Monthly Archives: July 2007

Office Visit

Vermont

In my peripheral vision yesterday, I noticed something trotting by my office window. Looking up I discovered that those long legs belonged to a deer. Then along came her babies. I was able to click this through the screen before they ran off. I immediately went out to my veggie garden (the direction they had come from) to make sure they hadn’t just had a little feast! All was in tact, though I wouldn’t have minded if they had eaten the mustard greens which have bolted and are even more bitter than normal.

Change for Aug. 13th Vermont.NET meeting: new speaker and telerik sponsorship!

VTdotNetFeed

Unfortunately, we’ll have to reschedule Rob Daigneau’s Aug. 13th presentation on WCF. We’re both bummed, but we’ll get him back in the fall, for sure!

However, we lucked out because we were able to get Richard Hale Shaw to “fill in”. Richard is one of the top instructors in the country and lives in Boston, so he is going to come up to present to Vermont.NET for our August meeting.

As if that wasn’t enough, telerik has generously offered to sponsor this meeting. They will be covering Richard’s T&E as well as our pizza. Rumor has it that there is a big pile of telerik’s famously fun t-shirts on their way to Vermont as well along with software licenses!

Thanks to telerik, to Richard and also to Rob (who *really* wants to come, it just didn’t work out this month)!

Definitely get August 13th on your calendar.

Stay tuned to the VTdotNET website for more details as we waiting on a topic from Richard.

Fun time at GLUG, GANG and TechSmith in Michigan

Just Rambling

Funny that my last post was a week ago as I was on my way to Michigan. Perhaps the fact that I have been silent for a whole week is testimony to the fact that I was having too much fun to sit down and blog about it!

Both user groups got “the same” presentation: Overview of ADO.NET Entity Framework, but as Jeff McWherter, (who attended both talks and did a lot of driving to do so!) notes, it was very different from one night to the next.

The first night was at the Microsoft office in Southfield, outside of Detroit, at the GANG user group. This one wasn’t an INETA sponsored event, but as long as I was so close for the next night’s meeting, I just came in a day early to do it. There were a whole bunch of fun and friendly folks there and I got asked a lot of great questions. It was also great to see some familiar faces such as Patrick Steele and Josh Holmes (who was on the INETA speaker bureau until he swallowed the red pill and became a D.E.).

The next night I spoke at GLUG in Lansing Michigan. But first I was treated to some local flavor thanks to u.g. leader Joe Kunk who was a great tour guide. Lansing is the capital of Michigan and Joe works for the House and was able to give me a great tour of the incredible and recently renovated state capital building. THen I was treated to lunch at a classic lunch spot called “Kewpees” where I experienced their famous Olive Burger. It took a little encouragement from Joe before I ordered it, but it was pretty good! I found the website with the Kewpee history where I learned that Kewpees was a chain but there are only a few left. One was actually in Utica, NY, about an hour from where I grew up.

After lunch I got to go visit the always fun Betsy Weber at TechSmith. I was surprised that when I was on the phone with her in their parking lot and asked “which building are you in?” she said “all of them”. That’s four buildings though they are building a new (green, LEED Certified… yay) building so they can all be together again. It’s a big and growing company! Betsy introduced me to the president, Bill “We will not share your e-mail address with anyone else, period” Hamilton and (man, I really need to learn to edit when I talk) somehow my past job history at Playboy and Penthouse came up. Luckily, he is a funny laid back guy (which is probably why the whole company seems to have a cool and relaxed atmosphere) so I hopefully didn’t shock him too much (though I think I did try just a little. :-)) Not only did I get to see what’s coming in Camtasia (key to me is that many existing features will be much simpler to discover and use), but I also got a tour of the cool Jing project that had just been released 2 days prior and already had over 11,000 downloads.

Next on my tour was a tour of Michigan State and I can tell you that the locals are PROUD of this university!

The meeting was held on campus and I was surprised that there were almost 50 people there. Unfortunately I had a strange problem with my VPC which was finally solved with a total reboot of my computer (which takes some time to get everything up and running again) but thankfully I was able to do what I came to do. While I was futzing with my computer, the group was introduced to two reps from webhost Verio (located in Florida) who had come up from Florida to meet the group as they were the first to sign up for free hosting for INETA user group members. I was pretty impressed that they came up for this reason!

