Category Archives: Vermont

Fun House by Alison Bechdel

Vermont

One of the best comic strip artists in the country lives in Vermont, just a few towns north from where I live, in fact. I have been a big fan of her strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” (which obviously has a broader appeal than what the title indicates) for years, not even realizing the author, Alison Bechdel, was practically a neighbor.

Alison has been working for years on an autobiographicnovel (sorry that’s german for Autobiographic graphic novel, or graphic memoir) that was recently published. Much hoopla is being made of it in Burlington. I’m looking forward to getting a copy! She’s touring all over the country (including Seattle & Portland!) so you can get a signed copy even if you don’t live in Vermont.

SevenDays has a great article on Alison and her book this week. But lest you think it’s just us northwest Vermonters who are excited about Alison’s book – is Entertainment Weekly (rave review) maintsream enough? She also mentions in her blog that the current issue of People has done a piece on her.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Late Spring Hiking in the Green Mountains

Vermont

Rich and I actually went out for a short hike yesterday. We can just go out the back door and through the woods to get to a trail called the Beane Trail that is an access trail to the Long Trail. Our plan was just to take a walk up to the shelter at the end of the Beane trail which is just a few hundred feet shy of the LT. We don’t generlly hike in the spring (too wet & muddy) or in the summer (too hot & buggy), but this was, well,right in between. It was a nice day. The trail going up the mountain wasn’t muddy at all. After a short sit at the shelter, Rich suggested rather than going back down, we could go north on the LT for a bit to where it intersects with the Catamount (x-c ski) and VAST (snowmobile) trails and then go down the VASTtrail back to the base of the Beane Trail then home again. After a check of how much water we had left and some figgerin’ about how much extra time/distance it would be, I agreed.

 Along the way, I was surpised at how manydifferent varieties of Trillium were still in bloom. One that we saw a lot of were Painted Trillium. I didn’t have my camera, but I’m a crappy photographer anyway. Here is a photo by a Vermont woman who has many beautiful photos of Vermont flowers on her blog. (Thanks Lene!)

I also found a photo of another flower we saw on her blog – called Clintonia.

Another one we saw a lot of at a higher elevation was the Purple Trillium which I found on this web page.

When we headed down the snowmobile trail it was like a bog -so muddy from all the rain. But mud is a good place to see footprints. And we saw plenty! One set that went along the trail was from a moose.  It was big. I put my foot in the print and it was wider than my foot and about 2/3 the length.

The other prints we saw were cat paw prints. BIG cat paw prints. I’ll have to find a tracker book to see if it was way too big to have been a bobcat (apparently that’s the case based on how big my neighbor’s eyes got when I showed her the size of the prints) or a cougar (aka “catamount”).

All in all I think we ended up doing about 5.5 miles which was a little more than either of us were ready for. But it was fun! Today was a good day to sit at the computer.

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

In the hammock

Vermont

A beautiful summer-like afternoon. As I took a few minutes to laze in the hammock, I thought of all my poor city dwelling friends around the world and ran indoors to get my digital camera. For the very short (but 22MB video) click here.

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Oh JOY JOY – Higher Speed DSL on the mountain

Vermont

I just thought to check again to see if there was a chance the “Elite DSL” 4mbps (vs. 1.2mbps or so that I’m currently getting) was actually available to my remote location. Downloading things like 3GB vista builds takes about 20 hours right now. So this will make a big difference to me.

Congratulations! Elite DSL upgrade, which provides speeds up to 4Mbps / 1Mbps is available at your location.

Click here to order Elite DSL upgrade online, or call our Customer Service

For only $5/month more.

When I was at the VTBusiness Expo on Wednesday I happened to walk by the booth for my provider (www.gmavt.net) and stopped to say “I’m a really happy customer and I just wanted to say hi!”. I wonder if they rewarded my small kindness with this? 😉

We’ll see if it’s for real. I’m signing up and maybe finish my beta2 download next week (it hung after 40% and I never went backto complete it.)



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

User Group Leaders UNITE at the pre-TechEd User Group Leadership Meeting

Vermont

If you are a user group leader in New England or a user group leader going to TechEd, you won’t want to miss the User Group Leadership meeting on June 11th.

