Monthly Archives: October 2005

Daisy, the amazing 11 year old Newfie – watch her run around

Purely Personal

I have two beeyoooteeful wonderful Newfoundlands; my “little old ladies.” Surely you have seen many posts and photos of them by now.

Tasha I adopted (rescued, actually) when she was 2 1/2 years old and she will be 12 in December. She is in pretty good shape for her age. She can go on really long walks, can get up and down the stairs fairly well (though it’s harder work now) and can still run around a bit. There are really no signs ofl losing her any time soon – we are so incredibly lucky. Newfies generally live well until about 10 years old.

Daisy is a dog I adopted (well, maybe “stole” is more accurate) from my parents last summer. She will be 11 in January. But there is something amazing about this dog. Considering that their life span is more like 10 years old, this should be a pokey fat old dog by now. But she isn’t. With my new Canon Elph, I made a little video (pretty shaky and I’ll do another better one eventually) this morning showing off her bouncing around in excitement waiting for me to throw her bumper and then running off to get it. Daisy has the fluidity and strength of a young dog still. The video is 6 MB.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Michele Leroux Bustamante’s DotNet Rocks show knocked my socks off

Community Cheerleading

Now that I have an IPOD, I finally have a means of listening to DotNet Rocks. I cannot listen to it while I am working and cannot just sit in front of the computer doing nothing, listening to the show either. So, I downloaded a bunch for my six hour drive to Syracuse this week. Among them was a recent show with Michele Leroux Bustamante where she talked with Richard and Carl about WS Security, Infocards and Indigo. In New York state you are not allowed to talk on the cell phone while driving. I literally pulled off to the shoulder of the highway because I just had to call Michele when I finished listening to tell her how blown away I was by the show. To put things into perspective, I have been working with WSE and WS Security for about 1 1/2 years and have finally started digging my teeth into Indigo. So I have some context to what she is talking about. However, since I work with so many different technologies, I am sometimes very sadly a “Jack of All Trades, master of none”. And I do not use the term “master” lightly here. Michele is absolutely and solidly a master of these technologies. Her knowledge is so deep. She is not just about “how to” but also about who, why and when. She understands how these technologies fit into the bigger picture, not just about interop, but architecturally, historically and with a very knowledgeable eye to the future. Michele constantly amazes me – almost every time she opens her mouth.

I remember the reaction from the VTdotNET user group when she spoke there last fall. It was the same. Most were not familiar with her so they saw this beautiful blonde get up to the podium and might have expected some cute little drag and drop session in ASP.NET. It was fun to watch their faces, both the men and the women, as Michele opened up the guts of ASP.NET and explained to everyone how it worked. Here is one VTdotNetter’s reaction, caught on his blog.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Blog about putting on a conference

Just Rambling

Paul Litwin, who is the Conference Chair for ASPConnections which is a subset of the entire DevConnections conference, has a blog about coordinating a conference. It is a lot of work. As a speaker I can add that we are asked to submit abstracts long in advance which in this era of evolving betas is quite a challenge. In fact, we had to submit abstracts right after PDC when things like LINQ and Atlas and SO much more had been shoved into our brains, yet, it is very important to keep the bulk of talks to technologies that developers can use currently or very soon. It is an interesting challenge to balance because it is really fun to work with the latest and greatest and show off that you are so bleeding edge, but it is also important to remember that not everyone is interested in the bleeding edge or even prepared for very advanced talks.  I love to play both sides of the fence: fiddling with the bleeding edge, but also trying to make sure that people don’t get left behind on the basics.

DevConnections is an amazing conference and I am really proud to be speaking at my 3rd one in a row next month in Las Vegas as well as to be listed among a very  impressive roster of experts and fantastic presenters. It is also very nice because they take such great care of the speakers and make it so that all we have to think about is doing a great session.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

CTP Madness

Just Rambling

Channel 9 has a funny post on CTP Madness. It refers to the huge variety of CTPs (Community Tech Previews) and other betas, RC (release candidates) etc of the conglomeration of .NET development tools out there right now: VS2005, SQL Server 2005, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Atlas, LINQ, and so on and so on. The biggest problem that people have been having since PDC has been [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org