Microsoft New England is sponsoring a free showing of the new Star Wars flick that Rod Paddock says he would see again and again! Here are the details on Thom Robbins’ blog.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I found this interesting article on raising your hourly rates when you are a consultant. It is not directed at IT consultants, but just at consultants in general. I find it to be good objective advice. I had been billing the same rate for many many many years and have finally been adjusting to a new set of rates (still with a special rate for long-term clients) over the past few months. I know a lot of developers within our blogging .NET community that have made the leap to consulting in the past year or so. I have been working as a contractor since 1989, yet I sometimes need the same advice as a consulting newbie!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have been thinking about the Birds of a Feather session that I am leading at TechEd called “Life on the Bleeding Edge” and hoping that there will be people there that are already heavily into technologies like Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, or have used .NET for so long that they are almost bored silly with it. Tablet PC users, etc

I did not create the session because I have the answer, but becasue I think it’s a really interesting question and am very hopeful that there will be a mix of early adopters and VB6 devotees for an interesting dicussion. Here’s the info

http://www.AcehAid.org

A component walks into a bar and …

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am not a gamer. I don’t know how to play Xbox, but I can spell it at least. Either way, I am really impressed by something on their new site that REALLY goes out of the box (no pun intended) with thinking about websites. It is something I have been heralding the geniuses at Hi-Res for years.

What is great is that you get to think and explore the site. It is not filled with hand holding explicit links. There’s not much there, but what I love so much is the page you get to by clicking on the question mark. It forces you to think and play with it rather than being hammer on the head obvious. Brilliant stuff. And when I finally followed my instincts and found success, it was really gratifying.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Rob Garrett was at the Mid Atlantic Code Camp (and I think Devscovery, too, since he looked so familiar) and wrote up his thoughts about the sessions he attended.. I was thrilled to see that my Web Services Security talk had the affect I was looking for, but his write up also made me very disappointed that I wasn’t able to attend Sahil Malik‘s talk on Concurrency with ADO.NET 2.0.

I have also been getting some nice emails from attendees thanking me for finally demystifying security for them. Since I do this talk because I used to be mystified as well, and didn’t think it was fair for experienced programmers like me to have a topic that made us feel like dopes, it makes me really happy to know that I am able to get the info across successfully.

Wow. Here is a company that listens to its employees!

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/05-06-05StevebPublicPolicy.asp

(via Microsoft Watch)

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had my favorite geek t-shirt on yesterday for my WS Security talk at Code Camp. It is the shirt that the WSE team did for the WSE 2.0 release last year. Below is the best picture I have of it, which I scraped from Bill Ryan’s blog. Below the image it says “I’m Secure“.

I didn’t even think about this when Wally dropped me off at the airport. When I went through security and had to take off my fleece, the security guys had a good laugh over it.

I was just a little embarrassed.

Carl and the insane gang have created mini-outtakes from Mondays for busy people who need a good laugh but have to work harder to find the window for the full show. Here are two really silly ones that had me laughing pretty hard.

First one is a good poke at the finger in the chili at Wendy’s: here

Second is some more silliness with high tech and a guy with an unfortunate name here

http://www.AcehAid.org

Sheesh first it’s David Chappell at Boston.NET and in another few weeks in D.C. Brad Abrams and Kit George are in Atlanta as part of a CLR tour.

I know our beautiful scenery, great maple syrup and small but very warm and engaging .NET community aren’t enough for Microsoft to justify spending big bucks to get people like that here. It requires bigger reasons than a user group and outside of IDX, there really isn’t a potential client big enough in Vermont to justify the trip. Heck we don’t even get MSDN events anymore.

All the more reason for a Vermont.NET Code Camp…. don’t ya think?

http://www.AcehAid.org