So Oregon finally got their act together and threw up a Sex Offender web site.  Is this good....bad?  I don't know, but a lot of other states have them.  I guess it's good to know the information if you have kids.  For instance, if my kids were of school age and going to the school in my neighborhood I would be sure to tell them to be leery of and steer clear of one house in particular.

Here's a blurb from the Conditions of Use Statement

"Information is only provided for sex offenders who have been designated as Predatory, as provided in ORS 181.585, who have also been determined to present the highest risk of reoffending and to require the widest range of notification; or found to be a sexually violent dangerous offender under ORS 144.635."

So that makes it all the more comforting to know that this guy, who's prior targets included "Juvenile females 12 years and younger" lives a block away from the local elementary school.

So it has been a busy summer already, and it's just starting.

Over the past month I went to my in-laws in Indiana.  Came back home but left my wife in kids in the midwest to continue their visit.  They finally came home just in time for me to leave for Tech Ed.  Then I got back from Tech Ed in time to go on a family camping trip to the Metolius River.  I think that I'm actually rested now, though.

I've already posted a couple things about Tech Ed.  Looking back, the conference just flat out rocked!  I would definitely recommend going if you have the means.  The local County that I work for should somehow work it in their budget to send a few more people.  At least one developer, dba, and tech services type person.  There is so much information there that it is just exhausting trying to take it all in.  I only took a few pictures there.

Tech Ed was held in Boston this year.  Great town.  Great People.  Not a straight road in the whole city.  Lots of Dunkin Donuts (as I've mentioned before).  The conference kept me pretty busy, but I did manage to take some pictures walking around the city one day.

We spent one evening at Fenway Park.  That night was crazy.  I don't know how much it cost but BillG sure knows how to throw a party.  Pictures.

Finally, the family camp out.  So it has been raining in Oregon since last September.  But the weekend that we decide to go camping the weather decides to wake up and shoot up to 100 degrees!  Actually, it was nice where we were.  I think the hottest that I saw it was 95, and the river helped to cool things down.  Camping pictures here.

...or day 2 depending on how you are counting.  I didn’t really count Sunday since it was a pre-conference day.  So today was the first real day, and it was a full one.  A friend of mine who had attended Tech Ed before had told me that it was like standing in front of a fire hose of information, and he was right.  Today was mostly presentations concerning architecture, Team System, and the different flavors of Visual Studio.  The Architect version looks killer.  The Developer version was nice.  That presentation was pretty ho-hum.  Probably because I’ve either seen the tools being used before or I’ve used some of them already. 

The Team System stuff really stole the show for me though.  When fully implemented it could take the place of a lot of manual processes and help us to cut the cord on an in-house defect tracking system that we use.  It all looked pretty nifty.  But then again in a nice controlled presentation environment things usually do.  I like the fact that at Tech Ed they have all of the on Hands-on Labs.  They let you start to get a feel for the tools that you just saw up on a projector screen.

I probably won’t be posting anymore this week.  Maybe once, we’ll see.  I got back to my hotel room at nine, and it’s looking like this was my early night for the week.  There are lots of activities planned the rest of the week and I don’t plan on missing any of them.  They do a pretty good job of keeping you involved.  Today I hit the last presentation at 5pm and it was over by 6.  I left the room feeling wiped out from sitting through talks all day.  I caught my second wind though when I got back to the main conference hall to find free beer, free food, and all the vendor booths back open.

I leave you with a shot of my loot from tonight…..

I had time to spend the first part of the day walking around Boston.  I didn't get really far.  I saw a bit of the North End at this little park out by the water.  I went to Faneuil Hall which is a big marketplace.  It was fun.  They had a lot of street performers out doing their thing and they were all pretty good.  If I try to relate it to Portland, it’s kind of like Pioneer Place, Waterfront Park (a small part of it anyway) and Saturday Market all smooshed into one place.

I also got to see the Boston Common.  It is a pretty nice park.  It’s very good sized.  There were a lot of people there but it didn’t feel crowded.  Boston Common is fairly wide which I think helped out in not feeling too crowded.  This would be the opposite of Waterfront Park in Portland which is long and skinny.  So when you get many people in there, bit feels crowded really fast.

I stopped by a graveyard along the way and there I got to see where Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and John Adams were buried.  As I was walking around the graveyard, out of the corner of my eye I caught my last name on a gravestone.  Turns out my first name was on there too!  That was kind of….I don’t know what it was.  Maybe weird, although I don’t know why.  Google for me, and you’ll see there are a bunch of us.  We should form our own voting block.

Finally I ended my day of sight seeing at Cheers.  It’s a total tourist trap.  I took the obligatory picture outside of the sign and the stairs going down.  Then I went down into the bar.  They have the wooden Indian outside the door!  But once you step inside, you aren’t in Cheers.  I wasn’t really expecting it to look the same, but even still it was kind of disappointing.  I should have bolted when I saw the menu had Frazier Fries on it, but I stayed and had a beer and a sandwich.

I threw some pictures that I took throughout the day on Flickr (yeah, I put one of the tombstone out there).

One final note, and something that has kind of been nagging me.  What the hell is with all the Dunkin Donuts shops?  Their freaking everywhere!  At any one place in the city, you can’t be more that five blocks away from a Dunkin Donuts.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the Boston Beer Works.  It’s a whole lot like Rock Bottom Brewery, only way better.  Food was better.  Beer was better.  I have to get back there one more time before I go.

What you see before you is the Day Zero take of Tech Ed goodies.  Nothing overly exciting in there.  Mostly magazines and trial software.  I scored a few architecture books.  But most of my day was spent going over the labs, trying out new software, trying to figure out how some of that stuff might be of use to us at work. 

Hopefully tomorrow’s take of freebies will be better.  I just got done going through my stack of entry forms to fill out to get free stuff, be entered for drawings, and just agree to be pestered by telephone and email for the next year or two.

Right now on the main Tech Ed page, you can see the keynote address that we saw tonight.  It was pretty interesting.  Very entertaining.  I imagine that it was more entertaining being there….more so than watching it on a pc.  Dark…fog machines…. lights… loud music.  It was fun.  Geek rock concert.

Microsoft’s big push right now is for collaboration.  They bought Groove a while ago, and now all that functionality is making it’s way into Office.  It looks way cool!  I imagine that it won’t be that cheap though.  Their other big push seems to be on the virtual server front.  They are talking a lot about having big beefy machines with gigs of memory and terabytes of disk space, and running your servers on there.  Then while maintaining those machines you can tweak them on the fly.  If a server is bogging down because of a specific process, you can just throw more memory at the virtual machine in real time.  The possibilities can really get out of hand.  Now deploying another server can be as easy as deploying your virtual machine image to wherever you want it to run.  Sounds crazy.  Probably be hearing more about that stuff tomorrow.

"Man, <insert state/city/county here> drivers suck...."

I don't know how many times I've heard that.  I used to think that drivers in Georgia were the worst.  But as I've traveled and come to see a bit more of the country, I'm fairly sure that people in general are crappy drivers.  I'm talking about everywhere.  I will say though, that in Georgia it sure seemed like a lot of the drivers just didn't know what the hell they were doing.  Here in Oregon, they don't seem to be so incapable of driving correctly.  They just seem to be assholes.  Everyone is all about me, me, me, me, me.....

But that's another rant for another time.

The point of this post is that now we know each state's ranking in a GMAC Insurance driving test.  Guess who's the best?  That's right.  Oregon.  HA!  Georgia is down around 30, so I guess they aren't as bad as I was thinking.  The north east is really bringing up the rear though. 

Sorry, Keith.

If you don't like bees, then don't look at this.