All posts by Julie

DevTeach Day 1

Community Cheerleading

What fun to be here at DevTeach! The day started out with being woken up by the slamming of the door of a nearby hotel room – a good thing in my case since it was 7:45 and Alan Griver’s LiNQ keynote was at 8am – and NOT to be missed! I took a lot of notes during his talk and I’m even more excited about LiNQ now. I’ll write more about that in another post.

There is a fantastic collection of speakers here – many of whom I’ve become friends with over the years coming to DevTeach (and from whom I learn a lot).  Also the .NET community in Montreal is wonderful. Since I live nearby , I get to come up occasionally and am always treated to a great time by this incredibly friendly bunch!

A special thanks to Etienne Tremblay who showed me how to get my VPC talking to my laptop through a loopback adapter! Etienne was even doing a talk on virtualization today, but it was in the French track.

The weather is great. The Marriott where the conference is is a really nice hotel to be in. There are about 300 attendees this year and lots of people from across Canada.

I did a talk on writing web services today to be able to be used by wcf tomorrow to the usual small crowd of web service developers. Even though there aren’t a lot of people doing WSE, they still want and need help getting it working and just because WCF is coming, people still want and need to secure their web services today. I almost missed dinner because I was so enjoying answering questions after my session of a developer who has to port his vs2003/wse2 apps to vs2005/wse3. I have been there and done that and just wanted to give him a brain dump.

Unfortunately, I have a whole bunch of work to do for some clients remotely from here, so I better get on it before I fall asleep!

Posted from BLInk!

DevTeach bound! Yay!

Just Rambling

Though I sadly had to miss this weekends Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy in Waltham (stay tuned here for a report from Dave), I will get 3 days of communing with geeks up in Montreal at DevTeach. This is DevTeach’s fourth year. It is a fun smallish (200-300?) conference in a beautiful city with a host of top-notch speakers. I am proud to be countedin the ranks of this great group of presenters.

The pre-con is today, the post-con on Friday, with the main conference running from Tuesday through Thursday.

Rich & I picked Alan Griver (who after successfully overseeing the phenomenal implementation of data tools into Visual Studio, has now moved on to his second love, working with he developer community)and the brilliant and [oh my god] energetic Beth Massi up at the Burlington airport last night and after a stroll on the Burlington waterfront, took them to Burlington’s phenomenal traditional Chinese restaurant, A Single Pebble.

We will drive up to Montreal this afternoon and Alan is doing the keynote tomorrow morning. Beth and I have three talks each over the next three days. Thursday afternoon we head back to Burlington for the VTdotNET meeting.

It’s a beautiful time of year to go to Montreal and I’m really looking forward to seeing so many people – speakers and attendees – (note to self – stop at Lake Champlain Chocolates on the way up to get some truffles for Kate) as well as attending sessions myself.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

One critter we can do without

Vermont

This little guy was wobbling through my front yard a short while ago.

(Here’s a short video I also took with my camera in case you’ve never seen one before – 25 seconds about 1MB.)

There’s a part of me (and most people who live around here) that has very evil thoughts when we see these little buggers, because we know the pain they can inflict on our curious pets and children. Apparently the most efficient means of doing this involves something like a baseball bat. Horrors! I could never.

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Charles Petzold relieves my anxiety about btnDoesSomething

Just Rambling

I know that hungarian notaton is supposed to be totally uncool now, but I am just not giving up using it on controls so I can easily tell the difference between buttons, textboxes etc when I’m reading my code (or coding my code).

From hereonin (is that one, two or three words?), this blog post from Charles Petzold is what I will point to anytime somebody gives me sh*t for continuing to do this.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Spring Vermont Treats this evening: a summer-like night, a Moose and a Woodcock

Vermont

We got a call from our neighbor telling us there was a moose heading up the road. So we ran out and there it was just at the corner of our property. I ran back to get my camera while Rich and our neighbor Tom watched him (I think it was a male). It was bent down on it’s front knees eating grass.

Though it wasn’t quite dusk, I couldn’t get a good picture. The flash, I now realize, was focusing on the white street sign and everything else was dark. Without the flash it was blurry. So I tried a movie. The light was perfectly fine for that somehow, but my shaky hand and the fact that my best attempt to walk towards the moose steadily was unsuccessful, rendered that pretty shaky. You can see if you want, though. It’s more like your typical loch ness monster video. I sure wish Shelley had been here! (Of course I think that every time I want to take a picture of something special to share.)

It was a young moose – probably a yearling and not afraid of much – typical for moose. There are enough moose around that there is now a moose crossing sign down on the main road about 1 mile from our house.

After it wandered off into the woods, Tom and Joe (another neighbor who had come down the road to see) were excited because they could hear a woodcock in the woods. I couldn’t recognize it’s call among the peepers. Eventually it came out of the woods, circled around above us and then landed in our front yard and continued it’s mating call (umm – no that’s not why Tom and Joe were excited). Now I could easily hear it’s crazy call. There is a good recording of the sound on this page from the SUNY Stony Brook website. It’s the 3rd from the bottom.

The woodcock has a crazy mating ritual which includes a lot of big spirals in the sky. We’ll be watching out for him in the next few weeks. Him and the darned porcupine that was also wobbling up the road during all of this. That is something we can do without.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Double Vision

Purely Personal

Sitting in front of a computer all day and all night has it’s downsides, not just on your social life, but after years and years and years, it can (along with age, of course) wreak havoc on your vision. I’ve always had 20/20 and not needed glasses. I finally got some glasses for the computer a few years ago and haven’t used them a lot because they give me headaches after a full day. But now I suddenly can’t even read road signs any more until I’m about 5 feet away. Afte months of complaining about this latest threshold and thinking minor adjustments to my environment will correct the effects of strain on my eyes (with my husband laughing at my denial as I near the age of 45 (6 more months – eeek!) I finally went back to the opthamologist today.

And the results are that my vision is still 20-20. So why can’t I read any more? Why is the world a blur? Apparently, the optical profession is discovering that this meaurement and stigmatism are NOT the only two factors that effect our eyesight. And although I have no stigmatism and my eyesight is 20-20, I can still be having bad problems with my eyes. There are depth perception issues and even some double vision. So we’ll try a few new prescriptions (yes I am talking BIFOCALS – well, transitional lenses)and I have to be more consistent in using them and I get to also have a pair plain old reading glasses at my bedside for reading at night. In that case, the magnification is really the only help I’ll need.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

May INETA NORAM Newsletter is out

Ineta

The May 2006 INETA NORAM Newsletter is out and there is a wonderful article in there by INETA Speaker Kathleen Dollard on a recent 3-user group tour to the Gulf Coast region. Kathleen also donated all of her honorariums for the user group events to local organizations and makes some suggestions how we can continue to help this still devasted area.

Also in the newsletter is information about the success of Deeper in .NET which was a full day event put on by the Wiscosin .NET user group. Scott Isaacs is eager to share with other user group leaders his secret to success!

The 2nd Alabama Code Camp was held recently also and there is an article written by Huntsvillian (had to becareful ont to type Huntsvillain) Dan Wygant about that event as well. The article is accidentally anonymous. I’ll update this post when I get the name of the person who wrote it. Maybe we can get the online editionof the newsletter updated, too.

If you are not on the list  to receive the newsletter you can read it here.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org