Monthly Archives: December 2006

Tasha the THIRTEEN year old Newfie!

Purely Personal

Tasha turned 13 years old last week. This is a pretty significant milestone for a Newfoundland. Because of their large size, they don’t have a long life expectancy. Tasha is getting acupuncture and lots of love and short strolls. Her weight is as low as we dare get her, but this puts so much LESS stress on her legs and her organs. So this has been another attribute that has helped. She does have a hard time getting up but manages. She’s pretty darned happy and as far as I can tell, her secret to long life is “as long as there is food on the planet….”.

Not to discount Daisy, who will be 12 in January. Daisy is in amazing shape and can still run around. Her only obvious sign of age is her beautiful grey eyelashes and her worn down teeth.

Here’s a pic of the girls I took a few months ago. Daisy (aka Daisy Dog) is on the left and Tasha (aka Boo Boo Bear) is on the right.

VTdotNET Holiday 06 Party

dotNET

The VTdotNET Holiday potluck party was at my house in the boonies last night. Someday I will learn how to use my camera but flash photos never come out right. Nevertheless, here are a few. Note the [not yet decorated] tree with all of the GEEKY gifts underneath. We got a pile of books from WROX and I also put lots of other books I’ve had around for a while and a pile of t-shirts. I noticed there was competition for two items under the tree. One was WROX’s gazillion page ASP.NET 2.0 Pro book and the other a particular hilarious but slightly naughty bright orange t-shirt from telerik.

Here’s Laura & Neal Blood of Blue Note Computing and Bob LoCicero of Inside Edge Software. In addition to attending almost every VTdotNET meeting since its inception, Laura co-runs the VTSQL user group along with Roman Rehak. Dave Burke brought his accordian and regaled us with the unique sounds of accordian style christmas songs. The bottom pic is Neal Blood again with Carl Lorentson of Rennaisance Info Systems (Carl also serves on the VTSDA board with me) and Rob Hale (well, his back) and Dave Friedman, both from GE Healthcare, talking with Chris DeGuise, co-founder of Pragmatic Technologies. Tasha and Daisy laid on the floor near the table and waited for any food that might get accidentally dropped on the floor. My smart doggies!

      

C#3, VB9 and Linq – Building up a language

dotNET

We got nearly 3 hours with Anders Hejlsberg at the ASPInsiders Summit last week. He went over language innovations in C#3 and how they feed into Linq. I can’t do a full brain dump in a single post, but here is some of what he talked about (with some added VB examples too for fairness, since the new goo in  C#3 and VB9 are usually discussed mutually exclusive of one another, though they do have a lot of innovations in common).

[A DevLife post]