which should be more than enough!

But that all changed recently when Netflix opened up the streaming with no limits (that I’m aware of).

We still, however, don’t have the hookup for the tv.

But I’ve been sick with a really nasty cold for the past week which seems to get worse and worse. Can you imagine ME actually not being able to talk! (Yes, Rich thinks its a small miracle! :-)) But today, I curled up in bed where I wanted to be, picked a sweet, not quite sappy, indy film (The Treatment) and watched it over the wireless network in our house. It was perfect.

There was a point when it went a little crazy because I ran out of room on my C:\. SO I had to crash it and go clean up things like the 4GB VS2008 install file that was on my desktop and then I watched the rest of the movie with no problems.

And you thought Microsoft files a lot of patents!

Here’s the article:

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080119/BUSINESS/801190312/1003

Every time I see a reply on a forum, listserv or a blog comment that starts with “Err…” or “ummm…”, it translates in my brain as “how stupid are you anyway?” and reeks of arrogance.

I’ve always wondered if it’s intentional and if the person writing this realizes the effect it has…

Generally I give them the benefit of cluelessness.

Thanks to Mike Taulty for keeping me in the loop. For some reason, when linking directly to the video, the sound was wierd, so here’s the MSN video site where you’ll have to watch a 5 second ad first. It’s worth it!

This is funny and it is always a great reminder to see Bill Gates sense of humor and his ability to laugh at himself. I think when we had the meeting with him last month, none of us were thinking of this – we were all so serious. Sheesh!

As a woman who is a little curvier from the waist down than I’d like to be, you think I would hail this report, “Are Curvy women smarter?” , as “justfication”  – “hey, it just because I’m smart!” (and maybe more potato chips in my future :-)) . But it seems pretty ludicrous to me, especially considering some of the many brilliant women I know who are slim & trim.

When I was at the MIX n MASH 08 event a few weeks ago in Redmond, there were a number of reasons that I definitely got excited about MIX. Read more…

[A New DevLife post]

I had been thinking that I don’t want to write up a whole story about our year to put into the christmas cards for those distant relatives that we hardly ever see, yet I wanted to at least have a little something to share with them.

Then today, I got the perfect solution in the form of a friend’s holiday letter – she created a comic strip from a handful of pictures using Comic Life from plasq. THere are versions for WIndows and Mac. We printed out a bunch and also exported it to a jpg. Mine’s a little lame, but you can get very creative. Definitely a fun tool!

Click on the mini version to see it full size.

VSM has a new website and it is finally possible to find content! Hooray. Nice job folks.