Kathleen Dollard gave up the fight against spam on her self-hosted blog and has moved over to MSMVP Blogs.
Here new blog, Leaning Into Windows, can be found at http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen
Category Archives: Community Cheerleading
MSDN’s Channel8, like Channel9 but aimed at students
I just found out about Channel8 which is in Beta and was launched recently. it’s aimed at students – from kids to PhD’s.
There are arlready some great videos – interns at Microsoft, PhD students describing their research projects; blog posts and more.
I’ve been emailing it to all of my pals who are teachers and profs related to all things nerdy.
15 New INETA NORAM Speakers!
Even though i am on the INETA speaker committee (responsible for the NORAM Speaker Bureau), I didn’t really know this was public yet but I’m starting to get some emails and see some blog posts that people are announcing their addition to the speaker bureau, so I guess it’s okay to blog about it now!
Must be that the email I got wasn’t a “how does this look before we send it out to the world?” but it was the official email.
Fifteen, count ’em 15! new people were added to the speaker bureau. They are all on the website already so you can start ordering them up!
Rod Paddock – Rod has spent his kid’s college fund travelling on his own dime to speak to user groups all over the u.s. and canada. he’s been to VTdotNET and he’s a great presenter. Rod is also editor of CoDe Magazine.
Markus Egger – Markus is the publisher of CoDe, so he keeps Rod in line! Markus presents at conferences all over the world. I am always amazed at the ease at which he explains some difficult concepts in a easily understandable way. Even with that Austrian accent!
Mark Miller – You may know Mark from his crazy fun on Mondays! with Carl Franklin, but Mark is also a friggin genious who is one of the driving technical forces behind Developer Express. Mark is another one of those guys who speaks at user groups on his own dime all the time.
Nick Landry – aka Active Nick. Nick is a crazy and smart as hell guy from Montreal (though he’s now a New Yakah living in Joisey)who is a guru in mobile device programming. He has been presenting at conferences for years. Watch out for that Quebequois accent, shiny bald head, and most especially his super silly jokes that somehow make technology sound dirty.
John Papa – John writes the Data Points columns for MSDN magazine and speaks at VSLIve a lot and we’ve just snagged him to present at devconnections this fall (he’s doing 2 talks in the Data Access track that I coordinated and 2 in the Mobile Connections conference that Nick Landry chairs). Maybe if we keep him really busy on the speaker bureau, he’ll be lulled into slacking off on his MSDN Mag column and I can steal it away from him. Evil laugh.
Ambrose Little – Ambrose has written books for WROX on ADO.NET 2.0, ASp.NET 2.0 Hacks and has a book on silverlight coming out. He works at Infragistics and is an ASPINsider – and a really nice guy who will be a pleasure to host at your user group!
Oh, John Papa’s really nice too. You should all invite him to speak at your groups. Keep him really busy! 😉
DonXML – oh, wait, Don actually has a last name! It’s Demsak. But really, “Donxml”, need I say more?
Wow – 7 down and 8 to go. This is a lot of work and I have work to do.
I’m going to have to just cut & paste the rest. I know, that’s really boring. Sorry!
Todd C. Bleeker, Ph.D., is regarded as an innovative, resourceful, and competitive technologist with an intense desire to excel. Todd is co-owner of Mindsharp (http://mindsharp.com/), a company that offers top-notch educational opportunities on the SharePoint platform. Todd has architected many solutions for small and large corporations: P&G, Fingerhut, United Healthcare, itiliti (now PeopleClick), Air
Mark Dunn has over 20 years of experience in the disciplines of software engineering, database administration, and project management. For the past four years, Mark has been awarded MVP status for his contributions to the Visual Studio .Net community and he serves as Microsoft’s Regional Director covering the
Caleb Jenkins long time community leader, former Microsoft Developer Evangelist, training mentor and consultant with Improving Enterprises, Inc. Host, cameraman and editor for http://communitycast.tv/. Caleb lives in
Kevin McNeish is President and Chief Software Architect of Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc, and a Microsoft .NET MVP. He is a well-know speaker and trainer throughout North America and
Mark Michaelis is the IDesign architect specializing in WCF and VSTS. Mark was recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio Team System and C#. Mark holds a MS in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and he serves on several Microsoft Software Design Review teams including WCF, C# and VSTS. Mark speaks at developer conferences both nationally and internationally and has written several articles and books, in addition to maintaining a blog. His most recent book is Essential C# 2.0 (Addison-Wesley, 2006). [Hey, there’s nothing in this bio about riding roller coasters on top of tall buildings with Kathleen Dollard!]
