When I was at TechEd, I did the TabletPC hands on lab. It was in C#. It was the first time I realized that those poor people have to declare every event when they are coding (we get them for free in VB). But it also got me practicing constructors in C# and the curly braces and all.

When I wrote my doodle app, I started with some C# code from a demo and wrote the whole thing in C#. It’s a pretty straightforward app. But again, just more time in the saddle getting used to some little differences like constructing if statements, try/catch blocks etc and the totally anal capatilization.

Now I’m back into the WSE2 Hands on Lab again. It’s all C#. The first part of it is gobs and gobs of coding.

I like the flexibility of being able to go back and forth.

And I was really happy that I didn’t have to learn a new way to create a new line since I’ve been using System.Environment.NewLine in VB since.net came out. reading this post of Sam Gentile’s on BCL Types. I wrote THIS one in response, which same saw and wrote “my work here is done.”

I was having some, umm, difficulty (heh) setting NTFS permissions on my new tablet for folders. I couldn’t for the life of me find the security tab. It has been a loooooong time since I had to do this on a new computer and I had forgotten why I was having this problem. I decided it had to be something new in XP SP2 and googled forever. Finally I found security whiz Anil John online on i.m. and asked him. It took him a moment because I distracted him by saying “I think it’s something new in SP2”. But then, he kindly pointed me to Explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View/Advanced Settings. That STUPID “simple file sharing” setting is on by default when you first install XP. (okay, it’s not stupid…) Now this is really embarrassing, but it’s one of those things that is easy to totally forget if you haven’t touched it in years. I was not googling the right words. So it is now just here as a reminder.

as in Gates, Ballmer and McNealy

not me, but Jackie Goldstein

Interesting article from CNN . I had no idea this was being done in grade schools. I went to a women’s college, Wells, and I can definitely attest to the fact that I found myself definitely able to focus on my studies and start definining myself as a human being rather than worry about how I looked in class or would I sound too smart or too stupid…

However, there were a few geeks in my high school that definitely turned out to do some cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I were at a single sex high school. One perfect example is Dan Schwinn, who started a company called Shiva Corporation in the early 80’s that was eventually purchased by Intel. Now he’s into aerospace technologies, heading up Avidyne, a company he started with the dream of bringing high-tech instrumentation to moderate airplanes.

 Dan was definitely our “bar” in high school as there was a group of us who were interested in math & science (oh my god, I just realized, I’ve been a geek all my life – eeeek!) and he was clearly the smartest among us and I also think the most self-confident, in those troubling days of high school social politics, as well. But it wasn’t all geek all the time. I think our poor mother’s drove us to ski about 6 or 7 days a week during the winter!

I went off to a small liberal arts women’s college and Dan went to MIT (oh, shock!) and I remember hearing that he was coming home during college breaks driving a Porsche because he was already doing some amazing stuff for some high-tech companies during the summers. In the late mid-80’s, I was working in the marketing dept for a magazine (already doing lots of programming related stuff). We were heavily invested in Macs as one of the first companies to do a lot of in-house computerized graphic work, and I remember that Dan’s company had the back cover ad of MacWeek (or something like that) every single issue! I’m talking about the 80’s. It was not the norm for 20 somethings to be doing big stuff like this, so it was pretty notable.