The meeting will be in Microsoft’s Waltham Office, just north of Boston. If you need to get from Boston to Waltham, let INETA know!

 

You’re invited to join us at the at the Northeast Regional User Group Leadership Summit on Sunday 6/11/2006 at the Microsoft Waltham, MA office.

 

User Group Leaders today face many challenges such as promoting your group, financing, engaging existing members, recruiting speakers, finding new sources of content, leveraging local Microsoft relationships; etc. The New England INETA user groups along with INETA, in hopes of building a more close knit community, invites you all to join us on Sunday June 11th, prior to the start of TechEd 2006 in Boston.

 

The agenda for the summit will includes peer to peer sessions to address some of the key concerns and issues related to running a user group.  As a follow-up to last year’s hugely successful INETA User Group Leadership Summit, the New England INETA User Groups will host this event in the hope of that we can all learn from one another to improve the user group experience for our attendees as well as ourselves.  The sessions are open to all leaders, both local and afar.  

 

If you are currently involved with a user group, in a leadership role, want to get involved, or even looking to start one then you will get powerful direction in the course of the sessions. If you read this far, you know this is for you. 

 

To reserve your seat please visit: http://www.wedevelop.net/leadershipsummit.aspx

 

Schedule

Activities

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM

Registration

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Welcome From INETA

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM

Panel Discussion: Marketing Your User Group

10:30 AM – 10:45 AM

Break

10:45 AM – 11:45 AM

Involving Your Group In The Community

Handling Financial Structure of Your Group

11:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Lunch

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Establishing A Local Speakers Pool Through Special Events: Guest Speakers, Code Camps. Local Speaker Nights

Group Promotion: Stop Preaching to the Choir and Reach Audiences Outside Your Membership

2:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Break

2:15 PM – 3:15 PM

Effective Communications: Writing Appealing Newsletters, Emails, Group Communications

Making The Most Of Vender/Sponsor Relationships

3:15 PM – 3:30 PM

Break

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Working With Microsoft Resources: Who You Should Know

How To Build A Leadership Team

 

 

For more information please contact [email protected]

Mega User Group Meeting at TechEd!! Monday night June 12th.

Vermont

New England Mega User Group Meeting
Developing with .NET in 2006 — What’s Hot and What’s Not

Register Now!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Boston Convention Center/TechEd 2006, Boston, MA
6:30-9:30 p.m.
Room information will be posted here before the event

Panel and Mini-Cabana Discussions

Do you develop in the world of Microsoft .NET?
Would you like to know more about .NET technologies?

If you answered yes to either question, don’t miss this event. Join us for a free and wide-ranging discussion with a panel of nationally-recognized experts on Microsoft development technologies. Architects and developers from the Boston area and around the world will be in attendance at this Boston Mega User Group Meeting held in conjunction with TechEd Boston 2006.

Panel Discussion

.NET is Microsoft’s strategic software platform for building systems that connect information, people, systems, and devices. Each of the panelists will share their philosophy and favorite (or not-so-favorite) tools, tips and techniques for .NET success. The topic areas include:

  • Visual Studio 2005
  • Web Services
  • ASP.NET
  • WinForms
  • SQL 2005
  • C# and VB
  • .NET Framework
  • MSIL
  • XML

    Panelists

    Bob Beauchemin
    Bob is a database-centric application practitioner and architect, instructor, course author, writer, and Director of Developer Skills for SQLskills. Over the past two years he’s been teaching his SQL Server 2005 course to 500 students worldwide through the Ascend program. He is lead author of the books “A First Look at SQL Server 2005 For Developers” and “SQL Server 2005 Developer’s Guide”, author of “Essential ADO.NET” and has written articles on SQL Server and other databases, database security, ADO.NET, and OLE DB for MSDN, SQL Server Magazine, and others.
    Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft
    Sam, author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, has 25 years experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe.  In his current capacity as Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products.
    Fritz Onion of PluralSight
    Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book Essential ASP.NET (Addison Wesley), and the upcoming Essential ASP.NET 2.0. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, VSLive!, and TechEd. You can read Fritz’s blog.
    Jeff Prosise of Wintellect
    Jeff is cofounder of Wintellect, a developer consulting and education firm that provides services to companies all over the world. His most recent book, Programming Microsoft .NET, was published by Microsoft Press in 2002, and his writings appear regularly in MSDN Magazine and other developer magazines. A reformed engineer who discovered after college that there’s more to life than computing loads on mounting brackets, Jeff is known to go out of his way to get wet in some of the world’s best dive spots and to spend way too much time building and flying R/C aircraft.
    Jay Roxe of Microsoft
    Jay Roxe is the Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft. In this role, Jay is responsible for product planning, technical evangelism, and external communication. Prior to this role, Jay was a developer and development lead on the .NET Framework where he had responsibility for the Base Class Libraries.