After the meeting I had a blast at Bennigans with a bunch of folks from the group and the Verio guys then it was off to Ann Arbor for a mini-vacation and the art fair.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this really great trip!

I will post my revised Powerpoint and demos shortly and will write a quick blog post with links to them.

Vermont Ruby on Rails meeting July 25th

Vermont

From the VTRails user group:

Meeting – July 25th at 6:00pm – Pub and Brewery in Burlington Downtown

We picked Pub and Brewery for the meeting, for it’s friendly atmosphere, location and good tasting beer. The plan is to meet everybody in person and shake hands and see what topics are attracting most of the interest.

We are going to raffle Rails Cookbook we received from O’Reilly.

See everybody there!

How Springfield Vermont won the Simpsons movie premiere

Vermont

USA Today held a contest between towns named Springfield all over the country to host the premiere of the Simpsons movie. Springfield, Vermont had not been included and brought it to the attention of the organizers so they got on the list. Springfield, VT, like the state, is a small town with a population of only 9000 and a movie theater with only 100 seats. The other 13 towns were much larger… some are cities.

But tiny Springfield, VT actually won the contest with the most votes — over 15,000. There have been a lot of complaints, mostly among the 21,000 comments to the above USA Today online article. Even an Oregon congressman got in on it although apparently he was just joking around.  Springfield, OR was one of the entrants and most likely the true inspiration for the Simpson’s town.

So how did Springfield win with so many more votes than their population?

Even though I have only lived in Vermont for 8 years and will never be considered a true Vermonter (5+ generations required :-)), I can tell you why.

In many ways, Vermont is one big home town. Phish is the “local band” to many. Ben & Jerry’s is “our ice cream” and there are Vermonters who are known to carry a small supply of the “only true” Maple Syrup with them when they travel. Most people who live in Vermont take pride in anything that hails from anywhere in our state. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everything. You’ll find lots of people who are dead-set against Civil Unions, Howard Dean and many other things deemed as the evils of the flatlander infiltration.

But on a different level, this “state spirit” really exists. It was quickly apparent to me after I moved from New York to Vermont. In New York state, it was hard enough to keep up with the entire county that you lived in, much less what was going on elsewhere in the state. 

And while I have never been to Springfield VT and had to look on a map to see where it was, I eagerly voted for it because I was voting for Vermont.

That is likely how Springfield got over 15,000 votes. The local daily newspaper in Burlington (Vermont’s biggest city and over 100 miles away) treated this as front page news. The t.v. stations all had stories about it. So people all over Vermont became aware of the competition and many, like me, were proud to put their vote behind our little town. Vermont’s entire population is somewhere around 600,00. Springfield, IL came in second with a little under 15,000 votes. If the same 2.5% of the state of Illinois had voted for their Springfield, they would have had 325,000 votes. If 100% of the residents of Springfield, IL had voted, that would have been over 100,000 votes.

So I am confident that it was state pride that won Springfield, VT this big spotlight of hosting the premiere. I have no idea how they will handle the potential number of people coming into the town  for the event. This is probably why they weren’t in the original list. But that will be another story and it will be headline news all over Vermont for days and days.

Silverlight Annotation in Safari for Windows

Silverlight

I don’t have a Mac, but while I was working on my Silverlight annotation tests, I had a few friends try them out on Safari on their Macs and they reported that it just didn’t work at all.

Now that we have a Windows version, I finally did a few tests myself.

At first, I was being prompted to install (the already installed) Silverlight.

This post by Jeremy Boyd helped me elimitate that problem. When the page first appeared the spot where my embedded Silverlight goo should be was all white. But I saw in this post by Tim Heuer (Tim suggests another solution for the seemingly uninstalled Silverlight, but that one didn’t work for me), that resizing the browser helped and indeed, it did. I was surprised to actually see my solution appear!

Then I started clicking on the images on the right. Nothing happened. But when I inadvertently resized the browser again, the images did appear.

I was actually able to do a little drawing on the screen (not the one above!) but it wasn’t much fun. Draw a stroke. Resize. See the stroke I just drew. Etc.

So it’s close, but not there yet. I don’t think there’s much I can do but wait for some change to this  beta version of Silverlight or some change to this beta version of Safari for Windows.