When Howard Dean announced today that he was leaving the presidential campaign, his parting words were still a rallying cry:
You have the power to take our country back so that the flag of the United States of America no longer is the exclusive property of John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell, that it belongs to all of us.
and boy are we lucky!!
saw this on Andrew Duthie’s blog
Kent officially announces the ASP.NET resource kit. (with some good humor, to boot!)
It made a brief appearance last week or so, long enough for a bunch of people (including me) to blog about it then – poof – it was gone! 🙂
Speaking opps?? Ha! There is no such thing! *I* don’t even get to speak at my own user group any more. Being VERMONT, it is kind of a popular venue. By November of 2003, I had all but 4 months of 2004 booked.
If you don’t happen to wander over to that site
here is a line up (more details here)
(This is going to require a mass of links – too tired – maybe later – sorry!!)
Jan Pat Hynds (INETA speaker but came on his own and I still want to keep thanking him!)
Feb Steve Smith(ASPAlliance) Sponsored by the Julie & Rich B&B
Mar Jason Beres(INETA Speaker who is also a new Infragistics employee and Infra is sponsoring)
Apr Joe Stagner(MS)/Trace Galloway (Altova) – it’s an XML night
May Tim Huckaby (INETA sponsored)
June Michele Leroux Bustamente (INETA Sponsored)
July Don Kiely (frequent flyer miles and Julie & Rich B&B sponsored)
August – Ali Agheraza (local brainiac plumber)
Sept – (hey maybe a spot for me???)
October – Rocky Lhotka (INETA sponsored)
phew
Generally all of the out of town speakers stay at our house and try to get here for the prior weekend to enjoy Vermont. Pat was going to but unfortunately it became not possible at the last minute and he drove all the way here and back on the same afternoon/evening (boston to Burlington – 4 hrs each way). Thom Robbins from Microsoft Waltham has done that and so did Shawn Wildermuth back in June 2002.
Another fun thing is that I’ve managed to find local companies to donate speaker gifts – something special from Vermont (eg gift basket of Vermont food products cheese, coffee, chocolate, syrup etc.) We have some pretty well known companies in the area and many of them are represented in the group. Gardener’s Supply, Green Mountain Coffee, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Karhu, Burton (okay the Burton guy – who is also becoming a famous bike racer! – went over to Gardener’s Supply) so I do have a good pot to draw from. Last year, one member donated ski tickets at (my favorite ski place – Mad River Glen) for Chris Kinsman when he came here in March.
Now you see why I don’t get to talk at my own user group. These people are spoiled rotten with primo speakers. Heh. And I’m kidding. They are not rotten. They are the BEST and deserve this. Really it’s been awesome. THere are a lot of people in the group that are really working full time in .NET now at a pretty high level.
We have one young guy in the group, Neil Wacek, who was working on the Mono documentation before the user group even started. So he knew a ton before all the rest of us even knew how to spell dotnet. Another person, Roman Rehak, publishes lots of articles in Visual Studio Magazine has become a national speaker (well International if you count DevTeach in Montreal) and was track chair for the PASS conference this past year. I expect to start seeing Roman on the bill for future big conferences – he really is a phenomenal presenter and knows his stuff inside and out.
So those two, well, they probably figured all of this out without benefit of the group. But really people are learning and it’s wonderful to see the transition. Hell, I hadn’t even installed VS.NET until after our 2nd meeting!! (And I had a live, working asp.net app by the 3rd…)
So back to the amazing speaker roster — it has been like that for our whole two years (Feb was 2nd yr anniversary). Here’s a page (need to update recent talks) of almost all of our past meetings.
Not bad for a little ol’ Vermont User Group, eh?
Why am I writing about this? I was thinking how it kinda sucked that I didn’t get to practice my upcoming presentation by doing it for the user group first. 🙂 But that’s okay.
Well, that was a LOT more fun than practicing my talk or writing code and now I’m just gonna go to bed! HAHAHA! (yes, it’s ONLY 10pm!)
I have not had a need for Console applications since I started writing Windows applications. Obviously there are a lot of people writing console apps (I can tell from the cheers of all the folks who were excited about the color in the PDC presentation). I know Stephen Forte has one he showed me once.
So, what *DO* all you people do with a console app? Unit tests? Client apps? I’m curious.
yes COLOR in the Console!! and beeping and more…
However, if you are playing with the Console Demo App from the BCL teams’ website, be sure that your console windows settings in WinXP (other versions?) is set to open to a Window rather than full-screen.
I have no idea how this works in .NET 1.0 or 1.1, but it’s obviously an issue with Whidbey alpha bits as I get an error any time I try to do something with Console like set the size or title.
It’s fixed in the beta from what I’ve been told.
Phil Scott thinks so – and since he is pointing to one of my favorite resources (devedge.netscape.com) when dealing with any css or html issues, I just couldn’t resist pointing this out! (Once I stopped giggling)
<procrastinating>
In talking about extensions to datatypes, I keep finding my self saying “type of type” as in “any type of type, a datetime, a string…” I am trying to train my brain to say “variety of type” instead.
</procrastinating>
Uggh – I hate this part of preparing a presentation. Sitting alone in my office talking out loud to myself, attempting to put all of the thoughts swirling around in your head into words and trying to make them efficient and effective as the clock keeps ticking away.
Why is it that if I were just sitting in a bar talking about this technical stuff with people, I don’t need to practice, I’m just having a conversation and it’s fun. If I was on the phone with a friend who asked me to explain something, it’s not a problem. I think the brevity of the presentation combined with the scope of the content makes it hard. I really have to fly through the information, but still want to share what I have learned.
I think it’s time to go back to all of those blogs of how to do a good presentation.
I actually have a (not quite scheduled yet) LiveMeeting date with Scott Watermasysk and Scott Cate to practice.
Note to self – see if thinkGeek sells a shock device that hits you every time you say “SO” or “umm” in a presentation
I have seen mention of it in a few places. Here is the article on msnbc. Having been involved in market research in a past life, first thing I looked for was how many people were in the study: 3600. Decent number. But still, as a woman over 40 (barely, mind you… :-)) I just find this so incredibly hard to believe. I have a lot of women friends my age (early 40’s) and couldn’t imagine any of them doing it. In fact,I bet if I did my own poll of women in say the 38-45 bracket (seem to have a lot of friends in there), I bet I would come up with a big fat zero for on-line gaming.
Here is AOL’s more detailed press release.
The only thing I cna think of is that Match.com is considered online gaming. But that wouldn’t account for teh part of the study that talks about how women made friendships with each other.