All posts by Julie

Downtown Burlington Parking for the Holidays

Vermont

i got this message from a friend at CEDO and thought I would share:

There is an addtional 1,200 parking spots downtown for the holidays during nights and weekends.

If you want a map of the other 14 parking lots and garages and a list of the 300+ retailers downtown go to our web site www.cedoburlington.org

Here are the locations and times free parking downtown is available:

LAKEVIEW/FILENE’S NEWLY EXPANDED PARKING GARAGE: Located West of Filene’s 2 new decks with 278 more parking spaces. NEWLY CONSTRUCTED SPACES NOW OPEN, 2 HOURS FREE IN ALL CITY OWNED GARAGES!

STATE OF VERMONT PARKING LOTS at:

-50 Cherry Street (across from Filenes)50 parking spaces

-59 Pearl Street (Dept. of Labor) 39 parking spaces

Parking is FREE at these lots ONLY on weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10p.m.; Weekends 9:00 am till 10pm from November 23 through January 8, 2006.

CHITTENDEN BANK PARKING LOTS at:

-150 Bank Street (across from Henry’s Diner)26 parking spaces

-2 Burlington Square (Bank Headquarters) 24 parking spaces

Parking is FREE at these lots ONLY on weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Weekends 9:00 am till 10pm from November 23 through January 8, 2006.

PEASE WEST PARKING LOT at foot of College Street on the West side of Lake Street; at the end of the Free College Street shuttle (80 parking spaces)

Parking is FREE at these lots ONLY on weeknights, 6 pm to 10 p.m.; Weekends 9:00 a.m. till 10 p.m. from November 23 through January 8, 2006.

MAIN STREET LANDING PARKING LOT (160 Parking Spaces) at the foot of College Street next to Union Station at the end of the Free College Street Shuttle.

Parking is FREE at this lot only on Weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10p.m. and weekends 9:00am to 10pm from November 23 through January 8, 2006.

PERKINS PIER PARKING LOT (180 parking spaces).

Parking is FREE at this lot ONLY on Weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Weekends, 9:00 am – 10pm. November 23 through January 8, 2006

ELMWOOD AVE PARKING LOT, just north of the U.S. Post office in downtown Burlington (88 parking spaces)

Parking is FREE at this lot ONLY on Weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; Weekends, 9:00 a.m. – 10 p.m. from November 23 through January 8, 2006.

HOWARD CENTER FOR HUMAN SERVICES, 102 S. Winooski Avenue, (50 parking spaces)

Public parking begins Friday, November 25, 2005 from 6 p.m.-10 p.m. through Monday, January 2, 2006.

FRIDAY NIGHTS ONLY 5:00 pm to 11 p.m. AND Weekends 9:00 a.m. to 11 pm

*TD BANKNORTH (100 parking spaces) on the corner of Main Street and St. Paul Street

The lot will be open for public parking through DECEMBER 31, 2005 at the following times:

Week nights: 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm

Weekends 9:00am to 10:00pm

NO PARKING ON THE FOLLOWING NIGHTS, – to accommodate Flynn Theatre patrons – on November 26, 27 and 30; December 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16 and 17th.

 

SURFACE PARKING LOT ON MAIN STREET across from TD Banknorth, DO NOT PARK ON EAST SIDE OF PARKING LOT ALONG BUILDING. Located mid-block between St. Paul and Pine Street. (30 parking spaces)

Weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.;

Weekends, 9:00 a.m. – 10 p.m. from November 23- December 31, 2005.

SURFACE PARKING LOT ON CORNER OF MAIN AND PINE STREET Across from the Ski Rack. (15 parking spaces)

Parking is FREE at this lot ONLY on Weeknights, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.; SUNDAYS ONLY, 9:00 a.m. – 10 p.m.. November 23 through January 8, 2006

SURFACE PARKING LOT MID-BLOCK ON PINE STREET BETWEEN MAIN ST. AND COLLEGE ST. across from North Star Sports (32 parking spaces)

Parking is FREE at this lot ONLY on Weeknights, 6

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Threading for dummies (i.e. me)

Just Rambling

It would be really handy if the compiler could tell when you have written code to access UI components in one of the external thread processes of the BackgroundWorker component, such as DoWork. (Yes, the debugger tells you when you messed up… just not the compiler.)

