Dave's Personal Diary

So about an hour ago the door bell rings. Despite working from home this isn't a unusual event, as Dan reviews books and I write them. There are also various software and hardware deliveries. Always eager for new goodies I rush downstairs to find the usual UPS man deep in the back of his van. He appears with a box and says "one". Hmm, not really expecting a big box, let alone more than one. He disappears and emerges with another. It's like one of those magic tricks with scarves where they just keep appearing. Four in total. From Microsoft. Now I've already got my MSDN subscription, so hold the faint hope that it's lots of freebies. Maybe an XBox or two perhaps. Inside I open a box to find it full of the Al and Dave Sofware Legends CDs. Despite the campaign being on a bit of a stall I'd asked for a a few mini CDs, bookmarks and trading cards to hand out user groups. Good timing I think, since I'm doing a user group talk this Thursday. However, all is not quite as rosy as I'd thought. The next box contained CDs as well. As did the third, and yes you guessed it, the fourth too. So now I have a zillion (I haven't actually counted them, but it looks a lot) of these CDs. No bookmarks, which given that I'm a writer would be useful. Now where am I going to put them all.

Spent the week catching up, doing final edits on book chapters, and proof reading. Have also kicked of the local broadband campaign to try and get DSL into our local exchange. It serves four villages, so we're trying to ramp up the registrations to get BT to upgrade the exchange, or to pull together enough local business and homeworkers so we can get funding from support groups.

Dan arrived back this morning (he's been for an interview at Microsoft), just in time for the England v. Wales rugby match. Jet lagged he dozed and I kept waking him up with my shouts of outrage at the referee and pathetic English play. Still we won. Just. Keep an eye on Dan's blog, where I hope he'll tell you the funny story surrounding the interview.

So a week after PDC, and I'm almost caught up. The conference itself was great and the whole trip was good. Even the Heathrow experience, which I generally hate is it's huge and overcrowded, wasn't too bad. It started with some geeky homour, where the departure screen had an IP conflict. I, sadly, found it amusing. The flight (11 hours direct) was with AA and as usual was great. Much more leg room in coach than other airlines, and a couple of good movies to boot. Nearing LA was interesting, especially when the pilot informed us not to worry about the smell of smoke. It seems that the aircraft wasn't burning up on re-entry, but the smoke from the LA forest fires. I was sitting in the middle of the plane so couldn't see anything. Mind you, I couldn't see anything from the moment we hit the cloud layer until we landed because of the smoke - normally you can at least see some of the land. On the trip to the hotel the whole sky was hazy. Pretty weird experience.

The conference itself was great, despite the fact I only managed to see two talks, in addition to the keynotes. I had the whole week mapped out with tons of talks to go to, but seemed to spend most of my time in meetings. Sometimes face-time is really important, and I didn't feel too bad since I've got the conference DVDs on order. Highlights were:

• Seeing Longhorn and Avalon. Very, very cool. OK it's still a long way away, but it's cool nonetheless.
• The Monday night party, co-hosted by Addison Wesley & MSDN. Seeing Band On The Runtime playing was fun, despite the sometimes tortured lyrics! I remained surprisingly sober.
• Catching up with some old friends and people in the ASP.NET community.
• Some great food, at a couple of good restaurants. There was a South American place on Figuera which was excellent, and a couple of great Italian meals at Cafe Trattoria, just round the corner from the Wilshire.
• The great presence by Addison Wesley, with great support for our two new books. Thanks go to Karen Gettman (our AE) and Curt Johnson for organising this.

The hard work we put in on the two new books was worth it, as they were the number 1 and 3 bestsellers at the conference bookstore. I think the fact that all the Whidbey talks had an end slide promoting the ASP.NET 2.0 book helped. The book signings weren't the best, partly due to the fact that they were scheduled when the expo hall was closed, which meant the only people around were those heading to the communications centre to check their email.

One interesting thing was the introduction of Birds of a Feather sessions, organised by INETA, which were completely controlled by attendees. There were a whole bunch of them organised for the evenings and the attendance, while not great, was OK. The one I was interested in was the publishing one , organised by Dan Maharry. It was interesting to see how many people used the book comments on Amazon, but didn't bother commenting themselves on books they'd bought. Odd that.

