I went today to Mad River for the last hurrah. It was just like one of those great spring days in college where you just have to cut class and go play frisbee and drink beer (back in the old days when the drinking age was 18) on the college green. A day of sheer sun, joy and new found freedom after a long, long winter. And slushy snow and lots of bare spots. Nevertheless, the parking lot was completely filled, there was a long line on the single and the deck was jam packed with happy people enjoying the 50 degree weather and the sun.

I took one last glorious run for the season then hung out on the deck eating a burger. I was in disguise – braids and a bandana – good little hippie tele chick gear. After a few minutes one of the guys sitting near me says, “Excuse me, but did you give a talk on .NET at DevDays in Hartford?” LOL! What a funny small world. This is Vermont, I’m 7 miles from my house and 4 hours from Hartford.

Brian comes up to Vermont a lot to ski and wants to move here. He’s got 2 years of C# development under his belt so I will definitely be helping him to connect to try to find a job. But what a funny thing. I like to think that I lead a double life and outside of a few connections (user group member Charlie Bates is a local, a ski patroller at MRG and a phenomenal skiier, Boston.NET user group leader and friend Chris Pels has strong ties to MRG and we brought Chris Kinsman there last winter…), I’m just Julie the ski bum when I go there. To top it off, Brian is also a fellow pin-head!!

www.madriverglen.com

3/27: After some fantastic powder skiing early in the week, spring has arrived. With last night’s rain and today’s warm temperatures, we have lost a great deal of snow on the mountain. Forecasts are calling for more unfavorable weather next week, so we have decided to close for the season after skiing tomorrow, Sunday, March 28th. Tomorrow we are expecting sunshine from mid-morning on and temperatures in the 50s, so we’re looking forward to one more great day of spring skiing and a great end-of-the-season celebration! Tomorrow the Single Chair will be open until 4:30 pm, we’ll have a BBQ at lunchtime and live music on the deck from 3-6 PM, plus all season passes will be honored! Tomorrow we’ll start off the day skiing on at least 24 of our 45 trails with variable spring conditions, primarily wet granular. If the snow sets up enough with tonight’s forecasted cold temperatures, hopefully we will be able to reopen most of the closed expert terrain for some great spring corn skiing!

I don’t think Rich and I have any plans for searching out more snow at Tuckerman’s or anything like that this year  – so it’s probably best to just start getting my bikes tuned up and dig out my paddling gear (well – not until the water warms up!!)

I’ve been sitting here in my office all morning in my flannel lined jeans and fleece – as I have all winter long! Who knew it was almost 65 degrees outside?! Throw open those windows! Where’s my bike? (oh god – do I have to wear my bike pants in public after this looooong winter?) I want to garden.

COME SPRING, COME!

from www.madriverglen.com

Conditions have been some of the best of the season this week, and today looks like another incredible day on the mountain. We received another 2-4 inches of new snow last night, giving us a total of 8-14 inches of powder since Sunday and over 2 feet of snow in the past week. Forecasts are calling for partly sunny skies and temperatures climbing into the low 40s. With fresh snow, blue skies and comfortable temperatures, today is going to be as good as skiing out west! We’re currently skiing on 100% of the main mountain terrain with 40 of our 45 trails open. Surface conditions are powder on most of the mountain with packed powder on the 8 novice and intermediate trails that have been freshly groomed this morning.

I am SO outta here!

First it was Urban Outfitter’s “voting is for old people” t-shirt, now it’s K-2 snowboard division, Ride Snowboard’s, attempt at a dig on Burton (trade show banners which said “The worst thing about riding a Burton is telling your friend you’re gay.” ) which is not only stupid and insensitive, but it doesn’t even make any sense. Burton is a local business here (with ties to my user group Vermont .NET) and I caught this latest via Roman Rehak’s blog.

Infragistics recently scooped up Jason Beres (lucky them) and he moved from Florida to New Jersey. Tomorrow they are sending Jason, who is also an INETA speaker, to speak at Vermont.NET. Jason will fly in in the early afternoon, get a quick tour of Burlington, do the meeting then we’ll head back downtown to check out some of our famous college bars. Of course, it’s monday night – things are a little quiet. But all are free to join us. I know – there are *SO* many bloggers in Burlington. Actually there is Dave Burke and Roman Rehak. We used to have Joy (sniff sniff I miss her) “Cleverhack” Larkin who moved to PA to go to law school.

My user group is VERY spoiled. Read this prior post to see our list of hot .NET speakers who have come and are planning to come to Vermont.

