All posts by Julie

Robert’s mom

Robert Scoble has done an amazing thing in sharing one of the most personal experiences of his life on his weblog that is read by tens of thousands of people. Over the past few weeks he has blogged through his mother having a stroke, the experience of being with her in the hospital and of her passing. When he got the call that she had died, he blogged about it before even calling his brothers. That may sound harsh to some, but I definitely understand the outlet.

Robert has worn his heart on his sleeve in his blog for many years. When I first met his wife Maryam, I felt like I was meeting an old friend from reading so much about her in Robert’s blog.

So these posts over the last few weeks seemed very natural, though horribly sad, to read from him. I am very close to both of my parents and I very selfishly want to put off experiencing this pain until I have to. And these posts were scattered in the midst of his usual gazillion “what’s going on in the world“ posts. It was all Robert, all the time, as always.

Something he wrote that I will never forget is this:

At some point in the afternoon I started crying. She must have heard because she put her hand on my face and carressed it like all mothers do when their children are in pain.

She was trying to make me feel better. And she was communicating with me that it’s all OK. That she’s OK. That she isn’t in pain, even as her body is laboring to make another breath. That it’s time. That there is still a mom left inside her broken body that won’t last her very much longer.

Robert and Maryam [who likely have the largest support network in the world], because I am so incapable of standing in front of a wall of sympathy cards that I once sent a friend a funny birthday card instead when her mother passed away (and she understood and was very grateful for the laugh), here’s one more hug for each of you.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Schmoozing with “the enemy”

I was at the Vermont Business Expo yesterday and spent a good part of the day yesterday with a Linux guy who kept bringing up how much we hate each other, even though we don’t. What’s up with the non-stop hatred for Microsoft? [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I decided not to leave the last two paragraphs on that blog so here it is:

The politicians were there doing some booth by booth campaigning.

I had nice chats with Martha Rainville, who, up until she decided to run for congress was (I’m copy/pasting to be sure I get my facts straight) “the first woman in the 370-year history of the country’s National Guard to serve as a state Adjutant General.”. She was the head of Vermont’s National Guard from 1997 to earlier this year. Like everything Vermont (our syrup, our cheese, our leaves, our rock bands), Vermont is extremely proud of  it’s National Guard and I believe we have the highest proportion of guardsman deployed in Iraq and environs per capita than any other state. Martha’s actually pretty cool. We were so disappointed when she decided to go on the Republican ticket. I’d love to have a strong woman representing Vermont (we only have one congressional seat), but I fear she’ll get swept up with the party line. It’s going to be a hard vote in November.

Rich Tarrant was there too. He recently sold his software company, IDX, to GE  for $1.2 billion (to be fair, I believe there were 8 partners) and decided to run for senate against Bernie Sanders. A sad way to throw all that hard earned money away. Rich spoke at a VTSDA meeting recently. We were hoping to get a glimpse of what it took to build a billion dollar softare business from scratch (he started it with one partner in the early 70’s). We heard a little about that and a lot about how he was going to change the healthcare system in the U.S. He smiles a lot. Hey, I would too if I someone bought my business for $1.2 billion. 😉



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

User Group Leaders UNITE at the pre-TechEd User Group Leadership Meeting

If you are a user group leader in New England or a user group leader going to TechEd, you won’t want to miss the User Group Leadership meeting on June 11th.

The meeting will be in Microsoft’s Waltham Office, just north of Boston. If you need to get from Boston to Waltham, let INETA know!

 

You’re invited to join us at the at the Northeast Regional User Group Leadership Summit on Sunday 6/11/2006 at the Microsoft Waltham, MA office.

 

User Group Leaders today face many challenges such as promoting your group, financing, engaging existing members, recruiting speakers, finding new sources of content, leveraging local Microsoft relationships; etc. The New England INETA user groups along with INETA, in hopes of building a more close knit community, invites you all to join us on Sunday June 11th, prior to the start of TechEd 2006 in Boston.

 

The agenda for the summit will includes peer to peer sessions to address some of the key concerns and issues related to running a user group.  As a follow-up to last year’s hugely successful INETA User Group Leadership Summit, the New England INETA User Groups will host this event in the hope of that we can all learn from one another to improve the user group experience for our attendees as well as ourselves.  The sessions are open to all leaders, both local and afar.  

