Having been a developer for over 20 years, I appreciate what Clemens is talking about in this discussion.

1) Where do you want to go, Aiden

2) Free stuff vs. Free Stuff

Makes my day. The owner of my favorite/biggest client treats me like a business partner. He tells me his visions and let’s me do whatever I think it takes to make them a reality. He pays me plenty. I love the company and over the past 7 years of working with them have a great sense of ownership of what goes on there and am very proud of my contributions. But still, he pays me plenty. So to have him stop to tell me “thanks for everything” means so much to me. He said what we have accomplished in the past year is now setting his company up for another fantastic growth spurt. He knows that my dedication to his company goes much deeper than my billables. I am *so* incredibly fortunate to have a client like this.

Building relationships with clients is what keeps you in business. Every time I have ever been asked to talk about this side of my business (I have been a contractor for nearly 18 years now) this is always the most important factor that I highlight.

this is pretty funny!

I’m sure it was a hardware problem…

Even though some long haired freak came by and made faces at me while I was doing this interview, it actually sounds pretty good! (I think). http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=43782.

Werner reports positively on having Bill Gates at the Cornell Campus. Quite a different view fromt Ajay’s report from Carnegie-Mellon!

just time for a couple of quick notes on Edge 2004 East

I finally got to meet Dave Seidel in person – we have a bit of a funny history so it was fun to meet up.

Carl Franklin, Pat Hynds, Ted Neward and Michael Steiffel all came to my presentation. I decided not to be daunted and was extremely fortunate to ahve some great feedback from these very experienced speakers after the fact.

After I did my talk, I found an email from Kit George with all kinds of great pointers to improve my deck! I’ll implement them anyway <g> Thanks Kit.

I got a pre-press copy of Paul Vick’s new VB book for Addison-Wesley. Thanks Curt! And met another one of my email pals from A-W…Heather Mullane.

I was interviewed by Jeremy for sys-con radio to replace my (so bad I have never listened to it) interview they did at PDC. Only got asked one ringer question, the interview was fun.

I almost died of a heart attack as a back seat passenger of Pat Hynds car driving around Boston. I’m sure he and TEd are still laughing their asses off at me.

Thanks Derek for taking us to “Cheers” for dinner. After being surrounded by so many Java people for the days there, it was great to be with many of my .NET pals!

I attended Pat’s ASP.NET Security talk. Can’t hear these things too many times (especially in prep for next weeks devdays talk.)

Had a total blast with Ted Neward – he and another pal of his from TSS and I went to the OLDEST restaurant in America  – the union street chowder house.

Gotta run… Hopefully I’ll get to come back and link.

Today, I was looking at a little website I did for my mom’s book in 2002 and really surprised myself at what pretty website it is. I just wanted to show it off. Getting stuck with design work is really daunting for a developer. It’s just a little frontpage site that uses bcentral, but it was perfect for them. They have sold hundreds of books from it too!

I have also always been very proud of the site I did for my sister’s company, Katie’s Bumpers. That is also a Frontpage site that ueses bCentral for e-commerce. I started this site for her when she began her business in January of 2002. She now has her products selling in over 500 stores in the U.S. and Canada and also some catalogs!

I have to admit that I really struggled with both of these, since I was given no direction really as to what the “look” should be at all. I know what I like and don’t like, but not how to get there. So I just kept changing and changing and changing it until I finally liked the way it looked.

I thought this was funny – but geeze Ted, you HAVE a real, grown-up title now!!

This is just the schedule of when we are getting interviewed by Sys-Con Radio while at the Edge 2004 East conference. I need a replacement for my bomb interview (well, I never listened to it really but I’m pretty sure it sucked) that they did at PDC.

Latest goody in the spam box:

a company in Thailand that is offering polygraph services for potential and current employees as well as hand-writing analysis and on-line ethics tests. A new low…

Pre-employment   polygraph    testing After you interview your candidates and you choose the one you think youwould like to hire, we will polygraph them to verify their CV. It is thefastest and easiest way to do it instead of trying to verify previous educationand employment by phone or letters that takes a long time. And sometime doesnot get the response on time or at all. We can provide you with pre-employmentpolygraph testing. This will verify the information on the CV from thecandidate him self. And usually you will get all the information you need thesame day or the next.
Periodic     screening For any size company that need to check on periodic basis that employeesare keeping with company roles and regulations. We will polygraph a fewemployees on monthly or bi-monthly basis. The employees never know when thetesting will take place or who will be tested.
Fact   finding    (specific issues) When ever company roles and regulations are broken or any kind ofdisputes, polygraph is the best way to get to the truth.

I love this post from fellow Vermont resident (we are only “flatlanders”– the definition of “Vermonter” is “five in the ground”…) on his geeky desire to have an excuse to really dig into xml serialization that was battling with the sanity of not overextending his architecture on a simple website that he is doing for a local charity. Read on…