Monthly Archives: December 2007

Second Litter puppy pics

Purely Personal

(On going… you can catch up at www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com)

The second litter was born yesterday. I’m helping to watch over them today. Celeste has to feed them every two hours and they nurse for over 1/2 hour. In between everyone rests up and the puppies get a Snuggle Puppy to curl up with. These are more than toys as they have a heartbeat and are warm. Sometimes they are all underneath it. Here’s what they are doing right now (there are 6 total but you can’t see them all here). The upstairs puppies (the litter of 17 that is now two weeks old) get two Snuggle puppies!

Vermont InstallFest and Bob & Chris RoadShow was a big success

VTdotNetFeed

Although I wasn’t able to be in Vermont on Thursday for the Bob & Chris Roadshow or the VS2008 Installfest, I have gotten emails from Chris Bowen and others letting me know that it was a great success. Over 40 people showed up for the installfest, and I learned from Dave Burke’s blog that they also had TWO XB0X 360’s set up for folks to play with.

Larry Keyes blogged his extensive notes from the day.

Sorry to have missed it.

What I really enjoyed reading was Dave Burke’s epiphany about VS2008. The sessions from Bob & Chris really made things click for him and he’s ready to get in bed wiht VS2008. I was thinking about that becasue he said he’s seen LINQ 4 times before, but not until Thursday did he finally get to his AHA! moment with it. I believe this may have a lot to do with the fact that it’s finished, it’s deployed and in hand, rather than seeing very early bits (we’ve had 3 LINQ talks at VTdotNET in the last 1 1/2 years).

I go away for a few days and look what I miss! EF Beta 3 was released!

Data Access

After I left Seattle, rather than going home as I had planned I ended up going to my parent’s house (where I still am) to attend a funeral after which I was whisked up to Canastota NY where my mom was camped out with two pregnant dogs (Celeste and Bumper) near her fabulous vet (Village Vet in Canastota) waiting for the right time to do c-sections and bring the pups into the world. Celeste had 6 beautiful puppies yesterday and I drove them back to Binghamton and am now helping out with her pups as well as the 2 week old litter of 17. Mom and my sister are still in Canastota with Bumper and they will be doing (they = vet, not my mom & sister) doing her c-section today with an expectation of 10 or more puppies.

In the meantime, what did I miss?

We were sent the entire transcript of our conversation with Bill Gates earlier this week. Keith Peters is posting it (in sections) on his blog.

Entity Framework Beta3 and the CTP2 of the tools were released.  (Also, here’s a  list of breaking changes) I’ve only been waiting for this for months and I can’t even look at it right now because I am responsible for precious little lives.

 

 

 

When airline delays are a good thing!

Travel

I’m in Seattle and on my way home to Burlington. When I arrived at the airport, I saw that my flight was delayed but it didn’t indicate for how long.

Shock of shocks … there is snow in Chicago, so my flight through Chicago was potentially delayed. If it was delayed more than 1/2 hour, I would likely miss my connecton to get home – the last one of the night.

Normally, this would have made me unhappy. However, for the past two days, I had been trying to reroute my flight to Binghamton  or Syracuse NY so that I could attend a family funeral but it was going to cost $450 to make the change – with no option to use miles to pay for the difference. I had decided I would just fly home to Vermont, get up at 5am and drive the 5 hours to Syracuse.

But the delay ended up solving the problem for me. United was able to change my flight to go to Binghamton without any charge. This I can’t complain about.

In the end, the Seattle to Chicago flight actually left on time, but I’m very happy that I’ll be able to get to my parent’s house tonight and we’ll just work out the logistics of my getting back to Vermont later.

Maple Syrup for Bill Gates

Just Rambling

So I got back to my hotel room after the meeting and was getting a few things from my backpack and was sorely disappointed to find this:

A bottle of Maple Syrup I had brought with me from Vermont to give to Bill Gates. I had totally forgotten in the excitement of the whole day.

So, I very happily gave it to Tim Harris, from the DPE (Develper Platform Evangelism) team who had coordinated the trip and the day. He was already looking forward to the pancakes he plans to have tomorrow morning.

Our hour with Bill Gates

Just Rambling

Okay that was fun. I was the third one to ask a question and about one minute before my time there were suddenly about 5000 in my head.

Each person asked a question and each question started him off on an interesting road.

There will be a transcript provided so I’m not going to bother trying to share the entire conversation.

When we first sat down, I feared that my pulse was racing, but then it was easy to get absorbed in what he was talking about.

Interesting to me was his discussion of vision – that a lot of the driving force is based on the dream of what computing should be able to achieve someday.

For me, however, the most exciting thing is that with all of the money and power that Bill Gates wields, he continues to change the world through the Gates Foundation.

I managed to suggest that if he ever wanted to open a Gates Foundation office in Vermont, to give me a call…

We had a group photo that we’ll get along with the transcript.

And no, we didn’t get a zune – but I’ve got my Nano.