 

If you are currently involved with a user group, in a leadership role, want to get involved, or even looking to start one then you will get powerful direction in the course of the sessions. If you read this far, you know this is for you. 

 

To reserve your seat please visit: http://www.wedevelop.net/leadershipsummit.aspx

 

Schedule

Activities

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM

Registration

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Welcome From INETA

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM

Panel Discussion: Marketing Your User Group

10:30 AM – 10:45 AM

Break

10:45 AM – 11:45 AM

Involving Your Group In The Community

Handling Financial Structure of Your Group

11:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Lunch

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Establishing A Local Speakers Pool Through Special Events: Guest Speakers, Code Camps. Local Speaker Nights

Group Promotion: Stop Preaching to the Choir and Reach Audiences Outside Your Membership

2:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Break

2:15 PM – 3:15 PM

Effective Communications: Writing Appealing Newsletters, Emails, Group Communications

Making The Most Of Vender/Sponsor Relationships

3:15 PM – 3:30 PM

Break

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Working With Microsoft Resources: Who You Should Know

How To Build A Leadership Team

 

 

For more information please contact LeadershipSummit@Ineta.org

Mega User Group Meeting at TechEd!! Monday night June 12th.

New England Mega User Group Meeting
Developing with .NET in 2006 — What’s Hot and What’s Not

Register Now!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Boston Convention Center/TechEd 2006, Boston, MA
6:30-9:30 p.m.
Room information will be posted here before the event

Panel and Mini-Cabana Discussions

Do you develop in the world of Microsoft .NET?
Would you like to know more about .NET technologies?

If you answered yes to either question, don’t miss this event. Join us for a free and wide-ranging discussion with a panel of nationally-recognized experts on Microsoft development technologies. Architects and developers from the Boston area and around the world will be in attendance at this Boston Mega User Group Meeting held in conjunction with TechEd Boston 2006.


Panel Discussion

.NET is Microsoft’s strategic software platform for building systems that connect information, people, systems, and devices. Each of the panelists will share their philosophy and favorite (or not-so-favorite) tools, tips and techniques for .NET success. The topic areas include:

  • Visual Studio 2005
  • Web Services
  • ASP.NET
  • WinForms
  • SQL 2005
  • C# and VB
  • .NET Framework
  • MSIL
  • XML

    Panelists

    Bob Beauchemin
    Bob is a database-centric application practitioner and architect, instructor, course author, writer, and Director of Developer Skills for SQLskills. Over the past two years he’s been teaching his SQL Server 2005 course to 500 students worldwide through the Ascend program. He is lead author of the books “A First Look at SQL Server 2005 For Developers” and “SQL Server 2005 Developer’s Guide”, author of “Essential ADO.NET” and has written articles on SQL Server and other databases, database security, ADO.NET, and OLE DB for MSDN, SQL Server Magazine, and others.
    Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft
    Sam, author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, has 25 years experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe.  In his current capacity as Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products.
    Fritz Onion of PluralSight
    Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book Essential ASP.NET (Addison Wesley), and the upcoming Essential ASP.NET 2.0. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, VSLive!, and TechEd. You can read Fritz’s blog.
    Jeff Prosise of Wintellect
    Jeff is cofounder of Wintellect, a developer consulting and education firm that provides services to companies all over the world. His most recent book, Programming Microsoft .NET, was published by Microsoft Press in 2002, and his writings appear regularly in MSDN Magazine and other developer magazines. A reformed engineer who discovered after college that there’s more to life than computing loads on mounting brackets, Jeff is known to go out of his way to get wet in some of the world’s best dive spots and to spend way too much time building and flying R/C aircraft.
    Jay Roxe of Microsoft
    Jay Roxe is the Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft. In this role, Jay is responsible for product planning, technical evangelism, and external communication. Prior to this role, Jay was a developer and development lead on the .NET Framework where he had responsibility for the Base Class Libraries.

    Mini-Cabana

    Immediately following the panel discussion, we’ll break out into informal Mini-Cabana discussion sessions where attendees can ask the panelists and other nationally known experts questions.