I'm humbled. And proud. And Thankful. I've just been awarded an MVP for ASP/ASP.NET, so obviously someone (or several people) think I'm worthy of it. I've accepted, but I really don't think I do enough for the community. Maybe this will push me to finish all that stuff I've been meaning to do.

Other news. I've another talk booked, January 20th, for the London .NET User Group. I'll be talking about ASP.NET 2.0, trying to fit approximately 3 days worth of material into a single talk. Al & I are also off to the PDC Highlights in Vienna at the end of January. Not sure what our invovlement is yet, but I haven't been to Vienna in a long time - I did some work out there some time ago and remember it being very cold. Ugh.

17 September 2003

I'm getting worse. Three months since the last update. So what's been happening during that time?

Firstly we've been working on two books for Addison Wesley. See the books page for details. The reason we haven't be able to talk about them is that they are for the next version of .NET and this has been top secret. There will be a technology preview released at PDC at the end of October, and now the sessions are up and the book is being promoted we can talk about it. We just can't talk about the contents in detail until PDC. Sorry. Suffice it to say that the stuff Microsoft is doing is fantastic. If you thought ASP.NET 1.0 was good you're going to love 2.0

We've also been updating books for APress. They have decided to reprint a few of our titles. They aren't available yet, but keep your eyes out for them.

Other than that things have been quiet, and spending free, since I'm very poor. The Wrox collapse left us with considerable problems, and although things look OK for the long term it's been a struggle. So the new lighting system is on hold, and I'd been thinking about whether to do it at all. It's a lot of work, and will involve lifting floorboards, chasing channels down the walls for new cables, etc. However, since the house hasn't had any decoration done, and is in a state of "waiting", now is the time to do it. So I think that even though I can't afford the lighting (It's a Clipsal CBus system if anyone is interested) setup I might just put in the infrastructure. Get the cables in, then when I can afford it I can switch over.

The only major expense has been a new car. Well not new, but a year old. Seems a bit odd given the previous statement about lack of money but this was forced upon me. At the end of July I went to the annual BBQ of some friends. It's always a great affair in a beautiful setting, and we had great fun even though it rained most of time. The rain had stopped and I was almost home at just after midnight (about 300 yards away) when I rounded a corner and the person coming the other way didn't. He ploughed straight on and headfirst into me. We think it was just a wet and slippy patch on the road as someone had skidded off in exactly the same place about half an hour earlier. In fact she was still waiting for her rescue company (the car was in a ditch so we couldn't see it). So, there were three dead cars, two police cars, 3 tow trucks, and an ambulance. No real injuries. The couple that hit me were very shocked, and I hurt my thumb (still not getting better, so off to see doctor tomorrow). Anyway, the car was pronounced "not worth repairing". "Not very aerodynamic" was how Rob put it. So I had to say a farewell and get a new one. Some people said get a sporty little number, but that smacks too much of mid-life crisis. So I plumped for the normal 4 seater family type thing. Mind you it is quite a plush one. Even though I'm single I quite like having enough room to cart people about. I've only had it just over a week, and as I'm so busy it's been in the garage most of the time, but I am mobile again. And many thanks to the Dan Maharry taxi service for ferrying me about.

So what's next on the horizon? I've a couple more book updates to do (one for Wiley and one for APress) ex-Wrox titles. I'm about to do a magazine article, and then put together a talk for the Dot Net Developer Group for the end of November. Come along if you can. I've also got a whole of web sites I want to update, plus a ton of other stuff. There's just not enough time.

Nothing special, just some more pictures of my niece.

So here I am sitting in a hotel bar near Wantage in the UK. I'm doing a week's consultancy for a company, evaluating their ASP.NET based intranet site, and giving advice on a whole host of topics. Given that the project hasn't been going that long, and the developers don't have a whole lot of .Net experience, I'm pretty impressed. They initially used the IBuySpy portal as a basis, but soon started from scratch and used some of the portal ideas, and some of their own. They've gone for a really flexible solution, and it's really good.

