Inka and Alex

Purely Personal

My parents had to put down one of their dogs earlier this week. Beautiful Inka. Two days later, the owners of Alex, one of Inka’s brothers, had to put him down, too. Inka and Alex were 10 1/2 which is pretty old for a newfie. They were from a litter of 13 that I will never forget -good ol’ Pippa had all those puppies all at once.

We put a little rememberance of Inka and Alex on the home page of my parent’s kennel website.My mom, dad and I had fun writing this and giggling about these beautiful dogs who have such big personalities. So much easier than bawling some more. www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont IT Jobs: .NET and other developer/IT jobs in this weeks 7Days

Jobs

People always ask me what we do up here in Vermont. Well, here are FOUR jobs related to .NET so we aren’t just boiling syrup and milking the cows all day, y’know! I noticed these local IT jobs in 7Days this week. One is a .NET Developer job that I have posted before. Here’s a link right to 7Days classifieds for IT jobs.

1) I see my favorite local software company, Synergy is hiring again. I worked there when they were just porting to VB6 and frustrated because .NET was released while they were in the middle of it. But now they are looking for .NET developers. Yay!

2) Blue House Group – a local consulting company that does great work and is in hip little Richmond, VT (12 miles from Burlington) has a web designer positions (as well as a few other jobs). They are also knee deep in .NET at Blue House along with the other technologies they use.

3) HazMed has a .NET Developer (C#) postion that is in 7Days but not on their website. They do have a SysAdmin job on their website.

4) ASP Developer wanted (.NET skills a plus) at CPA Site Solutions.

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Four inches of new snow – on top of grass (and some maple syrup musing)

Vermont

Is winter back? Well, it’s pretty but I can’t go out and ski in the woods even though we got lots of fluffy snow overnight and this morning. My skis would just go right down to the rocks and grass. Oh well. Bad for the maple syrup makers right now but its still early. They require cold nights and warm days for the sap to flow (up to the top when it warms up, down to the roots when it cools down…. each pass is a chance for the sap to flow out of the taps). But we had days and days of warm days and warm nights and now cold nights and cold days. Neither is the right combination! I did see the thick plumes of smoke coming out of a sugarhouse on monday. I wanted o stop and roll down my window so I could smell the sweet sugary smoke, but it wasn’t an option at the time. Did you know that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup?

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

INETA User Group Leaders – Why are you reluctant to tell INETA your meeting #s?

Ineta

I am astonished that INETA has had to go so far as to have a prize drawing to encourage user group leaders to report on the health of .NET user groups (thereby also helping INETA to show it’s sponsors what type of reach they are getting which is a VERY reasonable thing for a sponsor to ask).

Once a month, it is a tiny itty bitty task. All they ask is that you identify yourself, your user group, the date of your meeting and the # of attendees. Additionally, they ask what your current membership count is and if you are so inclined, you can even leave comments.

One minute? Two?

So why is it hard to get u.g. leaders to do this? Do you find it invasive? That’s the only thing I can come up with because certainly it’s not much of an imposition. Even if INETA did nothing more than provde the speaker bureau – that’s huge. And this is just about the only thing they ask in return other than eval forms when they send a speaker (and pizza) to your group three times a year. So what if they ask every month – not just months that you have INETA speakers. And even with that, you cannot imagine the time and energy that the INETA volunteers put in to running this organization. And for what? For you – for your user groups. So a little survey each month is not much to ask as far as I’m concerned. I’m very happy to share that info with them.

Really, I am very curious why bribery is necessary? Not that I would turn down a $100 gift card for my user group (though I wish I could use it at the local pizza joint)!

Feel free to leave comments or link back to this post if you want to blog a reply.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

My two very old dogs that defy their age!

Purely Personal

I took Tasha and Daisy to the vet today. They are both newfoundlands. Tasha turned 12 in December and Daisy turned 11. Tasha was a “rescue” who I adopted when she was 2 1/2 yrs old. She had come from a home where she literally had lived in the back yard her whole life. She was kind of naughty when she first came to live with me having never had any freedom – so she ran away a lot. But I knew that if I couldn’t get through to her, nobody would have enough love and patience to do it. So I took her to dog training and let her sleep on my bed. Soon she loved me so much she just wanted to be good and grew up to be a quintissential newfie – the gentle giant. Now Tasha is 12 years old, which is very unusual for a newfie to live this long, and other than some “old age” stuff … loss of muscle mass – most noticably on her head, a little swelling around the knees and having slown down a little -she is in really great shape. She’s happy, healthy, still runs around and has a great appetite. Even her eyesite and hearing are still awesome. Today at the vet, after verifying all of this to be true, he also told me that her heart was perfect. PERFECT! 🙂

Daisy is 11. We kind of stole Daisy from my parents two summers ago. She came for a visit and stayed. Daisy is astonishing in her own right. Except for grey eyelashes and a grey mustache, she looks and acts and moves like a five year old dog. When we go outside in the morning she jumps up and down until I throw her bumper for her which she races after and then prances around with when she gets it. Daisy floats up and down stairs – very different than Tasha who has to kind of bounce her back legs together to get up and down. She too is an amazing dog and this very experienced vet finds it hard to believe she is 11 years old.

I just needed to record that.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

How telerik and Red-Gate made me a hero

Tools

I have a client who is a programmer with a small company that is creating a really cool on-line product. And I mean kew-well!

His background is very strong in architecture and also he and his team have done a ton with WinForms but his ASP skills hark back to the pre.NET days. But he’s doing the app in ASP.NET 2.0 and I am mentoring him with this and a variety of other related things.

Along the way, he was frustrated with some of the limitations of the built in ASP.NET 2.0 controls (a post for another day). Even though I have never used them, I knew that based on the particular tools he was seeking, I have heard such great things about telerik from people I trust, so I recommended that they be on the top of the list of 3rd party controls to check out. Needless to say, the report back from him is that he is now using 3 or 4 of those controls and is so happy that he’s (no, not buying the company) but subscribing to their full package.

A few weeks later he was ready to start synching between his development sql server and he online sql server as he got deeper into his tests. Though I have only played with them a little, I am still quite familiar with Red-Gate‘s tools and also know so many people (that I trust) who think they are awesome. So once again, I gave him a strong recommendation to try them out. A few days later, I got another very happy email from him saying that the Red-Gate tools were fantastic and he is definitely sticking with them.

There’s a lot to gain from just knowing what’s out there and paying attention to what people say about them (and who it is that’s saying them and what the context is) even if you don’t have hands on experience with every tool out there.

So thanks Red-Gate. Thanks telerik. (And thanks ASPInsiders, too.)

p.s. no, this is NOT a sponsored post! 🙂



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org