Monthly Archives: June 2008

30 Days of Nothing but Tech

I’ve decided that there is so many new technologies coming out that I am going to spend the next 30 days watching and listening to nothing but technical podcasts and webcasts. I’m turning off the cable signal and hooking the PC to the 42 inch plasma screen in the living room and start making more productive use of my time. Instead of watching mindless reality TV shows filled with commercials every five minutes I’ll get up to speed on the latest coming out of Microsoft, Oracle and Sun. And instead of listening to commercial laden radio during my 45 minute commute to work or while tooling around the metroplex, I’ll hook up my Zune to an FM Transmitter and catch up on all of the podcasts that I never seem to get around to.

 

So stay tuned and I’ll let you know the gems that I uncover and keep you up to date on the Network TV withdrawal symptoms that might come up.

 

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Monthly Dallas VSTS User Group Meeting

I just got back from attending my first Dallas VSTS User Group Meeting. Vince Blasberg gave a presentation titled “Reporting in Visual Studio Team System.” He gave a great deep dive into the database architecture around TFS, the Data Warehouse and the OLAP Services. Vince also had some great tips on how custom work item field attributes can affect reporting as well as learning resources around building TFS Reports.

 

I’m hoping we do a deep dive around mining the Data Warehouse for dashboard data reporting. It was great first experience with the group.

 

Turns out that Vince and I worked together at CLR/FAST-TAX back in the mid 90s. We spent some time after the meeting chatting about old friends and the old days of working 18 hours days getting ready for tax season.

 

You can learn more about the Dallas VSTS User Group at http://www.dallasvsts.com

I Finally Joined the Twittering Public

So this weekend I was catching up on some web casts and caught Mark Pesce’s Keynote from ReMix08 Australia. It was basically about how the current Internet culture is hyper-connected because of social networking sites like Twitter. So, I decided to check it out and joined up. It’s pretty simple, just send random posts through out the day to indicate what you are doing or what is on your mind. Besides posting your thoughts and what you are doing, you can follow others and monitor what they are posting. There are even some innovative sights that are monitoring the thousands of posts and using them to come up with some really unique presentations of what the Twitter society is currently thinking.

 

You can find me at http://www.twitter.com/jimlavin,  maybe we’ll bump into each other, who knows.