    Mini-Cabana

    Immediately following the panel discussion, we’ll break out into informal Mini-Cabana discussion sessions where attendees can ask the panelists and other nationally known experts questions.

    Experts Attending

    The final list of authors and experts will be determined between now and TechEd. We’ve got a great pool of talent to draw upon, so you can be sure the Mini-Cabana sessions will be an interesting, lively and informative discussion!

    Don’t miss this chance to meet some of the foremost experts in the field of Microsoft development technologies.  Register Now! for this valuable no-cost event.

    Volunteers

    Moderator and Event Coordinator: Bob Goodearl of RGood Software
    Bob is an independent consultant with more than 28 years of experience in the industry as software architect, designer, and developer. He is also a contributor to BostonDotNet and a member of the board of ICCA-Boston.
    Event Director: Chris Pels of iDevTech
    Chris is President of INETA North America and the Boston .NET User Group as well as running his consulting firm iDevTech since 1986 which specializes in system and database architecture.

    Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts: May 18

    Vermont

    Wow – I didn’t know about this group until just now and they are having a meeting tonight!

    VAGUE

    Date: May 18th

    Time: 7pm

    Topic: A general presentation on network security and exploits by Sam Hooker will be followed by a portion on PHP-specific issues from Jim Grady of Code4Design. The presentations will be followed by an informal organizational meeting about the group’s activities

    Location: ClearBearing   208 Flynn Avenue  Burlington, Vermont

    More info: http://www.uvm.org/vague/

    Local Groups

    1. Vermont.NET (Burlington)
    2. VTSQL (Burlington)
    3. Green Mountain Oracle User Group  (Burlington)
    4. Vermont Flash User Group  (Burlington)
    5. Ruby on Rails (Burlington)
    6. NH/VT Upper Valley Microsoft Consultant Group (varies: Norwich VT, Lebanon, NH, etc)
    7. Northern New England Macromedia User Group (Brattleboro)
    8. Vermont Software Developer Alliance (Burlington) Business Association


    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    NH/VT Upper Valley IT Professionals June 20th

    Vermont

    June 20: What is in Your Toolkit?

    Location: The Howe Library, Hanover, NH

    Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm

    More info: http://thenorwichgroup.blogs.com/uppervalleynhvtsbs/

    Local Groups

    1. Vermont.NET (Burlington)
    2. VTSQL (Burlington)
    3. Green Mountain Oracle User Group  (Burlington)
    4. Vermont Flash User Group  (Burlington)
    5. Ruby on Rails (Burlington)
    6. NH/VT Upper Valley Microsoft Consultant Group (varies: Norwich VT, Lebanon, NH, etc)
    7. Northern New England Macromedia User Group (Brattleboro)
    8. Vermont Software Developer Alliance (Burlington) Business Association


    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

    VTSQL June 19th

    Vermont

    www.vtsql.org

    When:      Monday 6/19 – 6 to 8pm
    Where:     Competitive Computing – Colchester
    Subject:    What’s new in SQL Reporting Services 2005
    Presentor:   Susan Wisowaty, Microsoft

    Local Groups

    1. Vermont.NET (Burlington)
    2. VTSQL (Burlington)
    3. Green Mountain Oracle User Group  (Burlington)
    4. Vermont Flash User Group  (Burlington)
    5. Ruby on Rails (Burlington)
    6. NH/VT Upper Valley Microsoft Consultant Group (varies: Norwich VT, Lebanon, NH, etc)
    7. Northern New England Macromedia User Group (Brattleboro)
    8. Vermont Software Developer Alliance (Burlington) Business Association


    Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org