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Is that Alexandra Young chick hot?
Unforutantely i don't know. never met her in person.
I totally love this site. You have a new book coming out, you release code for the book, your picture is on the cover of the book and the first question is from The Armed Geometer: "Is Alexandra Young hot?" Seriously, I'm doing some WCF/WPF work on a few JJBR projects (no details, thank you very much) and am wondering if this book is a good overview, or digs into details. I'm looking for details and examples. The two areas that I'm interested in are Avalon 3D and Indigo Transactions in High Volume (with high throughput) applications. I looked at the table of contents and saw a few entries that look promising. Either way, I'm obligated to buy the book because now you are a famous guy (ok, more famouser than before) and when I finally meet you in person, I will have the book with me for you to sign. Congratulation on getting this published. When is the publish/release date? ---O p.s. Does being a geek author increase the "stud factor" at Microsoft events and trade shows, i.e. booth babes and stuff? "Hi my name is Bill Ryan and that's me on the cover of this book. I do database work, but I specialize in inserting large objects and other back-end operations.", cause if that works, I should write a book, too.
OS - If you buy my book I'll never talk to you again - unless that's what you want in which case i'll bother you all the time. I'll shoot you an email and make sure you get one gratis. As far as Avalon 3d. I'm getting pretty good there so we'll have to talk, but the Speech Synthesis is my true passion. I've had a lot of problems focusing on one thing lately (My ADD is pretty bad) but I want to PIMP the Speech Synthesis components early on. It's actually pissing me off b/c I busted my a33 learning Speech Server and now everyone who won't do anything unless they can drag it from a toolbox onto a form or create it in a wizard (ie, the guys that can't write Data Access call to save their lives unless they use the wizard, or use Web Services instead of Remoting for performance critical components running inside their own network because you can't poitn and click remoting) - is going to be able to kick some butt with Speech. Actually, I'm kidding myself - that ain't gonna happen anytime soon. I'm at Kim's this weekend so i have broadband. until my new place is ready, I am staying with the folks who have dialup. However, in the near future, well, I'm going to swing it around with Speech and 3d. Let's talk in private, with your help, I'm sure you can help me make it even better. Gotta get lco and the armged geographer involved as well...
As far as your PS. the only way to get chicks at Trade Shows is to hang out with lco - he's a friggin magnet.
Andy - I don't think it's appropriate to comment on physical appearances of anyone, particularly females. In our Phalocentric society, too many women derive their self esteem based on comments like the typical one that you made. Phalocentrism and mysoginy are the two worst things in the world that we face right now and I despise such things. Even hearing "Hot" and "Chick" in the same sentence is so demeaning to women that It hurts my ears to hear it. However my sexist pig cuckooz that I live with have no problem commenting on stuff like that and posting blog posts about that sort of stuff. As such, EDC (Sonny's uncle) just told me that although he hasn't met her, she looks pretty cute. He'll have to get back to you.
DoubleI, Thanks on that book thing. Yeah ADD can be a bad thing, but you seem to kick butt on a lot of stuff. Putting out a book, doing this site, doing two other sites with articles, learning a bunch of .NET; it's that whole community thing you do. So, if ADD is slowing you down, I can't see it from here. Speech in WPF looks good too, but I'm getting the hang of that. I agree that since it is not drag and drop, it'll likely not get huge adoption, yet. I'll wait to hear from you as you seem to have a bit of moving transition going on . . . ---O
I've had ADD since before it was ADD. I took benzdrine as a kid which should have resulted in me becoming a Beatnik poet instead of a philospher/computer geek. It's a bitch b/c I either can't concentrate for sh1t or a I can be amazingly effective and focused. I'm all peaks and valleys, but it could be worse - and I really apprecaite the compliment. The speech components aren't doing anything 'new' in any sense I've been able to discern - but I 'm not yet qualified to say that yet since I haven't delved that deep into it. lco is the one that got me into speech and keeps me on my toes. It's hard to ever rest on your laurels with friends like him, you, Frans, Sahil, Andy and the rest of the gang. i'd need a pretty powerful database just to list the really brilliant friends I have and they never cease to amaze me. I'll shoot lco a copy of the books (I have another one on ADO.NET 2.0 coming out in October that I'd be glad to fling you if you're interested. I have some stuff for lco anyway so I'll drop a few extra copies with it. Anyway, definitely wanna chat with you sometime about a new side project I was looking at doing - an advanced Math/Statistical library. One of the main thigns I wanted to do was be able to subclass a datatable and ahve stuff like Multiple Linear Regressions, (Simple Regressions), ANOVA, 3,6 Sigma control limits (like all the Math that Deming used for Manufacturing - crap like that. I've seena few libraries that do this in .NET, but I wanted to make some datatables that had these built into them. Wanted to do the same for collections since most stastical data and the like use collections as such. I know between me, you and Andy - we could probably do some pretty amazing stuff pretty quickly, and I'm sure we have some pretty smart friends too ;-). LCO hates anything database related but we might be able to twist his arm if I gave him a free memebership to www.bridgettekerkove.com ;-). more in a bit. Cheers, Bill
I can't believe no one is ragging me about my "Progressive" comments on the "hottness of chicks" ;-)
Why should I rag you? You have to say stuff like that or the beaver gets angry. Mad beaver == No beaver. I completely understand.
Thanks Andy, but I can't even type Phalocentric without bursting out into laughter. That and heteronormative always make me chuckle. not b/c I'm a sexist pig or homophobe, it's just that those two words are sooooo serious sounding that they make me chuckle. You know, how come they never taught us Algebra in terms of beaver? You know "Class, Mad beaver = 0. Anything times mad beaver = no beaver" Von Neumann would have been my bitch if they'd have went that route.
Congrat's on the book Bill! :) And yeah, i agree - when I read "Phalocentric" I almost laughed out loud at work here....sounds like something that Ann Coulter needs real bad...then maybe she'll be happy.
I just thought that you were trying to protect your co-author's reputation in public. You totally had me fooled. I should have known better. Here's a fun tidbit on Von Neumann. This guy was a total party animal. He was a contemporary of Einstein and Godel while at Princeton and was generally regarded as the smartest guy in town. He was one of the six original mathematics professors that founded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (along with Alexander, Einstein, Weyl, Morse and Veblen who all are monsters of math in their own rights). But that didn't matter to him; the party was the thing. The parties were "frequent, famous and long". He was so much more cool than Turing and other computing pioneers. The guy did cool math, cool computing, built some atomic bombs and partied like there was no tomorrow. He died at age 53 of cancer. ---O
Good to link up a name with a face on the cover of the Wrox/Apress books. I assume you are the second guy from the left. You do much more work than I to stay current with Microsoft technologies. I am currently converting the Build Your Own code to C# and my own programming language. But basically I be chilling on the beach, here on Lamma Island. It's a little island on the southwestern side of Hong Kong. Take care, big fella.
Yeah, I saw a picture of von Neumann at the Princeton library, with half a pineapple on his quite bald head. The dark side of the Princeton party scene was real. Kitty Oppenheimer used to invite a guy of my acquaintance (her handyman) in for drinks in the afternoon because she didn't want to wait for J. Robert Oppenheimer to come home and didn't want to be an alcoholic, or something. Nash went beyond the bend at a New Years Eve party. When von Neumann learned he had inoperable cancer he converted to Roman Catholicism because he could not deal with the idea of there being nothing instead of something. Well, aren't I the little death's head totenkopf? My point being is that in my experience, Princeton allowed people to be who they were, the paradigm case being Nash. And me, for that matter.