Jonathan Goodyear / angryCoder

Keynoting at the Vista/Office launch in Tampa

Keynoting at the Vista/Office launch in Tampa I’ll be co-presenting the keynote of the Ready for a New Day: Launch Tour 2007 in Tampa with the incomparable Russ Fustino ( http://www.russtoolshed.net/ ) on January 18, 2007. Registration is now open, so come see what all the excitement is about. It’s going to be a great event!

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032314636&Culture=en-US

BlogMailr Rocks

BlogMailr Rocks Telligent recently released the BlogMailr service to allow you to post blog entries via email. Very cool stuff. Check it out here:

http://www.blogmailr.com

I Didn't Know You Could Do That With MasterPages

I'll be presenting at the Space Coast .NET User Group on Wednesday, September 20, 2006. The session title is "I Didn't Know You Could Do That With MasterPages". Here's the link to more information:

http://www.scdnug.org/Events_view.aspx?Eventid=14

If you can make it, I'd love to see you there.

Stupid Southwest Airlines

I flew into Indianapolis on Sunday on Southwest Airlines. I arrived at 3:30pm, and was told that my bag did not make it. Eight hours later, they called me up and told me that my bag had not arrived on either of the two subsequent flights from Orlando. They think that perhaps my bag will arrive this morning sometime.

I asked them why they couldn’t just look up the barcode from my luggage receipt and find out where the hell my bag is. I was told that only Delta Airlines has a true baggage tracking system, and that everybody else just uses the barcodes as an old-fashioned claim check mechanism. Given the complexity of baggage handling in today’s airline industry, coupled with the vast improvements in inventory management systems (and this really is a form of inventory), it baffles me why more airlines haven’t stepped up to resolve this glaring hole in customer support.

The bottom line is that I’ve got nothing to wear but the clothes on my back. I’m especially pissed about it because I had $300 in brand new unworn Tommy Bahama silk shirts in my bag that my wife gave me for my birthday (which is today). This is a week long trip, so all told, I have about $2,000 in clothes missing in action. According to the Southwest Airlines baggage policy, they are liable for up to $2,800 per fare-paying customer. If it comes to that, I’ll be interested to see how much trouble they give me. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to give me some pro-rated value (which would be almost nothing, because used clothing has very little marketable value).

On the bright side, I’m staying at the Embassy Suites in downtown Indianapolis, which happens to have a skybridge to a mall. Looks like I’m going shopping this morning!

By the Community, For the Community

Microsoft rounded up some MVPs (including myself), and started up a program called By the Community, For the Community. Essentially, the developer community gets to vote on which of several projects we will build and deploy every few weeks. Each project (including source code) will be freely downloadable for you to use and extend. So get on over there and vote.

ASPSOFT Launches email2face.com

We just launched email2face.com yesterday. In a nutshell, email2face is an online repository of photos linked to people’s email addresses. It will allow you to look up what some of your “online friends” look like. At any rate, the service won’t be any good unless good folks like you register their photo, so do it today!

New SharePoint 2003 book released

Addison-Wesley just released a new book on SharePoint 2003, co-authored by a good friend of mine, Stacy Draper. I haven’t gotten my review copy of it yet, but Stacy is an industry expert on the subject, so I’m sure that it won’t disappoint. Here’s a link to it on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321336615/sr=8-2/qid=1142639845

ASPSOFT is hiring

Here’s the latest job openings at ASPSOFT:

VB6 / SQL Server Consultant
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=40956849

.NET Consultant
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=39279801

If you’re interested, please shoot me your resume. I have an especially urgent need for job #1 above.

Would you buy a laptop from a tv shopping channel?

I was up late channel surfing last night and came across the ShopNBC channel. They were selling something called the Durabook, which can supposedly survive having hot coffee dumped on the keyboard (the visual was cool, anyway). What I found really amusing, though, is that both the description on the screen as well as the voice-over guy described it as having 512Mhz of memory. Even moderately computer literate folks were sure to pick up on that. It probably didn’t hurt sales to their target demographic, though.

Hello? Is this mic on?

OK, I admit it. I suck at blogging. You’d think that someone who is as prolific a writer as me, and who has a strong opinion on anything and everything would be a great blogger. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to find the magic formula for putting it all together.

Perhaps it’s the fact that blogging is largely spontaneous. Usually, I like to gather my thoughts on a particular subject before I unleash them on the masses. Lord knows, I’ve been burned more than a few times when I have published something without first thinking it through. As a result, thoughts that I really should just “jot down” in a blog entry go unwritten.

Another big problem that I have with blogging is the fact that I have signed so many NDAs. Between all of the NDA material that I read and hear from the MVP program, the RD program and the various beta programs that I am involved with, it is hard to keep straight in my head what I am and am not allowed to talk/write about. That means that before I say anything about anything that I can’t find by Googling, I’ve got to run it by somebody at Microsoft to make sure that it’s ok. At that point, I often lose interest in the matter.

It was much easier to write freely when I wasn’t bound to so much secrecy and could just assume that if I knew about something at all, I had free reign to discuss it. I can’t even imagine how hard it is for many of the folks who work at Microsoft to keep from spilling the beans regarding all of the exciting (but secret) stuff that they work on every day.

Yet another reason why it is tough for me to blog is because a lot of what I do every day concerns dealing with the various cients of my consulting company. For obvious reasons, I keep my thoughts to myself regarding what they do, as well as how and why they do it.

I still get a lot of emails from people asking me how I started ASPSOFT, though, which is why I began writing my “Going Independent” series. I’ve got a lot more war stories to tell on that front, so perhaps I’ll venture more into that on this blog. If I can stop being so jaded regarding the publishing industry, perhaps I’ll write a book on it.

Many of you have mentioned the “death” of angryCoder.com. I prefer to think of it as being in a coma. I have already commissioned a company to give the site design a complete face-lift (eg. better than the sucky layout that the site has been using for the past 5 years), and will be re-launching angryCoder.com sometime over the next couple of months.

As always, I continue to do the things that I’m good at, as well as improve on the things that I am not good at. It is obvious that blogging is here to stay, so I’m determined to find a formula that works for me.