Monthly Archives: March 2006

My two very old dogs that defy their age!

Purely Personal

I took Tasha and Daisy to the vet today. They are both newfoundlands. Tasha turned 12 in December and Daisy turned 11. Tasha was a “rescue” who I adopted when she was 2 1/2 yrs old. She had come from a home where she literally had lived in the back yard her whole life. She was kind of naughty when she first came to live with me having never had any freedom – so she ran away a lot. But I knew that if I couldn’t get through to her, nobody would have enough love and patience to do it. So I took her to dog training and let her sleep on my bed. Soon she loved me so much she just wanted to be good and grew up to be a quintissential newfie – the gentle giant. Now Tasha is 12 years old, which is very unusual for a newfie to live this long, and other than some “old age” stuff … loss of muscle mass – most noticably on her head, a little swelling around the knees and having slown down a little -she is in really great shape. She’s happy, healthy, still runs around and has a great appetite. Even her eyesite and hearing are still awesome. Today at the vet, after verifying all of this to be true, he also told me that her heart was perfect. PERFECT! 🙂

Daisy is 11. We kind of stole Daisy from my parents two summers ago. She came for a visit and stayed. Daisy is astonishing in her own right. Except for grey eyelashes and a grey mustache, she looks and acts and moves like a five year old dog. When we go outside in the morning she jumps up and down until I throw her bumper for her which she races after and then prances around with when she gets it. Daisy floats up and down stairs – very different than Tasha who has to kind of bounce her back legs together to get up and down. She too is an amazing dog and this very experienced vet finds it hard to believe she is 11 years old.

I just needed to record that.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

How telerik and Red-Gate made me a hero

Tools

I have a client who is a programmer with a small company that is creating a really cool on-line product. And I mean kew-well!

His background is very strong in architecture and also he and his team have done a ton with WinForms but his ASP skills hark back to the pre.NET days. But he’s doing the app in ASP.NET 2.0 and I am mentoring him with this and a variety of other related things.

Along the way, he was frustrated with some of the limitations of the built in ASP.NET 2.0 controls (a post for another day). Even though I have never used them, I knew that based on the particular tools he was seeking, I have heard such great things about telerik from people I trust, so I recommended that they be on the top of the list of 3rd party controls to check out. Needless to say, the report back from him is that he is now using 3 or 4 of those controls and is so happy that he’s (no, not buying the company) but subscribing to their full package.

A few weeks later he was ready to start synching between his development sql server and he online sql server as he got deeper into his tests. Though I have only played with them a little, I am still quite familiar with Red-Gate‘s tools and also know so many people (that I trust) who think they are awesome. So once again, I gave him a strong recommendation to try them out. A few days later, I got another very happy email from him saying that the Red-Gate tools were fantastic and he is definitely sticking with them.

There’s a lot to gain from just knowing what’s out there and paying attention to what people say about them (and who it is that’s saying them and what the context is) even if you don’t have hands on experience with every tool out there.

So thanks Red-Gate. Thanks telerik. (And thanks ASPInsiders, too.)

p.s. no, this is NOT a sponsored post! 🙂



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont IT Jobs: C# Developer and Senior DBA positions

Jobs

1. C# – full time position with a national company, 2+ years C# development skills, small team environment.  Location – Burlington area
 
2.  MCDBA – full time position with internatinal company, 4+ years in a MS development environment with extensive experience in SQL Server 2000.  MSDBA or equivalent qualifications/experience.  Senior level position.  Position is in Vermont.
 
These jobs are listed at www.vttechjobs.com


Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Windows Live Local – give me “tinyurls”?

Virtual Earth

I created a scratchpad today using Windows Live Local that has a view of my house (yes my HOUSE outin the boonis in the mountain. You can actually see where my house is (though the photo must be from shortly before it was actually built), the trails into the woods. Anyway, I selected eight points on it for my scratch pad with a title and notes for each one. Then I clicked on the email function and it created an email but the link. Yikes. Was it long and filled with gook. Lori McKinney from the Huntsville .NET User Group sent me a tiny url to get to a scratch pad she created for seeing where their meeting location was, the airport and a few surrounding hotels. That’s the way to go. So hopefully down the road, this [very cool application which has come  long way since Virtual Earth’s release this summer!!] will enable a cleaner way to share scratchpads without having to take care of that piece of the puzzle ourselves. I sent the link of the scratchpad I created to my husband he told me he deleted it because it was filled with gobbledygook. That is going to be the typical reponse of regular users.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Next Vermont.NET Meeting – Stephen Forte on XML in VS2005 & SQLServer

dotNET

It took embedding XML into SQLServer to get Stephen to go public on his love for it. Perhaps all of those digs at Clemens Vasters’ choice to store dasBlog data in XML were just a ruse. But now Stephen is not only at one with XML, he is spreading the joy. (Hey maybe I should be a lobbyist, that’s pretty good, huh?)

Stephen is coming to Vermont.NET on Monday night, all thanks to INETA to present on XML in VS2005 & SQL Server 2005.

He was also planning to come up for another snowshoing hike (we did Mt. Mansfield last time he was here) but alas, we are expecting rain rain and more rain.

Meeting Date: Monday March 13th
Time: 6:00 – 8:30 pm
Location: Vermont Technical College, Williston Campus
More info and details and directions at www.vtdotnet.org

We also have some great raffles this month! We will be raffling off Sax’s CommStudio and Atalasoft’s DotImage.

This is a joint meeting with www.VTSQL.org.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Doug Reilly on being a responsibe consultant when you are ill

Community Cheerleading

Some might say that Doug Reilly is making lemonade from lemons, though I think that his health situation is much more sour than a lemon and the work he is doing is much sweeter and more nutritious than lemonade.

Doug is a fellow developer, and ASPInsider and an author who has been battling a really tough illness for a long time. He has an article out about being responsible about dealing with your clients and your commitments when big things happen in your life. It is a valuable read for anyone in consulting.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org