A couple of months back, Microsoft offered free copies of Vista Business or Office 2007 for watching 3 webcasts or hosted labs through PowerTogether.com. I did my part and signed up, watched the 3 webcasts and received an email saying it would be on the way within 6 weeks of RTM.

That day came today! I received a license and media for Vista Business:

Jim has already scooped this story….
A new site from the creators of LearnVisualStudio.Net have launched LearnExpression.com! The site will offer video tutorials for all of the new Microsoft Expression products. They have done well so far in creating a community surrounding the LearnVisualStudio.Net site with forums available for the lifetime subsrcription members to converse and find more information. I suspect they will be doing the same here.

They have really done well with the streaming via Camtasia and you can see a free video here.

Since Microsoft has implemented a lot of this interface into Visual Studio Orcas, you might want to check it out!

In my past I have learned a lot from others, but have had few people that I would call a mentor. There was my first Ordnance Chief, my Instructor Pilot, and my OIC in Japan. Only one of these people have been technical, yet they have helped me in my journey along the way. I label them mentors because they taught me more about myself and helped me grow.

My last mentor was actually my manager in my first software development role outside of the Marine Corps. She has provided me with a lot of information on how the software industry works, business in corporate environments and dealing with other developers. She is an excellent judge of people and is usually right on in her assessments. She’s kind of a “Geek Whisperer”. What she helped me learn about myself was more about validation, that I could stand with (or on) other developers in the real world.

Lucky for you, you’ll probably get this info for free now. She has launched WebDevRocks!

The much anticipated Rails 1.2 release has offically arrived!

I have now moved about half of my previous posts over from the old blog. It’s actually a little fun to go back over what I’ve read in the past and see how things change and how they stay the same. I have still kept up with much of the technology I have previously written about, I just haven’t been writing about it!

As part of my New Year’s Resolutions I have decided to read 30 books this year. I know, that’s like 2.5 books a month! The idea came to me when I looked at my programming library (currently at a measly 73 books) and realized that I had read few of them.

I’m the type that will buy a book, read the half I need for the project I’m on and move to the next book. Few books seem exciting enough to actually finish. So I was looking at this wall of books over the holiday break to find where I could get rid of some and thin out some books. Too hard! How can I get rid of them???? They’re full of great knowledge! Wait, how would I know that? I never read the whole thing!

So as it stands, I may be reading 30 books, but it’s more like finishing 30 books. And as the title states, I have finished book one: Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide, 2nd Edition. The “Pickaxe” as it is commonly referred to was a great book to read. I liked it so much, I went looking for books from the same authors. I found The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and jumped into it. I also have the problem of reading multiple books at the same time, so I’m also reading Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition, Professional .NET 2.0 Generics, and Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. They all seem so good so far, but I’ll keep you posted.

The End of the Road

After using an older version of Community Server (CS) with GoDaddy for some time, I have made the switch to WordPress (WP) on DreamHost. I like a lot of the features on CS, however GoDaddy would not support the newer version and with their security policies and lack of any real support I decided it was time to leave. Don’t get me wrong – if you do very little custom coding and don’t require any technical support, GoDaddy may be the right choice for you. I did not have any down time while hosting with them for a year. I didn’t receive any technical support either: just form emails to let me know that it was their policy not to support whatever it was I emailed to ask for.

A New Beginning

Why did I choose OneInspired.com as the domain name? I thought for a while about why I want to write. When I figure something out, write something new, or am just generally excited about something new I feel like I need to tell someone. When it comes down to it, I just feel inspired by technology. And out of what was available, it seemed short and unique enough to not be confused with another developer blog.

A New Host

Now I’m on DreamHost. I’ve heard good and bad, but I decided to give them a try. So far, I do not have any complaints. There was a small amount of downtime in the first week, but I didn’t notice it. I’m having trouble getting RoR to work with FastCGI, but I am still a noob in RoR, Linux, Apache, and FastCGI. As I learn more in these technologies I’ll be able to better evaluate them.

With the move I have missed a couple of chances to post, so I’ll be making that up over the next week or so as well as migrating the old posts to the new blog.