Daily Archives: April 13, 2004

A funny encounter at the MVP Summit

Just Rambling

On Tuesday morning as I was hanging out with a bunch of Scotts in the W Hotel Lobby, and me looking like a good ol’ geek, no – make that hippy geek, in came some of those typical “W-crowd“ stylish, all dressed in black, beautiful people. As they came up the stairs to where we were I looked and realized that one of them was a man I had worked very closely with for a year in the late 80’s. He was a “stylish beautiful people“ back then, too. I was a little closer to that at the time than I am now. But we hadn’t seen each other in 12 or 13 or more years. It was so fun to have our little “oh my god!” reunion in the lobby.

We had worked together at a big ad agency in NY (in the same building that Microsoft is in now) and he now works for another huge ad agency and runs the world of interactive advertising for them globally. Coincidentally they were there for a meeting with Microsoft to talk about some advertising accounts. It’s actually a big deal but I don’t know if it’s all public or not.

The funniest part was that I thought he looked exactly the same as 13 years ago and later that evening, one of the women on his team told me that he had said the same of me. Sorry, try to rid that ego boost out of my little head!! 🙂

Maryam

Just Rambling

Do I need to say the last name ? It’s Maryam Scoble. As famous as her hubbie from his many endearing and occasional “please save me from this totally outspoken chick!“ blog posts about her.  I got to meet Maryam when I was in Seattle. First on Saturday night, where I was so happy to meet her, feeling as if I knew her so well, I forgot that she had no CLUE who I was and just threw my arms around her. It turned out to be a-okay. We had a wonderful time and also had dinner together with Alan Griver and Olga Londer on Sunday night – two more of some of the nicest people I know. That was a very interesting and international dinner in so many ways. Here’s an adorable picture of Maryam with Robert in Vancouver. I almost like it as much as this one which I believe was taken on their honeymoon. LOL. Love ya Maryam.

Rocky Lhotka – Microsoft Software Legend and a blogger, too

Community Cheerleading

Amy Sorokas blogged about SAMS author Stephen Walther becoming a software legend a few weeks ago. But I totally missed the fact that Rocky Lhotka was also acknowledged as a Software Legend as well. I know – big shocker, right? Rocky is a definitely a legend — there is no doubt about it.

And he has been doing a little blogging – so stay tuned to this spot for future enlightenment.

Congratulations, Rocky!!

Won’t you play with my tablet?

Tablet

There were 30 people at our user group meeting last night. I brought my little Acer C110 tablet and offered it up for people to play with. Maybe it was because of the pizza they were eating, but I was stunned that nobody jumped at the opportunity. Okay I did say “when you finish your greasy pizza…”. Finally one person said he’d like to play with it, but wouldn’t you know, the battery had just sucked it’s last drop of juice and I had left the spare AND my power cord at home. But ONE person out of THIRTY? I was hoping to do a special afternoon/evening of a tablet pc get together to let people play with them, but this seems almost hopeless.

I have a bit of Tablet PC Evangelism work ahead of me here, I see.

I told them, Tablet PC development is hardly different than Windows development. You don’t even NEED to know how to interact with the API if you don’t want to – just for writing a basic data entry type of application. I will be working on this…

My homies at TechEd

Community Cheerleading

It looks like, thanks to INETA and help from MSDN, I will be going to TechEd this year. The key of going is the User Group Leader meeting on Sunday but I will be staying for the whole week and running another Women who Code BOF (go vote!) and hopefully a Tablet PC BOF. (Brad McCabe from Infragistics is already doing one, so maybe he’ll let me help…)

But what is most exciting to me is that a few folks from my user group are going. Roman Rehak, who works at MS Gold Partner Competitive Computing (“C2”) – where there are a few job openings right now and Ali Aghareza – our local “plumber” – who works for Green Mountain Power, a local utility that is VERY advanced when it comes to technology. I also know that a few of the guys from the UVM Business School (they work for the woman who is a hard core TabletPC user that I frequently write about) will be there. I am thrilled that these guys will all be there. We will have a blast and I am looking forward to showing them off.

More awesome .NET jobs in Vermont

Jobs

It looks like things are really picking up in Vermont!

