Thanks Wisconsin! Cabot Cheese – World’s Best Cheddar Again!

Vermont

As I get ready to head to Wisconsin for Deeper in .NET, I see that Vermont’s Cabot Cheese has once again won a bunch of gold medals at the “olympics of the cheesemaking industry”, the 2006 World Championship Cheese contest. And just to be clear, it was the Wisonsinites who run this contest so thanks Wisconsin!

from the Cabot site:

26th Biennial World Championship Cheese Contest  Selected Results
March 21-23, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin

Results for Cabot Creamery Cooperative

Product EntryPlaceScoreProduct Class
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old)
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old)
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (3 months old)
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (39 months old)
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (60 days old)
Cabot Horseradish Cheddar
Cabot Salted Butter
Cabot Unsalted Butter		1st
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
4th
2nd
4th		99.20
98.70
98.20
98.85
99.25
98.35
99.20
98.65		Sharp Cheddar
Medium Cheddar
Medium Cheddar
Extra Sharp Cheddar
Mild Cheddar
Flavored Past. Proc. Cheese
Salted Butter
Unsalted Butter
Results for other Vermont Cheese Council members (www.vtcheese.com)

Product EntryPlaceScoreProduct Class
Hahn’s Blueberry Dream Spread
Vermont Butter & Cheese Goats Milk Feta		2nd
3rd 		99.60
99.45		Reduced Fat Cheeses
Semi-Soft Goat’s Milk Cheeses

For additional results and information about the World Championship Cheese Contest, visit:
www.wischeesemakersassn.org

Maple trees are budding

Vermont

I took this pic of one of the red maples on our property yesterday morning. Kinda gray but the buds are pretty. the picture wasn’t impressive in a small format, but it looks so nice big that I have it for my screen background now. Spring is coming. Yay!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

RecruitersNOTAnonymous! Gretchen and Zoe – brilliant new company idea

Community Cheerleading

So, there was much ado about somethng when Gretchen announced she was leaving Microsoft. I love that Korby referred to her as a Microsoft Legend and almost wrote a blog post about that. She is something of a folk legend (I don’t mean that as in “imaginary” though) for what happened when she and Zoe started the JobsBlog as opposed to, say the MSDN “Microsoft Legend” program which highlights some of the best selling authors in our industry.

Michael Kaplan pointed to where Gretchen landed and it’s really great. She and Zoe have come back together to create a business which leverages their extreme experience as recruiters to offer assistant to technology job seekers and technology job seekees. JobSyntax. Excellent! Go girls!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

My OLD newfies ….looking pretty young still

Purely Personal

Giant breed dogs don’t have a long lifespan but my dogs Tasha (12) and Daisy (11) are not only very old for Newfoundlands but unbelievably healthy at their unusual age. Here’s a little 8 second movie (only 364KB) of them on a walk last week. Daisy is on the leash and Tasha is in front. People who own Newfies cannot believe these dogs.

Tasha came to me as a rescue at 2 1/2 yr old with bad knees. She had 3 operations on her 2 back knees when she was about 3 or 4 years old. She has been on Cosequin for many years but we switched to something called Cetyl-M a few years ago. Tasha was always athletic. Tasha definitely has problems with those back legs now. If she is on the tile floor, it is really hard for her to get up (slippery) and she is pretty pokey going up and down stairs. But she is eager (and able) to go for long walks and still even runs a little. She’s not a powerful dog anymore, but she still amazes us.

Daisy who is a year younger is one of my parent’s dogs (they are breeders). All the other dogs at my parents knew that it was pointless to chase stick or a ball if Daisy was around because she aways got there first. Daisy still runs and jumps and chases – very very strong and powerful still. She has not been on anything until about 6 months ago we put her on Cetyl-M too. The vet says she’s like a 5 year old Newf. Even her coat is still dark and rich.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

WSE3 Demos recorded in Camtasia

WSE

I recorded my basic “Securing a web service with WSE 3” demo using Camtasia. There are two versions of this.

  1. In the 30 minute version (25MB), I spend a lot of time looking at config and policy files as well as tracing and debugging while implementing the security.
  2. The shorter 15 minute version (12MB) does not take any stops along the way although we do inspect the trace file at the very end  just to prove that the message was secured.
  3. WCF Client to WSE3 Service Demo (20MB, 20 minutes) see notes below

I don’t get to take this much time to explain things during a conference, so I’m happy to be able to do the demo in my own time frame. I think I will do this for some of my other favorite presentations.

It’s different to do a presentation with no audience, in the quiet of my office. I did have to edit out the barking dog at one point. It’s not nearly as fun and I can tell that I sound very different than when presenting to a room full of developers. Maybe I should drink a few cups of coffee next time I record demos. Also, without the conference clock ticking away, I am not racing through the demo which is a nice change. Calm cool and collected.

Next I will record the demo of my WCF client calling into a plain ASMX web service built in .NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 and then calling into a web service that has been secured with WSE 3.0. When that is online, I come back to this post and link to that as well.

Update 4/18: The WCF demo is online. It is 20 minutes long and about 20 MB. There are two important things to know about this demo. 1) It is part of a bigger presentation about writing web services today that can communicate with WCF tomorrow, but the demo doesn’t go over those rules. You can see basic guidance in this article that I wrote, but becuae the guidance was in flux when I published the article, please do keep an ey on he MSDN WSE Dev Center for an upcoming article by William Tay and PAG guidance. 2) This is not focused on how to write the WCF client. Although I show a little about how I did it, the point of the demo is just to prove that it works. Again, watch for William Tay’s article!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Never realized how many people dowloaded my session materials

Just Rambling

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org