Update from me...
Over the past week, so much cool stuff has happened that it's hard to mention it all. yes, i'm alive.
1- Code Camp - Speech Server presentation blew up. This sucked. I hate Betas! Ported the SDK over to VS2005 Friday night. No problem. Did Tablet Recos in the car as I was driving to charleston - worked perfectly. Twenty minutes before my Speech presentation, noticed that none of my new buttons were showing up. Recompiled, rebuilt etc etc. No errors but no new buttons. killed the resx files and tried again. Built fine but no new buttons. Took the forms into new project, killed resx files. Built fine, no new buttons. Killed the bin folders and exe's. (at each pass, the a new exe was being built- it just didn't have the new buttons). Now i couldn't compile. Had a backup server but 2003 was loaded on that,all my demo code was already switched to 2005. Sucked. Other than that, all was good.
2- Made friends with Sara Morgan Rea , author of Building Intelligent .NET Applications : Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing . If Deb Kurata, Kathleen Dollard and Julia Lermen haven't proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that some of the most bad a33 programmers in .NET are female, Sara Morgan Rea has for sure. In her book, she talks about Speech Server, OLAP and AI (hmmm, what other brainy friend of mine writes about that stuff???? ). Started dialoging w/ her and asked if she knew the lower cased one . She didn't, but her reply after reading his blog was “I really like your friend Casey, he's very cool.” One of the best metrics I've found to determine whether or not I'll get along with someone who's a developer is their reaction to BnB . If they say something like “Yah, the guy is really smart but the site sickens me” then i know they'll probably find me pretty offensive too. On the other hand, if they say “Yah, that site totally kicks a33” then i know we'll probably have a blast.
There's a lot to comment on in respect to Sara's book. First and foremost she deserves mad props for just writing about any of the subjects she writes about. She deserves another level of props for making it interesting. Even more credit for covering everything sufficiently enough so that if you weren't already familiar with the technologies, you could totally follow along and get things going. The only gripe I have with the book is that it's not 2,000 pages longer b/c well, it's good stuff. In reality though, you could write an entire book (and in many instances, people already have) on OLAP or AI alone. She does a damned good job covering everything (and the .NET Implementations in particular) in enough detail to get you going (if you're totally unfamiliar with the technology) and if you are already familiar with it, she still throws in a good bit of red meat.
We've been talking about doing a few joint articles, one of which is going to be my Remoting Objects back and forth with Mono/Windows as well as some speech stuff. I'll be the weak link in the group but I look forward to being able to work with someone that kicks this much a33. The only real thing i wonder is how she hasn't gotten more Notoriety. She's obviously written a a good bit on everything from Enterprise Development to Parenting but most people i know haven't heard of her. Hopefully that will change soon.
3- Going to the MVP Summit next week. Can't wait. Kim won't be coming with me this time unfortunately, but I'm sure I'll have a pretty busy schedule nonetheless. Seattle is probably our favorite location to go together, but Sarah has school, Kim's got a large project due this week so it just was a bad time for her. Decided to ride in ride in style this time. Back at Mobius they actually set us up with BC Limo and we got to stay at the W as well (my favorite hotel if you haven't guessed). I tried to make reservations for the W this year too but they moved me to Renaissance Seattle for logistics. There's a lot of people at the Summit so it makes things a lot easier if you put people in the same product groups in the same places. I go out of my way to hit the W whenever possible, but when you aren't paying for it, it's hard to complain [Actually, it's hard to think of anything but one big THANK YOU!).
4- Kim bought a Media Center PC a few weeks ago. Being the good boyfriend that I am, I just got her a bunch of peripherals. So far, of everything I bought, i only got the Remote Control working. Sometimes, my incompetence in setting things up scares me so bad that i really have to wonder. If my boss ever saw how much difficulty I had doign simple things like installing a USB 2.0 TV Tuner and getting it working - it's hard to imagine that I would have a job for long. Anyway, Kim is definitely kicking my a33 all over the place techology wise.
Speaking of which... My parents have been trying to move to their other home in St. Helena Island SC for a while now. Monday my stepdad will know for sure if he's going to be working down there or not. For the last 3 weeks, i've been staying at their house and may end up buying it from them if they move. Having a month of not paying rent has been great for my gadget collection as well as Kim's - got another Tablet PC, got 1 1/2 gigs of RAM in it, got the AC Adapter for my car [so I'll HAVE no choice but to get a GPS and mounting system for it] and am seriously contemplating getting a new iMATE JasJar. Since I already have an iMATE and a few SmartPhones, it'll be hard to explain to Kim why I 'needed' such a thing - but if you can come up with any compelling reason, I may offer a reward for any concept that convinces her. Anyway, here I am at the bleeding edge of gadget geekdom, but my parents live out in BumFahk SC. Cellular coverage is terrible there and worse, we only have DialUp. So far, it doesn't even look like Verizon will provide DSL out there and I don't believe the cable company has high speed. This is in large part why I haven't been blogging. I honestly don't remember how people (my) used Dial Up and actually enjoyed it. I remember actually downloading “The Real Slim Shady” a few years back when i was at their house over the holidays. It took almost 9 hours. Well, it takes almost that long to load Gmail and even longer to open up my blog admin. HOPEFULLY I can get Satellite or DSL Package of some sorts.
5- Going with Kim to take the puppy to training at www.petsmart.com . The trainer, Debby, is really amazing. If you have a dog, training is probably one of the best investments you can make. Before that, Kim loved the Nikki (we got him from this huge no-kill shelter that some rich old lady runs. But the poor little guys original owners named him Onyx - because I guess he's Black. Naming a dog anything like that is just too cruel - so Nikki was the closest thing we could come up with). When we first got him, he was great but had a lot of bad habits. This will be our forth session today and other than jumping a lot - he's pretty much been trained to be the perfect dog. And he's almost 9 months old and not getting much bigger. Since he basically looks like a black furry Summer Sausage from Hickory Farms, even the jumping isn't a big deal b/c he's not big enough for it to matter. And one of his best qualities is that he, like my pet Cuckooz, really enjoys .NET. So I can count one him to be a good Pair Programming partnet when the Cuckooz aren't around.
6- I know Scott was mentioning the Microsoft Federated Identity and Access Resource Kit , Anyone else using them yet? Just getting caught up on my blog reading since dial up doesn't cut it (and we only gave one 'real' Starbucks in Augusta - and other than Taco Bell , open wireless is RARE there) so i haven't read much about it.
7- While I'm here at Kim's for the weekend (Praise be to Allah for Broadband) I'll try to get caught up reading my blogroll, answering emails and posting stuff. If it seems like I dropped off of the face of the earth, it's mainly because of dial-up - hopefully that'll be remedied and while I'm in Redmond next week, I know I'll at least have some cool stuff to write about.
8- i Have a really inflamatory post I've been toying with for a while - just wondering if I shoudl post it or not. Any suggestion?