Monthly Archives: June 2005

Leaving the INETA NORAM Board

Ineta

At the INETA NORAM User Group Leader Summit on June 5, a new board was announced. I am no longer on the INETA NORAM board. The original board members and founders of INETA (Bill Evjen, Brian Loesgen, Keith Franklin, Keith Pleas) as well as myself (I was not a founding board member) are now on the Advisory Board for INETA NORAM. It was actually the old board that voted in the new board.

I am also [finally] passing on the production of the monthly INETA Newsletter that I have been doing for the past three years. The first two years, I did this on my own and then I finally I had Sheri Nawrocki’s phenomenal help (she did the design, artwork and physical production, which is why it has been looking so beautiful) as well as some great editing assistance from Scott Swigart 

If I had kids, I might liken this to watching your kids go off to college. 

INETA has come a long (enormously long) way and accomplished incredible things in the past 3 years. It has gotten to a point where it has outgrown its grassroots roots (sic) and needs to be run like a professional organization. That’s just not somewhere that I shine (reports? concalls? plans? agendas? minutes? phew!), but it is a perfect role for the new President, Chris Pels (who is one of the most organized people I know) and the rest of the nine member board.

Watch the INETA website for further information about the changes to INETA. I am not leaving INETA (it would take a total blood transfusion as well as a heart replacement to do that!). I am still a liaison and my role on the Advisory board will keep me involved with what is going on.

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Little Discoveries in your Daily Tools

Tools

One of the great difficulties of programming is having to accept the fact that we can’t know every little function and feature that exist in our development tools. In the old days it was easy to write an application from end to end, understand all that was available to you in your IDE and database and even fix your …[more]…

[A DevLife post] 

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Crypto at DevTeach

Just Rambling

I did one of my favorite sessions yesterday, the one with the evolving name. Yesterday I thought maybe it’s best called “Security Basics for WSE, Indigo and Beyond”. I love this talk and have done it a number of times and feel it is my calling. There is NO code in the talk at all. I explain with my own words and from my own (hard earned) understanding, security tools and methods such as credentials, keys, digital certificates, hashing, encryption and digital signing. The purpose of doing this talk is to explain this stuff to people like me because it is an important foundation for working with security but is generally glazed over with the assumption that everyone already understands it. The payload on this talk is when attendees then go to other sessions, such as Christoph Schittko’s WSE3 talk this morning, Ted Neward’s [rockin’ – and I will write about this later] keynote on Indigo last night and further sessions on Indigo today by Ted and Steve Swartz (Indigo Architect at Microsoft). I got to gloat for a moment this morning while my average scores are still 10 (only three people did evals so far and they happened to be ones that loved the session – as more people do evals, of course, this can’t possibly stick). Today I am doing a brand new talk and though it’s a topic I have been very keen on for a while, Visual Debugger and other customized debugging features in VS2005, I can’t expect to hit it with all 10’s the first time out the gate.

Hey, I’m on the Readify home page, too!

Just Rambling

Frank Arrigo noticed that fellow ASPInsider, Paul Glavich, has joined the very impressive collection of developer/consultants in the Australian Readify. I went over to check out their page and thanks to the MSDN Online feed, my Doodling on the Web article is featured on the top of their homepage. Hey, does that win me a free trip to Australia? Charles???



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I love my Dymo label printer

Tools

Once a month or two months I need to print a shipping label. For years I have wanted a Dymo labelwriter, but it just didn’t seem justifiable for the rare times I needed it. But I finally gave in and bought one last month. I have made 3 labels with it, but each one gives me such enormous gratification on how simple and professional it looks, it was totally worth it. (Geeze next thing you know I’m gonna say “I liked it so much, I bought the company!)

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TechEd Speaker Charity Auction has ended

Community Cheerleading

The auction ended today. I know we raised a minimum of $2300, but we learned in the last auction that people will pay what they actually bid, not what the lowest winning bid was (as is all you are required to do for these multi-item auctions on Ebay). I’m happy to say I am onen of the winners of the 23! But I am not at the top of the list for picking. But since every one of the auction “items” is amazing, I will be in luck no matter what! More importantly, we will be sending a nice little cash infusion to IDEP as they continue their recovery work in Aceh Province, Sumatra.



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DevTeach getting closer

Community Cheerleading

I’m really looking forward to DevTeach and it is only days away.

Here’s what DevTeach looks like for me.

Friday:
Don Kiely arrives in Burlington. It’s a lot cheaper to fly to Burlington from Alaska than to Montreal, for some reason. Lucky me. Don will come stay with Rich and me (I know that sounds like bad english but really it is correct) and we just HAPPEN to be having a party on Friday night. We had a great time when Don visited us last summer when he spoke at VTdotNet, so he is a welcome guest in our house.

Saturday:
Drive to Montreal with Don and Marc Heinzer from Gardener’s Supply
Canadian User Group Leader Summit: :This meeting is all day, but I will get there in the afternoon and spend the last few hours with them. I will be doing a little presentation on INETA NORAM, where we’ve been, where we are going and also take a good look at the Canada groups as part of our region.
Speaker Dinner: this is always fun and this year J-R and Maryse have also arranged for a bus tour of Montreal before dinner. Afterwards, we will go see the Australian’s entry into the annual fireworks competition.

Sunday: I’ll be giving my Security presentation on Sunday and in addition to the other session, I’m looking forward to Sunday night’s keynote with Steve Swartz from the Inidog Team and Ted Neward.

Monday: My new VS2005 Customized Debugging session is on monday as well as the user group night.

Tuesday This may be a play day for me. I’ll be all done with my talks as of Monday lunchtime, but Don has talks through the end of the day Tuesday. So I may hang around for some of the awesome sessions, or maybe go see some of beautiful Montreal. I rarely get a chance to do stuff like that these days.

update: Wednesday Oh yeah, Don reminds me that it is NOT back to work on Wednesday. We are going hiking. Hmm, I wonder if I can use teh emergency tow rope from the kayak and hook it up to DOn and he can pull me up the mountain? 🙂

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