I would pay money (sorry, not really, it’s just a phrase) to have Rory interview Kasia (aka Unix-Girl). If you don’t read Kasia’s weblog, you are missing some very intelligent and biting humor. Here’s a perfect example. She is a programmer (“Yah, I like Java, deal with it.”) and for fun she is a sys-admin for DSL Reports which is the source of  some of her best posts.

I just think it would be hilarious to put those two together in one room, pick a topic, and let them go to town.

I’m trying to work on some C# stuff to test out some things in the latest rev of VS (2005 march preview etc etc). C# is so damned confusing for a VB programmer. Most of my build errors are due to capitalization problems for forgetting to put () at the end of method calls.

The whole static void thing is insane – not that there is something wrong with it. Just that it’s really hard to understand how it works and what it friggin’ wants from me :-). Like not being able to call a class’s method from inside of the starting point (static void main) of an app. I bet this is a very common error message for newbies:

“An object reference is required for the nonstatic field, method, or property”

I’m doing extremely simple stuff, it’s taking me forever, but I gotta get over this hump sometime…

I have a lot of respect for people that have a lot of VB experience who have learned how to program in C#. I don’t have the patience because I don’t have the time when I could just do this in VB and have been done with my stupid 10 lines of code an hour ago. Oh well.

update: I did finally grok the static calling non-static thing and that if you want to do that you need an object that owns the non-static method. But really, it made me dizzy. A good explanation (for me at least) was found in this thread in the C-Sharp Station forums.

Poor Kent [Tengels] …he’s in between a rock and a hard place. It’s the old post-feminist quandry: “Should I open the door and be polite or will I be accused of being sexist?”

Why did I say I think “dasBlonde” is very funny for the name of Michele’s blog? Well, she is blonde (and brilliant), she’s using dasBlog and it’s a good play on words. Kent, it’s okay to notice. From my perspective, as I should let Michele speak for herself…just don’t make it be what I’m all about. I’m a programmer and I’m a chick* and I have red hair (well hard to define the color really sometimes 🙂 ) and I live in Vermont.

*Why the heck do I say “I’m a chick”? Because I’m way too old to say “I’m a girl”, I’m way too young to say “I’m a woman”. Don’t dare call me a lady. So “chick” works for me – it feels timeless, ageless and cool. But on my terms as there are many ways to use that word and I certainly don’t like all of them.

I received this email from Rich Peliel, one of the members of Vermont.NET after Tim Huckaby’s presentation on Monday night.

Julie, thanks for bringing Tim to our meeting. His code demo was exactly what I needed to  get my report for my manager. This saved me so much time and from so many headaches.

This is a guy who is trying to teach himself ASP.NET in his free time so that he can do more interesting tasks in his job.

I remember sitting in a FoxPro meeting many [many] years ago with the wonderful Mac Rubel speaking. He did something in passing that I had never seen before and I said “wait, stop, what did you just do?“  I always remember him referring to that as an “oh“ moment. You never know what, in a technical talk, will trigger that.

So getting this email from Rich really made my day. It is the kind of message that makes me always remember why I love running a user group.

This kind of stuff happens at every meeting, even though this one was a little special since Tim is a little special 🙂 and since he came all the way from California as an INETA Speaker. Tim also received a copy of this email and replied that he’s be happy to come to speak at Vermont.NET every year for the rest of his life if we’d have him… Thanks Tim. It’s documented now!

Remember the chocolate cake debate from TechEd last year? I was an “it was awful” voter. So was Marcie. Marcie is now writing about the rumor that the snacks might not be at TechEd this year and  how she will miss the Little Debbies. It made me think of something that is pretty strange. I actually lost weight at TechEd and PDC. It’s those mile long arenas back and forth back and forth. I get more exercise at those conferences than I do at home during a normal day of sitting on my butt in front of the computer. Then I come back and eventually those 3-5 pounds find their way home – onto some part of my body (well, I know which part at least…)