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Bill Wolff.NET and SQL Server Consulting June 07 Star Wars Highly RecommendedMicrosoft rented a local theater for a private showing of Star Wars. Very enjoyable movie. Non stop action, terrible acting, but memorable effects. It really brought the story together at the end and fits right in with the original Star Wars IV. Highly recommended. Murder Mystery MansionI spent two days in scenic Jim Thorpe, PA at the historic Harry Packer mansion. The Packers were the third wealthiest family in the nation at the height of the railroad boom in the mid to late 1800s. Harry was the son who drank himslef to death in his mid-thirties. Asa Packer was the father who built a huge railroad empire to haul anthracite coal to New York and Philadelphia. By controlling the coal mines and transportation, he was able to amass an incredible fortune. He built two mansions overlooking the railroad depot. One of these is now a musuem and the other a decent bed and breakfast. The mystery unfolds Friday night with the assignment of roles and the reenactment of a murder. All roles are based on historic figures in the Packer family so you learn a lot about the times and culture. Each of us received printed instructions concerning our parts. The second day had three sessions where clues were revealed and each of us defended our position based on our roles. At any given point, each of the eight roles was considered the prime suspect. The story was quite complex and we never did guess the culprit (it was my wife Joan). The mystery really brings the guests together as a family/team. Fortunately, we went Memorial Day weekend so only four couples attended. Very enjoyable. The town has some nice sight-seeing opps. The prison is interesting, home of the famous Molly Maguires who were convicted and hanged there. There is a scenic train ride through the Lehigh Gorge and some quaint shops. Most of the architecture is Victorian but you can tell that the town was in disrepair for many years after the coal bust. Tourism and adventure sports are saving old Mauch Chunk, the Indian name for what is now known as Jim Thorpe. May 27 InfoPath ResearchI am studing InfoPath for several human workflow projects. There is a lot of power, certainly more than you could easily do with WinForms or ASP.NET. Layout, validation, formatting, and rules based display are excellent. The offline capability is useful (saves data as XML). There are several ways to store the data: SQL Server, web service, or SharePoint List. You can add code with jscript, C#, or VB. Next week I will wire this up to some web services. PACS PresentationI spoke at the monthly PACS (Philadelphia Area Computer Society) meeting last Saturday. There were close to 70 in the room. We covered 10 things you should know about Microsoft. This was primarily an overview of their technology and services with some history lessons. April 18 PACS Windows SIGI spoke at the WIndows SIG of the Philadelphia Area Computer Society on Saturday. We talked about high speed network connections. There are very few dial up users left, most are Comacast cable modem or Verizon DSL. I explained the new FIOS (fibre optic) service and how much faster it can be. Contractors just started laying fibre in my development and a call to Verizon customer support said that I can connect by July. The high priced service is $199 a month but is 5-10 times faster than cable. Might be worth it for a home based consultant like me! We then talked about how you might use this bandwidth. VOIP was one suggestion. I demoed LiveMeeting and said why settle for voice when shared video and remote PC control could be included for a small monthly charge less than $10. It will be interesting to see if this catches on. Another suggestion was video. Fibre optic speed would allow real time video downloads or stored video that trickles in overnight. This could seriously change the way we use broadcast TV or even DVRs. We also talked about directions Microsoft is taking. They are making the back end software for vendors like Verizon. There will be tight integration with your desktop PC as these services evolve. Think subscription software purchasing. I recently bought a Dell Media Center Edition box with 800 Gb of storage. Once I get this running on my home network and connected to 30 Mbs fibre internet, you won't get me out of the house! February 22 philly.net Code CampWe are finalizing the speaker and session list for the April 23-24 Code Camp at Philadelphia Community College. The speakers are listed on the DNN 2.1.2 web site www.phillydotnet.org/codecamp. This is a child portal off www.phillydotnet.org. Once we have all the tracks filled, we can set the schedule and start promoting the event. There is room for about 400 but that will sell out quickly. I wonder what effect the free conference movement (Code Camp, Day of .NET) will have on the big names like ASP.NET Connections, Tech Ed, and the like.
Upper Dublin School District Web Design ClubThe local school district has an archaic web site design. I made a play to the school board to get rights to develop a new version using DotNetNuke and SQL Server. This is hosted at WebSecureStores with my other public sites. Last Monday, I met with the students and teacher of the Web Design Club to get them interested in helping with this effort. I am used to professional developers who know how to spell CSS and DHTML. Young students know games, free downloads, and search engines. It will take a while to get them on track. They do have a lot of energy! |
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