When I got asked to present on ASP.NET security at not one but two DevDays events, I accepted [of course] and then afterwards started wondering where I was going to find the time to create a high quality presentation for such a big event. I have a few others that I am currently working on and it is hard (though rewarding and if you are really lucky, educational) work. Since this was my first time at bat for DevDays, I didn’t learn for a few more days what is beautiful about this event. You may know by now of course, from reading Brian Goldfarb’s weblog that he and Jeff Prosise have created the content for the web security track. Boy oh boy, this is like having my cake and eating it too. So you may be getting locals (and in some cases even local yokels) doing the presentations, but Brian and Jeff will be in many ways right up there on stage with us, feeding our brains…and yours! Of course a lot of the presenters are more than capable of creating their own session materials for this, but the benefit is that there will be very high-quality consistency for every single date.

Considering that she is a pretty attractive woman, I’d be going after the courtroom artist, if I were her! 🙂

Joel Semeniuk asked me why I haven’t written a book and have turned down offers to do so. My joke answer was that I’m too busy with my user group and INETA (he also runs a user group and is on my INETA committee).  I pointed Joel to Chris Anderson’s post which perfectly answers this question.

I received an “order confirmation from Amazon” email and of course, I hadn’t ordered anything. Out of curiousity I looked at the source of the email. It is filled with tags that I don’t feel like deciphering or examing, but it looks like it’s some secret message or something! If you are curious, I have uploaded a screen shot of the source, rather than paste the text in here and give them some google juice!

This is just a splice. Click on the message to view the whole jpg.

Not to say that they are the only ones, but these two really stood out for me. Was it just because one was about a great outdoor gear chain and the other had something to do with Vermont? No, they both go much deeper than that.

The first gives some true visions from a successful retailer on future technology and how it will help his business – and this is something we developers should be paying attention to! It’s almost like a hot stock tip! And notice how Robert slips in that the guy uses a tablet?

The other is Robert’s take on why he is suddenly very disappointed with the whole phenom of the dean blogging thing. I have watched Halley Suitt and Robert get very caught up in the campaign (and Dave Winer was here helping them out just last week) and I wasn’t sure if it was because it involved blogging or because they are really behind what Dean wants to do for the U.S. I sure hope that he (Dean) is kidding when he says he wants the whole country to be just like Vermont – land of the $7.50/hour service jobs (and many people who need to have more than one job), taxes that are out of synch with incomes and let’s just say a little problem when it comes to health insurance. Robert accepts that the Dean Blog isn’t blogging as he knows and loves it, but politics as usual. There’s more than politics to Robert’s post and I dug the whole thing.

I’m trying to replace my hard drive with another one and then install win2k3 server on the new drive. Of course for some reason I can’t boot from the setup cd and have fiddled with all of the cmos/bios and scsi settings. Switching jumpers (scsi doesn’t do that ma…./sl…. thing). Damned good thing I’m stubborn. But I fear I’ll be at this all night!

I always notice that Jason Salas posts lots of reviews on the AspAdvice forums and on his blogs. I think that he puts them on the ASPAlliance site also.

We get a lot of books from publishers coming to our user group. We even have a book review page! I do have the opportunity to grab what I want before I push them out to my members. Usually I just ask if I could get my hands on them afterwards. But I generally find I don’t ever have time for leisurly reading as opposed to being VERY happy to have these books around when I am trying to learn a particular thing or solve a problem. I would love to be able to find the time to do what Jason does, which is why I always notice when he posts yet another book review.

from Microsoft-Watch

Microsoft has something free for Linux fans

In the last [many] months, I generally work until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. We don’t have kids, but do have a few dependents – a wonderfully funny cat, G.B. and my beloved 10 year old Newfie, Tasha. These two have bed times, too. I know it’s 10pm because the cat suddenly appears, meowing, twirling around my ankles and wants to curl up in my lap. That’s because he likes to snuggle up next to me under the covers when I’m in bed, so this is the best he can do when I’m at my computer. (No wierd interpretations of this please). But the funniest thing is the Pavlovian reaction to the sound of me pushing the power button of my monitor to turn it off. Both the cat and the dog jump up. They know. “Finally, it’s time!!! She’s finished with that DAMNED thing and we can all go to bed.” Silly kids.

It just struck me that I have noticed mentions of and pointers to Mary Jo Foley and Microsoft Watch a lot lately from a variety of the blogs that I read (ooh now I can show you my real blog roll, btw). It’s interesting to me. I imagine there are people who just always see someone in her position as someone to “watch out for”, but it’s looking to me like she is being embraced by this blogging community.