One of the things they asked me about was the idea of templates for their portal modules. Currently they have a template User Control, and they just cut and paste it to provide a new module. I suggested creating a custom base class from which to inherit the module from, and having that base class handle all of the default content. I was having trouble getting some of it to fit with their architecture, when I came across a thread on the ASP.NET forums discussing the whole idea of templates. I'd been wanting to do this for ages, but just hadn't found time to look into it in detail. Now however, I've got it working (hence the beer in the bar), so I can use the technique on my own sites. It's a much better idea than user controls to contain common content (such as header and footer information). I'll dig out the links, and maybe post some code when I get back home.

1 June 2003

Just got back from my short trip to New York for the Software Legends campaign, doing to free form talks in Borders and Barnes & Noble with David Platt. I'd never met him before (but have one of his books), and we got on and interacted really well. Since the events were in the evening I had almost two days to fit in a quick bit of sightseeing, in glorious weather. The first afternoon I headed for the Natural History Museum (we were staying in Manhattan), but spent 3 hours wandering around Central Park. I'd like to think I was just strolling around, but actually I got lost - it's a pretty big park.

The next morning I had great fun wandering around with Susan from Microsoft, who had been to New York before, so acted as my guide. We stopped each other maxing out our credit cards - she kindly pulled me away from the Virgin Megastore before I came home with a dozen or so CDs. Mind you we did get a few (and only a few) in the Borders. I plumped for the new Chantal Kreviazuk, one by the Ataris (recommended by Susan - good call that one, thanks Susan), and a band I'd never heard of called Evanescense. All are excellent, and didn't cost that much as we kindly got discount because we were involved in the event.

So here I am back home, tired from jet lag, and trying to catch up before going away next week again. Nowehere near as exotic though, just a company in the UK. More on that next week.

Well, it's official. Al & I are, it seems, legends. I've yet to work out whether it's for the quality of the books we've done, or just the sheer quantity! The reason we went to Microsoft for the photoshoot was that we are part of the Software Legends campaign. We're not up on the site yet, but we will be taking part at the Software Legends event at TechEd in Barcelona. I'm also hopping over to New York this week for a couple of events with David Platt at a Borders and a Barnes and Noble (check out the legends site for more details). If you're going to be around either of these, or in Barcelona, do stop by and say hi.

Two entries at once, although I did write up the previous entry last month. I just realised that I never posted it though. So, what's new? Well, the Wrox situation is being settled - at least we know what's going on. Al has put some info on his page, so you might already know that Wiley have bought 36 titles, the web site, and some other domains, and have said they will homour the contracts. That's a big relief as it means we will get some money back. When we don't know - it's supposed to be soon. They have been great so far, but have an uphil struggle getting the contracts sorted out. All other titles have been bought by APress, and Gary has said he's got lots of ideas and plans.

As to what I'm doing at the moment I can't say. It's another of those client confidentiality clauses. Suffice it to say it's exciting stuff, and someday I'll be able to talk about it. There's a couple of other projects in the line up, so I'm going to be busy once again. I do plan however, to take a week off once this is finished, to put the new lighting system in the house. 2 circuits to be replaced by 13,a complete set of new cabling, switches and controllers.

On the child front, I took friday off and went down to see my god-children Annabelle and Natasha. Oh, and Jan of course. Natasha is 5 months old and just beautiful. Annabelle is almost 2 1/2, and is I energy on legs. We spent most of the day out, where she wore me out. One of those play areas full of tunnels and balls, then 10-pin bowling, where I only beat her by 6 points. Sad really. She did fall asleep in the car on the way back, and Jan woke her up later to make sure she slept that night, and after some tantrums (well, no one likes being woken up), she was raring to go again. She wouldn't go to bed, so ended up having a curry with us, until Jan and her went to bed at 10pm. Brad and I carried on talking and drinking until I realised it was too late to catch the late train. Oh well, might as well carry on then, which we did until 1am. Of course, I forgot what it's like to sleep in a house with an active child, so at 6:30 Anna was running around. And that was late for her apparantly. I can't believe I've ever been that active. A great time though - she's a delight to be around. Picture from the day are here. Clicking the thumbnails will give bigger pictures.

