Nick MacKechnie, of Microsoft, lists all of the KB articles (so far) related to installing XPSP2. Great resource.

I’m jealous. Roy Osherove has a DBA coming to his office tomorrow to go over his database with him. I actually tried to get Roman Rehak to do this – but he can’t do any moonlighting. Roman is a pal, lives right here in Burlington and is a real live SQL Server guru. Unfortunately, I’m spoiled by knowing him and nobody else (that I have easy access to) will do. I even asked Stephen Forte if he could recommend someone in NYC since my client is about 90 miles north, but he couldn’t come up with someone who would be willing to make the trip for a day. It is something I would REALLY love to happen with my client’s database. But I’m very very picky now.

If you can say it in your own words, then you understand it. If you can’t say it in your own words, you better keep at it…

I plan to devote a nice chunk of time to explaining how keys work (at least 5 minutes, maybe 10 which is a lot in a one hour talk!) in my WSE2 security presentation. Watching some different explanations that are given by people who *really* understand this stuff makes me laugh (mostly at my own dopiness) because I have no idea how someone who has never done encryption before could follow what they are talking about. This is not a criticism of the explanations I am seeing, I just know that if I am still going “but what about ____” and “wait, let’s do that again…” (ummm, more than once…gulp), that my intended audience of WSE2 Security for Dummies is going to feel the same way. That’s why I have chosen to present on this topic. I want to translate. I speak dummy. I wake up a dummy every morning. Every time I try to grok something I haven’t worked with before, I am totally a dummy. And I’m sick of making leaps of faith with concepts I don’t truly understand, so I’m willing to do the work to learn it.

Understand, this word “dummy“ has always been used as a term of endearment in my family. And I’m using it here in the sense of “the more you know, the less you know.”

I don’t plan to “dumb down“  or water down the concepts. I just want to approach them from a different angle.

I’ve received my DVDs with the TEchEd 2004 content. This is one of the most valuable features of a conference becuase you can “attend” all of the sessions! Unfortunately, with the few that I have seen, the “video” of the demos are really out of focus and it’s a real bummer. I try to watch them, but my eyes keep trying to focus and it actually hurts (just a result of problems from 20 years of sitting in front of a computer screen).

Well, I think the 3Leaf guys are losin’ it but this is a funny post.

Don’t forget, they’re looking for a new hire….

A few months ago, Alan Griver and I were giggling over the idea of adding articles to the VB language. You know, it’s all about readibility.

My hubby plays windows solitaire all the time. I am going to get him to try Eric’s new pet project, “Winnable Solitaire” and see what he thinks.

misbehaving.net’s Caterina Fake on getting more visibility for women in i.t.

I’m sure we in the i.t. world have some shared questions and issues about encouraging young women into this field as with the sports world. Here is Andrea Learned’s take on a current Nike ad.

…or how well-known Robert Scoble is. I was chatting with a woman tonight (not an I.T. person) who blogs and out of the blue she said “I really like the weblog of Robert Scoble.” It was odd to me. Robert has become “this guy I know…”. But it’s funny to have that reminder of how well known and influential he is outside of our little geek-world. The more I thought about it, it made sense, because she is a marketing person. She focuses on marketing to women. Here’s her blog.

Here’s her book.

But you know, Robert’s just a geek like all the rest of us – only that now he’s a kid-in-the-candy-store geek. And I quote: “heh”.