    Experts Attending

    The final list of authors and experts will be determined between now and TechEd. We’ve got a great pool of talent to draw upon, so you can be sure the Mini-Cabana sessions will be an interesting, lively and informative discussion!

    Don’t miss this chance to meet some of the foremost experts in the field of Microsoft development technologies.  Register Now! for this valuable no-cost event.


    Volunteers

    Moderator and Event Coordinator: Bob Goodearl of RGood Software
    Bob is an independent consultant with more than 28 years of experience in the industry as software architect, designer, and developer. He is also a contributor to BostonDotNet and a member of the board of ICCA-Boston.
    Event Director: Chris Pels of iDevTech
    Chris is President of INETA North America and the Boston .NET User Group as well as running his consulting firm iDevTech since 1986 which specializes in system and database architecture.

    IT Jobs: Microsoft TechExo inWaltham MA, May 25th

    From Joe Stagner’s blog:

    There is a Micosoft Career Connections Event in the Waltham MA district office on Thursday May, 25.

    Here is the info from the TechExpo Website.

    Microsoft Career Connections – New England- May 25, 2006

    Date & Time: Thursday, May 25, 2006 – 10am-4pm
    Location: Microsoft Offices – 201 Jones Rd. Waltham, MA 02451
    Phone: (781) 487-6600
    Directions: For travel directions,
    click here.
    List of exhibitors: scroll down or click here
    Security clearance required ? -> No


  • 2 years professional TECHNOLOGY or TECH SALES experience Required
  • Bring many resumes
  • Tell your friends who are experienced professionals
  • You can [ CLICK HERE ] for the website.

    If you get a job at Microsoft and email Joe that you found out about the Career event on my blog – he’ll buy you dinner after your start date !

    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    ASP.NET 2.0? Don’t forget to check cross browser support!

    I did. For shame, eh?

    I have been playing with a new Vermont.NET user group website and using lots of new asp.net 2.0 UI features.

    I put it up and quickly got a reminder from ASPInsider, Aaron Seet, (who I’m grateful to for checking) that there were some messy areas when he opened it up in FireFox.

    I don’t, well didn’t, even have FireFox on my computer. So I downloaded it and saw the mess right away. I wasn’t sure how to fix it at first, but after looking at that page in the designer for a while, I finally saw the problem. I had DIV tags that had a default height in them. When the actual content made the div larger than that default height, I.E. made the adjustment. Firefox didn’t and the content hung over the bottom of the div into the element below it. I removed the height parameters and all was well.

    While I was at it, I checked the html for XHTML compliance. You can do this when in source view by changing the drop down from it’s default of Internet Explorer 6.0.

    I cleaned up my html with alt’s in my images and more. I had a few i.e. specific things that I left in  such as setting the non-xhtml img border parameter to “0” so that hyperlinked images don’t get a big ugly border around them.

    I’ve discovered a few other things I’m doing on the site that don’t work in FireFox. For example

    1. You can’t move ASP.NET 2.0 web parts around in FireFox. However, if you move them around in IE, the positions are stored to your user account and displayed properly in FireFox when you are logged in.
    2. I have some groovy little popup divs that are driven by html and javascript. If you go to the site in i.e. you can see these in action. There are little question marks on the page. Hover over them and you will get info on the ASP.NET 2.0 (or other interesting) tool that is used in that section of the page.
    3. I have a telerik r.a.d.panelbar on the book reviews page. That is awfully funky in FireFox. I’m sure I just have to change a few parameters and will deal with that after I get some client work done.

    Bottom line is don’t assume that even .NET developers are so Microsoft-centric that they wouldn’t dream of using a non-MS browser. 😉 And don’t be so darned lazy. Look where it got me! Spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon working on my user group’s website. Okay, I’m kidding about the nice weather.



    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    Office12 Video

    Over  month ago, Markus Egger pointed out this video of Office12 features that is on the Microsoft Office site. I finally got a chance to take a look at it today and am now inspired to reinstall my beta copy on my mobile pc (translation: my tablet) and play with it more.

    One of the things I think is cool about Office 12’s  ribbon is that it is going to make using Office 12 really comfortable with a stylus. The tablet apps that I have written are light on drop down menus and heavy on single click functionality. That design came from dogfooding my own apps until they felt good to use with the stylus.



    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org