Monthly Archives: March 2005

Happy Campers

Just Rambling

I have a client who has crazy wonderful ideas about what they would like their software to do. They don’t go by any rules of “what software should do”. I told them from the beginning “just dream…I’ll let you know what I can and can’t make happen.”

Sometimes these ideas are really hard to implement, sometimes not so bad. It’s really gratifying when I get emails that say “this works great! I love it!!!”



http://www.AcehAid.org

If you could read only one blog….

Community Cheerleading

…which would it be?

Lately, this thought has popped into my head every time I read a new post from Elizabeth Grigg’s blog.

But of course, I would probably go into some type of withdrawal shock if I couldn’t “blog surf” like I do frequently throughout the day. And I would stop being constantly challenged to learn a gazillion new things about programming which is the result of reading (or scanning or surfing or whatever) such a great variety of different blogs.

But Beth’s blog is definitely a stop and smell the roses kind of thing…kind of like having the t.v. channel stuck on PBS.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Want to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

dotNET

What does it mean to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

What you do: Pay for the pizza and soda

What you get:

  • Get your company logo on the homepage of our website (www.vtdotnet.org) during the time of promoting the meeting (and afterwards sometimes if I don’t update for the next meeting right away)
  • Get your company  logo and thanks to you in all emails that go out to our lists that are geared towards promoting the meetings. We have a member list of 200 members, as well as a meeting announcement list that is those 200 + 100 more. That’s 300 people who have explicitly asked to receive these emails!
  • Get your logo on our THANK YOU slide that is in the powerpoint deck that plays during the meeting “warm up” and that I review at the beginning of my meeting. More info on this…
  • If you would like, we can have literature about your products available to attendees.
  • Our undying gratitude.

Take a look at the upcoming meeting schedule. Where there is not an INETA Sponsored event (note the logo below the speaker’s name), we can use a pizza/soda sponsor. Our meetings can have anywhere from 20 – 40 attendees though we have had 50 on a few occasions, so the cost of sponsorship varies.

I can’t believe it took me three years to think of blogging for pizza for my user group!! 🙂



http://www.AcehAid.org

User Group Dilemmas -The widening gap between .NET Newbies and .NET Pros

dotNET

Reading Jerry Delany’s post about attending the Atlanta.NET meeting and a comment he made at the end about attending the Atlanta C# meetings because they are more advanced made me think of a problem I have been pondering lately with my user group , Vermont.NET, that is not uncommon.

We have been meeting for 3 years now – since Feb 2002. There are plenty of pepole in the group who have come frequently to meetings since the beginning and they are many who are pretty advanced. Yet we still have new people coming into the meeting all of the time. Of course, this is a microcosm of the whole programming community and not a new problem. I don’t want to have to choose between sating the more advanced .NET programmers and ignoring the needs of those who are just moving to .NET.

What we are talking about (and I am waiting for someone in the group to grab this project and run with it…) is having a pre-meeting presentation that is more for beginners and then let the regular presentation continue to engage those who are interested in more advanced topics. There are many groups who do this so we can certainly learn from them. My idea is to have the beginner talks be done by user group members, which has so many advantages.

How is your user group dealing with the widening gap between .NET newbies and .NET pros?

update: I emailed Chris Pels who runs the Boston.NET User group and has been doing a 2-part meeting for two years. We will have an article on this in the April INETA Newsletter. If you aren’t signed up for the newsletter (which you can do from the home page), they are archived at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

http://www.AcehAid.org

New 8.2 earthquake off of sumatra coast

Asia

An aftershock – 3 months after. 8.2 earthquake in the SAME spot as before. Hits at midnight, everyone of course fears another tsunami. Banda Aceh is the target again. Horror. Waiting to hear back from the folks in Bali…will post anything I hear…

update – you all probably know from the news, the earthquake has done a lot of damage in places (high death toll on the island Nias) but at this point, the fear of a tsunami has faded. Thank god. It is now morning there. Got word from folks in southern Indonesia who are awaiting contact with their aid workers in Aceh Province…

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd Speakers list is filling in

Just Rambling

Kate Gregory notes that the speakers list (check the dropdown) on the TechEd site is filling in. She also already did the Brian count. There are (just guessing by names) 8 Brians and 11 women, so maybe the ration (I decided to leave that typo in tact since it made me laugh) is increasing? This has become fondly known as the Brian Factor.

What is nice to see is that after the early indication that a lot of the 3rd party (aka Non-Microsoft) speakers who are frequent TechEd speakers were not on the roster, it seems to have improved. I see lots of people that I know are not MS employees on the list. That’s good for the community I think. PDC is the all Microsoft event. So an apparent reduction for TEchEd had (understandably) ruffled some feathers and egos.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Losing stuff

Tools

It’s starting to become a pattern

I “lost” my Pocket PC at DevTeach in Montreal. I think I accidentally left it behind in the hotel room and it was never to be seen again – or something like that.

After spending 45 minutes showing the very nice young waitress at the New York Sports Grill who is attending art school my TabletPC and letting her play with it, I managed to leave the stylus behind. Someone probably just picked it up thinking it was a cheapo pen. By the time I was getting ready to board the plane and realized I didn’t have my stylus, the restaurant was all closed up. That’s the $32 stylus that handily fits right into my tablet. Darn! Luckily I have a beautiful Wacom Executive pen.

I left my handy little retractable ethernet cable behind while at Code Camp. That was one my MVP Lead gave to me last year and it is a great thing to have.

I “lost” my laptop mouse at DevConnections. I’m 98% sure I left it in my room on the desk when I went downstairs.

Lucky for me I had some MVP bucks left so I just went ahead and replaced the last two items. I try try try to look behind me whenever I leave a room where I have stuff. Really I do. I have another pocketpc but I don’t even use it.



http://www.AcehAid.org