Luckily at least some of these are caught in runtime.

I will have to write myself a little reminder comment in these methods NO UI ACCESS HERE, DUMM-DUMM! I think that I will get over this very quickly though., as I get more and more used to working with asynch processes.

You, too, can write asynch processes (almost) easily in VS2005 now with the BackgroundWorker component. But you still have to know what you are doing and pay attention. You don’t need to know threading inside and out – but have an awareness of it.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Finally gave in and bought a new printer

Tools

I have an old HP Laserjet 4si that I bought a looooooong time ago. I think the retail price was $5000 and I paid about $3500. I can only remember that it was when I was living with a certain guy and we broke up when I was 33. So it is at least 11 years old! It has really been a die-hard and has MORE than earned it’s keep, even with having to lug this 125 lb beast through three household moves.

It actually still performs like a trooper but it’s no longer 100% dependable. I get paper jams that drive me batty when I have to print out lengthy reports – whether it’s the 100 and 200 page reports I have to print for a client  about 10 times a month or even just a 10 page document. I had the printer serviced last winter and started using better quality paper in it. The jams are back again though and yesterday, under duress, I had to send out a 100 page report with pale streaks through it (which the client was able fade out when they made their photocopies). Apparently this is either the (not very old) fuser or something suddenly wrong with the print cartridge causing the streakes. Solvable, but dumping more money into it.

So I gave in and bought its’ replacement today. A 38 pound, $400 (after rebate) faster (22ppm vs 16 ppm max) LaserJet 1320t. It also does duplex printing (which I occasionally would love to have). I never needed the network capabilities so I don’t have to pay for that now. And the paper trays hold 250 pages instead of 500. No problem there for me.

It’s a hard thing to do. I always have better things to spend my money on, but I realized that at this point, it will cost me a good $100+/year to keep it going in addition to the aggravation of those occasional paper jams which are very costly in their own way.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Using Blocks are new to VB’ers, what are the rules?

dotNET

Using blocks are new to us VB developers. I get the basic concept – it’s cleaner than try/catch/finally blocks when all you are doing is disposing an object and it’s super great when dealing with unmanaged resources and good ol’ SqlConnections.

But the intricacies of using it are a little less obvious. Luckily, this code construct has been around in C# (and I will guess C++??) so we can learn from those folks.

I was trying to find a better way to deal with a file stream and memory stream today. Porting some code over from vs2003 to vs2005, the compiler was moaning about the following code block (I am only writing it loosely here…) where I am passing in a file name, opening up the file into a streamReader and then doing something to the streamreader and then closing both objects at the end. Maybe it wasn’t written perfectly to begin with, but the compiler issue was a new one.

dim fs as new FileStream(myfilename,FileMode.Open)
dim sr as new StreamReader

Try
   myStreamReader=new StreamReader(fs)

  … do some stuff

Catch exS as IOException
 … do something
Catch ex as Exception
 .. do something
Finally
   If  Not fs is nothing then
      fs .Close
  EndIf
  If Not sr is Nothing then
     sr.Close
  End If
End Try

So when I ported this to VS2005, the compiler was not happy about accessing the streamReader in the Finally block because it was possible that no value would be assigned and I’d get a null ref exception (on the bold red line.)

I knew that I could get rid of those Close methods with a using block but was not sure if nesting them was a) possible b) good code or c) something that would bite me in the rear down the road.

Once I figured out what I was dealing with: “nested using blocks” I quickly found this blog post by Scott Hanselman, who specifically says in the comments of this post that he is thumbs up with “nested using blocks (but ONLY if theare are pure nestings without any other code following the inner block.”

So, considering the source, I’m confident that I’m doing good by doing well (or however that goes) with nested using blocks (with out extra code after the inner block). 🙂

Using fs as New FilesStream(myfilepath,FileMode.Open)
  Using sr as new streamReader(fs)
     Try

       … still need exception handling around the other code

     catch ….
    Finally
    End Try
  End Using
End Using

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org