My MVP award ended yesterday. But thankfully I just received an email that I am an MVP for another year now.

Oh great, something to look forward to this afternoon. Mind you I live in Vermont, not Kansas. Generally this means shutting everything down and completely disconnecting from electrical outlets and phone lines. I learned my lesson well about 10 years ago.

I give up. I really truly lost my pocket pc. I think I left it in my room in the hotel in Montreal last week. I didn’t realize that I was actually that attached to it. It had my name & address & phone # on the back and can’t be much use to anyone without the perpherials (battery charger, etc). Maybe it will show up in the mail someday.

I think it’s replacement will have to be a pocketpc phone though.

Update: Dec. 15, 2005! It’s back after 18 months! Check out this new post.

Thanks to whichever one of you recommended me to Paul Vick’s VB Blogger list. 🙂

I was thinking about the void between the .net mvps and the other MS technology mvps at the mvp summit in April and wondering if there is going to be a similar community gap between vs express developers and ummm … what will we be called … “real”?… developers. I imagine there will be many people who just stop with the express products rather than using them as a stepping stone to .NET development. Will they be embraced in our community or treated like 2nd class citizens? Hey, does that mean VB developers will finally have someone to pick on now*?

Seriously. I really was wondering about this as I was considering Avonelle’s post on trying to understand the VS2005 Express products in relation to VS2005. This probably means it’s time to go to sleep.

*kidding…I’m KIDDING!

Now that I have switched to non-admin there is one problem that forced me back to admin last time I tried this. Building VB6 executables. This may be due to the fact that this app has been worked on for years as an admin, but as a non-admin, I do not have access to particular registry keys that need to be modified during the build. (And I once did attempt to deal with that, but really screwed up my whole system!) So I finally figured out a workable solution. I can do all of my development in my non-admin mode. When it is time to build (which is rare these days anyway), I just log out, log in as admin, build, do a few QA checks and then when I ‘m happy, log back out and back in to my non-admin login.  THen do the QA checks again and all is well.

I tried to “run as” admin when starting up VB6 but that wasn’t’ working very well (can’t remember what the problem was…). This solution seems to be okay. Just so long as I am not LIVING in admin mode. Then

How about a patent for using human skin as a power conduit and data bus.

I’m not making this up! http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5244766.html

Thanks to major DotNetNuke (DNN) fan, Jim Duffy, who is one of the goofy gaggle of DevTeach speakers, for pointing this out to me…

I received my new desktop computer that will replace my “daily driver” last Thursday. I left Sat. a.m. for DevTeach in Montreal and returned last night. I have a lot of work to catch up on, of course. The box is still unopened. it will take some setting up. It has no 0/S on it. I have to flip my 160 GB drive into it and make it the master drive. I have to install the 2GB of RAM I bought at Crucial. I wonder when I’ll get to it?

Maybe I should have a pool where people can make guesses and the winner will get – ummm… hmm how about the 128 MB RAM that I will be extracting from the new p.c. and hanging on my christmas tree?

DevTeach was once again (and as expected) a wonderful conference. I had a great time hanging out with everyone and this time also got to see a little more of Montreal since my hubby was there for Saturday and Sunday. Marcie ended up hopping a train from Toronto early Monday morning and “crashing” the conference. With Rich back in Vermont, I was able to offer her the other half of my king-sized bed. She definitely had some fans in Montreal.

I really enjoyed doing my sessions. There was definitely a limited “market share” for Whidbey and Tablet SDK but it made the sessions that much more fun to have a small audience of about 10-15 people where I was able to adjust the talk to meet their needs. My tablet talk was preceded with a BSOD as I pressed the Fn & F5 key to push my screen to the projector. Luckily all was well by the time I was supposed to begin and my RC2 bits held up perfectly fine with VS2003 and even asn ASP.NET application.

So far my evals are great (all three of them …heh). But regardless of those, I know that in both sessions – especially the Tablet session – the attendees were really excited to be able to see some of this stuff live and have someone they could ask questions of.

Well, I’m not the only one who was unable to digest this article in one sitting (or have the appetite for it…). Every post I have seen so far is basically saying “interesting, need to read and think more before I say anything.”