Here’s the scoop on tomorrow’s meeting:

Who: Jason Beres
When: Monday March 8th 6pm-8 or 9pm
Where: KnowledgeWave, 300 Community Drive, So. Burlington, VT
Topic: Writing an N-Tier Windows Form Application
This presentation will look at the Tracker reference application and eBook as a real world example using key Microsoft technologies: Web Services Enhancements WS-Security, allowing secure authentication from the Windows Forms application to a web service for data access Microsoft Data Access Application block Microsoft Exception Management application block Microsoft Application Updater application block Multithreaded Windows Forms application for data access Structure for implementing online and offline data access without using Datasets XML Web Service data access or data access directly to SQL Server
Why: Well d’uh – to learn a lot, to eat free pizza to get great swag (courtesy of Infragistics)

Jason will be the next victim to stay at our house on the mountain and will then head up to Montreal on Tuesday to speak at GUVSM.

There was something in the local news the other day that IBM was doing a small amount of hiring (small in comparison to the thousands that have been laid off in the last few years). The newscast showed people in full lab gear, so I assumed it was jobs right in the manufacturing area.

However, I just noticed that Dice.com posted a bunch of software jobs today at IBM in Essex Jct (just outside of Burlington, VT). In fact I think they are doing it as I type because it was 8 when I started this post and now there are more.

If you’re curious, go here, type “IBM” in the Full Text Search box and select “Vermont” from the state dropdown, then go. There’s some WebSphere, C+, etc. Some are pretty focused on particular industries.

Ahhh peace and quiet, now I have some time to write another overdue post.

I was able to lure Steve Smith to speak to Vermont .NET with the invitation of a free weekend getaway in Vermont which was extended to his wife Michelle and daughter Ilyana. Unfortunately, Michelle and Ilyana weren’t able to come, but Steve did come for the weekend. We tried to get him away from the computer a little. Food worked, including some Ben & Jerry’s in downtown Burlington and dinner at two different local restaurants that brew their own beer.

I think it was really good for my husband to see that I am not the only lunatic with the type of work habits that I have and that a lot of time spent on email etc is just part of how things work around here. Steve and I stayed up late working. Steve got to sleep in late – I still had to get up and walk the dog! hee hee

We had a lot of fun, bundled Steve up in the appropriate gear and took him snowshoeing in the Green Mountains (we access the Long Trail from our back yard). I took a look at all of his cotton clothing and scared him into accepting loans of a lot of our technical stuff. Cotton is dangerous to wear winter hiking – read “hypothermia” – just like in programming, it’s all about “what if…“. Anyway, Steven, totally inexperienced with this stuff was great. I also was disappointed to see that I have really lost a lot of strength from sitting in front of the computer all of the time. So I have to try to get out more. It’s why we live here. It’s what I love.

Monday of course was the user group meeting. We just had the ASP.NET Roadshow a few days before (via Live Meeting from Boston!!) so unfortunately a bunch of people had used up their “night out” and there were only 20 people there. Too bad for the others. We also had free pizza that night thanks to DataDirect! (Thanks guys yumm yumm)

Steve drilled into cacheing and focused solely on that. This is a phenomenal presentation if you have an opportunity. Steve has the luxury of focusing on ASP.NET in a way that gives him true expertise. I have been programming with ASP.NET for 2 years and I learned SO much on Monday. Some stuff I may have seen and glazed over before. But this time there is no problem with the lessons sticking. Also he spent some time on Whidbey which is always good for the group. They think I’m some kind of koolaid addict and I’m trying to make sure they understand that it is important to start paying attention to Whidbey now so that they can jump in and leverage the goodness when it arrives.

The other thing that I was really impressed by was Steve’s presenting style. I paid attention because I have a lot of talks coming up. Steve is such a natural. It is a huge thing to be talking about something you know so very well. Becasue of that, he is really able to communicate the information. And I think I told him something he never heard before, he has a great “radio” voice.

Amy Sorokas from SAMS/QUE shipped some books for the meeting including of course Steve’s co-authored ASP.NET Cookbook. Thanks Amy. They arrived 15 minutes before we left for the meeting. And Steve dragged along an extra HUGE suitcase filled with books and swag to give away.

All of this was possible because Steven was doing an INETA event in Montreal the next night. So we worked things out so that he could come to Vermont also. So I get to say thanks once again to INETA and thanks to Guy Barrette (one of the new Regional Directors) who runs GUVSM in Montreal for helping to coordinate all of this.

Blueberry pancakes on the house for all!

Here’s some proof (oh and steve just posted as well with these pics! )

Avonelle points out this t.v. ad for Vermont Teddy Bears which is one of Vermont’s most well known businesses and #2 tourist attraction after Ben & Jerry’s (though I can’t figure out why…with so many other treasures). Anyway, I was amazed by the ad – it’s kind of sleazy and low class – opposite of the image that they usually portray of themselves.

That’s the temp when I walked the dog this morning. No wind and very sunny so it did not seem unbearable. Yesterday was -18 when we went out in the a.m. Needless to say, these are short walks!