In addition to the four Burton Snowboards and Evergreen Bank jobs I wrote about a few days ago, there are two great jobs at our local (Burlington area) Gold Partner, Competitive Computing.

The biggest advantage of working at C2 (as we call it) is that you get to work with up & coming SQL guru Roman Rehak (who is also a hell of a fun guy).

One is for a Business Analyst/Application Engineer. If I was looking for work this would be a job I’d be interested in. It combines your business and communications skills with “.Net, web programming using .ASP, JavaScript and HTML. Fluency in SQL and the use of data access components such as ADO and ODBC, scripting skills and a basic understanding of Microsoft DTS“ But a)I’m not looking and b) nobody asked me anyway – but maybe they were assuming “a“.

The second job is not a programming job but, eBUSINESS CONSULTANT. This is more like a classic B.A. position — no coding. However, you still leverage great experience and skills that you have gained from coding.

Here is a direct link to the jobs page. Tell them I sent you!

Post XML Night in Vermont

Tools

XML night was fun at VTdotNET last night. We had 30 people attending our meeting. This is about our mean – vs. average. We have actually had 50 at a few meetings and sometimes we have closer to 20, but it is more likely to have 30 than anything.

Joe Stagner, our MS Community Champion (though I think those titles are changing YET again) was one of the speakers. The DCC (hmm – so that d stands for something, maybe Developer Community Champion) are just about the only people in the entire corporation that do not have to account for sales, so Joe is in a nice position. These are the people responsible for the MSDN Events. Unfortunately, because of low attendance, Burlington is off the list for MSDN events. We all talked about this last night. It seems a combination of content and timing has been a problem. The first series was VSTO and Smart Clients  – the VSTO turned off a lot of people – sorry Paul – as not critical enough to leave the office for a 1/2 day. The second, on March 2nd (I was at DevDays Hartford) was both “Town Meeting Day” in Vermont and also the middle of a school break so a double whammy for a lot of people. THe end result is what I gather must become a high cost per person for putting the events together. However, since I have access to numerous free facilities, and Joe loves Burlington, we are going to try to work something out that will be very low budget, content that is driven by our user group and a win-win for everyone (including Joe).

Joe also came with  a box of many MSDN t-shirts, which disappeared so quickly that I had to ask for one (from someone who had taken two :-)) and some other goodies.

With the great focus on security lately, Joe talked about security in XML, and Dave Burke has already pointed out what was also to me a new and interesting fact – that you can encrypt xml data at the node level. Cool.

The other presentation was a tour around XML Spy and some of Altova’s other flagship products. XML Spy of course is VERY cool, but I was really blown away by Authentic (which is free) and even more so by StyleVision (which is currently separate, but will be bundled into the next version of XML Spy). I almost cried when I saw StyleVision, thinking about the PAIN and AGONY I went through learning XSLT about 3 years ago when I was creating some very complex reports on the web. This is also a great way to learn XPath, while StyleVision helps you out.

Trace Galloway (who gave a damned good technical presentation considering he’s a marketing guy!) also brought a box filled with beautiful bright red XMLSpy t-shirts and raffled off the Pro version of XML Spy. I owe an apology for my protective reaction when the winner was a bright database programmer who works for Bloomberg in NYC who was visiting his pal Ali (a VTdotNet member) and tagged along to the meeting. My gut instinct was “geeze, someone from the group should get it” – but everyone looked at me like I was being a Nazi (though I was really just being a protective momma bird). But Mike was SO excited to win the product that I know it is in VERY good hands and that he will benefit greatly from the products. Hopefully he will also be talking about how great it is to go visit the Vermont.NET user group for at least a few weeks!!

Trace was really impressed with the turnout at our meeting. He says he has been to user group meetings in the Boston area with comparable attendance. He actually suggested that I try to get Don Box to come to the group, but I think he understood when I laughed that idea off. I’m sure there would be a few people in Vermont who would probably pee in their pants if I told them Don Box was coming to speak. (oops sorry Leon, there I go again…)

So we do have an outstanding line up coming up in Vermont. Over the next few months we have our year’s INETA Speakers: Tim Huckaby, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Rocky Lhotka in October. And also Don Kiely, who is coming from Alaska on his frequent flyer miles in July. Not too shabby, eh?