I’m not makin’ this up.

I only point it out because it’s 30 miles south of Seattle.

Sorry I couldn’t help it. For about a week there have been these “testing” posts always at the top of my aggregator feed from Chris Sell’s weblog. I just had to make this bad joke. It’s one of those days that is only salvaged by lame jokes.

Amy Sorokas has been somewhat of a muse for me.

When I started Vermont.NET two years ago, I emailed SAMS to see if I could get some books for the user group. I got an email back from Amy Sorokas saying – “hey, have you heard of INETA?”. I hadn’t. (If you know me, you know that I am extremely involved with INETA to this day.)

When I started learning a thing or two about .NET I sent a few ideas to DotNetJunkies. There was Amy Sorokas again, helping out with the articles and authors who were writing for the site. It took me a while to figure out where I knew the name from and one day I wrote to her and said “Oh, I know – you’re from SAMS!”

I finally met Amy in the flesh this past summer at TechEd in Dallas. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected a cute, hip young woman to have been the same person who had been my muse.

Amy has a weblog now on GeekswithBlogs, even though I dare say, she’s not really very geeky.

Amy does write about what she is doing at SAMS. Over these past two years, I have gotten the impression that this is way more than “just a job” to her. She really loves what she does, she is very proud of her company and even more proud to be involved in a process which enables so many bright folks to publish many of the books that we depend on to learn the tools of our trade. And when SAMS was moving offices this summer, I kept getting these big boxes full of books (and some pens and cups). She was cleaning out her office and VTdotNET was the beneficiary!

Amy just wrote that not only will SAMS be supporting DevDays 2004 , but they will be a Bronze Sponsor of TechEd. This is a big deal for a relatively small company. I think it’s great. Yeah Amy!

That’s my story about Amy Sorokas.

CNN has a doom and gloom story about Martin Pichinson’s recent move to Silicon Valley. He is a business advisor who has laid 6,500 tech firms to rest since 1999.

I figure that anyone geeky enough to read my blog has read or seen Lord of the Rings. I never read the books (as a kid or adult – for shame) and hadn’t seen any of the movies. I just watched the first the other night and wanted to drive all the way to the video store to get the next one the next day (but couldn’t) so over the last few days I have been watching hte extras that were on the DVD. Tomorrow I will be going to town so I will get the next one and watch it. Then I get to go see the latest at the cinema. It’s just riveting and I can see why you would want more more more. 

y’know when you are staring at some code you have to keep adding to and all you seem to be able to do is correct the typos in your comments? “I before E except after C”

Now all temptations to go out and play are gone – as will be all of our beautiful snow. Boo hoo. Work work work

I’m trying so hard to get through my client’s project. I want to finish BLInk!. I now have 4 conferences (which is 3 separate talks) to prepare for (EdgeEast, DevDays in Boston, DevDays in Connecticut and DevTeach), a review of some bits that I’ve been asked to do, want to play with Whidbey, have not even had a chance to touch LongHorn (et alia), Reporting Services, Yukon and somewhere in there I’d like to have a life. How do you folks all do it? My friend Ali keeps telling me to sleep less, and I keep reminding him that I’m not 21 anymore and just can’t physically do that.

Many have writting about Tim Berners-Lee, “the father of the web”, being Knighted – which is pretty wild. (heck, I guess if they could Knight a Rolling Stone – why not an I.T. superstar?) Halley Suitt has a funny perspective on this as Berners-Lee’s children go to the same school as Halley’s son. That’s got to be pretty strange to have someone you see at the grocery store suddenly becoming a “Sir”.

Via Peter Kurth – a local writer who publishes in Seven Days, here in Burlington VT

“You come right over here and explain why they’re having another year!” Dorothy Parker, telegram to Robert Benchley, December 31, 1929