All posts by Julie

VTdotNET Holiday Party – even with a live jazz band!

dotNET

In the past, the December “meeting” for Vermont.NET has been a pot-luck gathering at either someone’s office or house. This year, with other (less stingy? ;-)) folks than myself in charge, we are having a real party! It’s going to be at Parima Thai in Burlington which has a really cool private party room designed in the feel of Frank Llloyd Wright. And member, Paul Swider, has somehow gotten his friends from Pine Street Jazz to play at the party! It’s like a real office party. Appetizers will be provided and there will be a cash bar. Parima is even offering a discount to any of our members who want to have dinner at their Thai Buffet before or after the party. We will still do our pot-luck in the form of desserts as well as collect food for Vermont Foodbank.

Thanks to Parima and Pine Street Jazz for making this affordable and to local c-tech, Knowledgewave, for their sponsorship!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Virginia Beach: St. George’s Brewery and Mongolian fare

Travel

In addition to having a great time presenting at WeProgram.NET last week, there were two other things I wanted to share.

When it’s possible, I try to bring back a local beer for Rich. Unfortunately, there was no bringing a 6pack of Castle back from South Africa, but in Virginia Beach, the local brewery is St. George. I had to find them via google, but was able to grab a 6-pack at the local market. Since my laptop is not too heavy, it wasn’t so bad carrying it back home in my backpack.

While there, my brother brought me to one of his favorite lunch spots, the Warriors Grill, which does a buffet in the style of the Mongolian warriors of centuries past. I love the history of this, described in ther menu and got a good laugh out of “at the Warrior’s Grill, we do the gathering and preparing for you. No need to place the meat under your saddle to tenderize it as the Mongol Warriors would sometimes do.”

At the restaurant, you pile prepared vegetables and meats along with a great variety of oils into a bowl and then they are cooked on a hot surface.

Unfortunately, the whole history is not on their website, so here’s a quick scan for you.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

How many programmers does it take to …(TFS scales way up)

dotNET

Etienne Tremblay is a real VSTS wonk. (Etienne is French Canadian, so I should be sure to remind him that “wonk” is a good word..). He works at EDS, which is one b-i-g company, and is excited about the fact that Microsoft has just changed it’s Team Foundation Server recommendations from “Teams of up to 500 users” to “Teams of up to 2000” users. That’s a lot of programmers mucking with your code. But one has to understand that I am an independent so it’s basically unfathomable to me….

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

PCI vs PCIx vs PCIe vs AGP and my dual monitor dreams

Just Rambling

When someone told me that the AGP interface for plug in cards for my PC was “like pci but better” I made the assumption that it would plug into my PCI port. Dumb me. After 20+ years with computers, I should know better.

AGP is different from the ground up and requires it’s own interface on the motherboard.

PCIe (PCI Express) is also different and is even newer than AGP.

These two are mostly for the high intensity graphics that are used in gaming.

PCI-X is not another way of saying “PCI Express”. It’s totally different and was an enhancement to PCI.

My Dell 170LN does not take AGP or PCIe. I was lucky to find a dual DVI card that can plug into my PCI slot. It took me a long time to find it because when I saw pictures of this one, I passed it by. It only has one port to plug a cable into. However, it is designed to sort out sending signals to multi-monitors. You only need a special Y cable to plug the two in.

So if you are stuck with “Conventional PCI” but want to use dual digital monitors the thing to get is an NVIDIA Quadro4 VNS 280 PCI card. This is made by PNY and also HP. You also need a separate Y cable. Be careful because you can get Y cables that have one VGA and one DVI or one that has two VGAs or one that has 2 DVIs.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Google AdSense – I ain’t gonna retire any time soon

Just Rambling

I did an experiment a few months ago by putting some google ads on my blog. I was just curious what would happen. I replaced one of them after Katrina with a more worthy cause than my own, but left the others there. I have basically forgotten about them until I had a nice email from DonXML with some suggestions about how I could make the ads more effective.

This reminded me to go check my earnings. Here’s where they stand:

You can’t collect on this until you reach a certain amount  (is it $50? I forget). Maybe sometime next year, I’ll collect the $50 and donate it to a local Vermont charity. I get free hosting from Alentus (thanks Alentus) so I have no real need for the adsense anyway.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org