Jeffrey Palermo makes his living making software teams twice and three times as productive by coaching executive managers all the way down to individual software engineers. Jeffrey is also a master developer, MCSD.Net, Solutions Architect MVP,
David Yack is the CTO of Colorado Technology Consultants, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in
Add great searching to your ASP.NET website for a nominal cost and support the American Diabetes Assn
Flooding in Findlay Ohio
One of the many midwestern towns that has been impacted greatly by the flooding is Findlay Ohio. Here’s a picture that is currently on the home page of CNN.com.
According to the latest CNN article:
Findlay, Ohio, was enduring its worst flood in nearly 100 years.
“This is the most widespread it’s ever been,” Findlay Mayor Tony Iriti told The Associated Press.
Findlay is a beautiful small city with a lot of glamour to it thanks to it being the home of Marathon Oil. It has a main street right out of the 1920’s and a lot of charming homes from that era as well. Of course, it’s also home to the Sugar Towers, which should be one of the wonders of the world!
I got to go to Findlay last fall on my Central Ohio INETA “tour” (3 groups in 3 nights) and just loved the town and totally enjoyed the attendees at the user group meeting.
I’ve emailed Gary Shank, the leader of Findlay.NET who is currently sitting in a remote office, but still in Ohio and still suffering from the sweltering heat and the floods, but hanging in there.
I wish them all the best and look forward to coming back to do another user group talk and to get some pictures of those Sugar Towers!!
Sage advice from Kate Gregory
Besides being a technical guru and an amazing teacher (e.g. conference presenting and more), Kate Gregory is, to me, somewhat of a sage, a very wise and even-keeled person. So when she diverts a little from her great technical tips on her blog and gives some bigger lessons — life advice — I definitely perk up my ears.
She has written about giving and taking, whether it’s on newsgroups or forums, job interviews, interacting with clients or anywhere in your daily work.In the post she also references another post about knowing what you want (which I believe also inspired me to blog about at the time she wrote it).
Mike Gunderloy’s 7 month status report on de-Softing
After many years of being an icon of teaching us all how to use Microsoft development tools, Mike Gunderloy decided he needed to transition himself away from a dependency on Microsoft for personal reasons stated in this blog post, the first of his alter-blog “A Fresh Cup”.
It was a scary proposition, mostly because he has a family of 6 (including himself) to support.
It’s been 7 months and in a recent “status report“, Mike seems to be content with his progress, productive with his learning curve and getting work using his new tools.
I’m not sure if I could go through the refactoring that he has done, going from “expert” to starting over again with a new set of development tools. On the other hand, he brings an enormous amount of IP to his adventure which makes the transition that much more interesting.
I think if I were going to make a big life change like this, it would be more along the lines of doing a dramatic life-style downsizing and returning to my love of potting (as in making clay pots and sculptures) and that just ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
I have an enormous amount of respect for Mike on many levels and his commitment to following (and following through on) what he believes in is pretty impressive.
Teens in I.T.: I wanna build Physics Engines
As a follow up to my recent post about spending time with the teens attending the Summer Institute in Information Technology in Burlington, I’ve written about my visit over on my DevLife blog.
[A New DevLife post]
Meeting Roy Osherove after all these years
There is an Israeli contingent of speakers at DevTeach this year, bringing Udi Dahan, Oren Eini and Roy Osherove. I was especially happy to meet Roy because after so many years of blogging, he is someone I feel like I’ve known for a long time! Here’s proof that we were not only on the same continent, but in the same room!