So, the end of an era it seems. I would think that most of you by now know of the demise of Wrox Press. They went into voluntary liquidation on Friday 14th, and turned my whole world around. But, let's start at the beginning, with what I was doing on that fateful day. Alex & I had been asked by Microsoft to hop over to Redmond for a photo shoot - I'll tell you more about that later. Since we were flying from Manchester (to get decent times and a decent airline), I was spending Friday night at Al's. So, come lunchtime I'm packed and ready to go, when I receive a phone call from Wrox letting me know the news. Oh bugger, I think, bang goes all my plans. Since I make my living from writing, it's a big blow - suddenly no money. Pretty much everything I've done for the last six months is down the pan. I'm used to budgeting a bit since royalties are quarterly, but this means an end to everything. No one knows if we'll get anything, of indeed if the books will continue to be produced. So, if you're buying my books (or have done since October), then feel sorry for me and buy me a beer if you ever see me. It seems unlikely I'll ever see the money and beer is the next best thing 8)

Anyway, there's not much I can do about it, I hop in the car and drive up to Al's, where we retire to the pub to worry. Next day we spend travelling, and on Sunday pitch up at Microsoft for a meeting to talk about books. Hmm, short meeting. Not a waste of time though - we have plenty of plans in place for the long term, but until the Wrox situation is sorted, there's only so much we can do. We don't know if someone is going to buy them, or maybe just buy the rights to some of our books. Everything is up in the air. We have some short term plans to try and keep the money rolling in - that way I'll have enough to pay the mortgage.

We had more meetings on the Monday, and then surprised Matt, who used us as an excuse to take the rest of the afternoon off. We went over to his place where he cooked us a great meal, and we settled down to watch his latest Eddie Izzard DVD, which is of course fantastic. Eddie is a huge favourite if mine, but I did have to explain a few of the specific English bits. Al, who hadn't slept too well the night before, fell asleep and missed most of it.

On Wednesday we had meetings most of the day again, thanks to Stacey. She was an angel and set us up to talk to lots of people, most of which we can't talk about yet. Once the Wrox situation is sorted we'll let you know what's going on. In the evening we went out with Alex Stockton, an ex-Wrox employee who went to work for Microsoft five years ago. He's a documentor and tool writer, and gave us his view on working for Microsoft, and being a Brit in America. Moving over there is an option - there's plenty of work we could do, and one or two job openings that might be perfect. Not sure I want to go though, having just started all the plans for this house.

So, onto the most exciting part - the photo shoot. I don't want to tell you what is was for yet, as it's not announced, so you'll have to wait a while. We've had photos done before, and by a studio, but this was the real deal, by a great photographer (Karen Moskowitz - take a look Karen's Web Site to see some of her work - it's good, really, really good. A google search on her name will find an interesting bio. So, not only do we have a top-knotch photographer, we have a whole crew too - there was:

• Micheal, Karen's husband. He wasn't part of the shoot, but is a musician (with a great studio at home and a nice wall of guitars), from Wales. And he lent me his shoes for the photos, so deserves a mention.
• Dana, Karen's assistant, who seemed to spend the day just loading film. Karen took an awful lot of shots.
• Cathy Bahn, who is the PR campaign manager. She was in charge of us and of what was required.
• Laura Blanchard, the Art director.
• Rebecca Luke and Danielle Wares, the two stylists, whose job was to make us look halfway decent. And, to my shame, I forget which is which, hence the confusion in the photos. Sorry.

We'd been asked to bring along a set selection of clothes, but it seems we're just not stylish enough. They had our measurements in advance and there was a rack of clothes waiting for us, so we played dress-up all day. It was interesting how I felt during this shoot. I'm used to standing up on stage, in front of hundreds of people, but put me in front of a camera and I felt very self-conscious. It was, though, great fun. We started off with the wardrobe, with Karen, Rebecca and Danielle deciding what we needed to wear. That's where Michael's shoes came in - mine didn't really fit with the outfit. What we found funny was Rebecca and Danielle suddenly running into shot (I'm going in was one phrase that I remember) to smooth out a wrinkle in the clothes (Alex did enjoy getting his chest rubbed), or adjust a cuff or collar. Being people who just throw clothes on, usually whatever's on top of the clean pile, this was a new thing to us.

The shoot lasted from 10am until about 3pm, including a nice Vietnamese take out, with several changes of clothes, and a variety of poses. Karen really had to work hard, trying to bring some life into a couple of inert lumps like us. She was good though, made us laugh alot, and generally got us to relax. It was a relief though, when she finally called the curtain. I was surprised by how tired I was at the end of the day.

You can see the photos documenting the day here.

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