I was at the Vermont Business Expo yesterday and spent a good part of the day yesterday with a Linux guy who kept bringing up how much we hate each other, even though we don’t. What’s up with the non-stop hatred for Microsoft? [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

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I decided not to leave the last two paragraphs on that blog so here it is:

The politicians were there doing some booth by booth campaigning.

I had nice chats with Martha Rainville, who, up until she decided to run for congress was (I’m copy/pasting to be sure I get my facts straight) “the first woman in the 370-year history of the country’s National Guard to serve as a state Adjutant General.”. She was the head of Vermont’s National Guard from 1997 to earlier this year. Like everything Vermont (our syrup, our cheese, our leaves, our rock bands), Vermont is extremely proud of  it’s National Guard and I believe we have the highest proportion of guardsman deployed in Iraq and environs per capita than any other state. Martha’s actually pretty cool. We were so disappointed when she decided to go on the Republican ticket. I’d love to have a strong woman representing Vermont (we only have one congressional seat), but I fear she’ll get swept up with the party line. It’s going to be a hard vote in November.

Rich Tarrant was there too. He recently sold his software company, IDX, to GE  for $1.2 billion (to be fair, I believe there were 8 partners) and decided to run for senate against Bernie Sanders. A sad way to throw all that hard earned money away. Rich spoke at a VTSDA meeting recently. We were hoping to get a glimpse of what it took to build a billion dollar softare business from scratch (he started it with one partner in the early 70’s). We heard a little about that and a lot about how he was going to change the healthcare system in the U.S. He smiles a lot. Hey, I would too if I someone bought my business for $1.2 billion. 😉

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

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