I’m writing this entry from a patient room at Central DuPage Hospital in Wheaton, IL. My wife had to come in today for an out-patient surgical procedure. With all the work I have on my plate right now, my wife suggested I bring my laptop to work on while we wait for her to re-coup. When my wife went in for her procedure, I openned up the laptop to do some work and was pleasently suprised by those magic words “Wireless Connection Detected”.

I wasn’t really suprised that a wireless connection point was picked up but what I was suprised by wasthefact that the connection was for patients and guests of the hospital. For the low price of $9.95 I was able to purchase 24 hours of WiFi Internet access and from there I was able to connect to my client’s VPN and get some work done. How cool is that?!?!

Jacob and the MSDN Events team will be making their next Chicago stop on October 21st. This event is being held at the Ford City Theaters on S. Cicero. This is a bit of jaunt for myself but I’m sure they’re trying to cater to the south-side contingent. Not to worry though, I still plan on making the trek. Even though I consider myself an advanced .NET developer, I always get something out these technical sessions. There’s always something there that sets my technical mind in motion.

Take a look at what’s on tap:

Optimizing ASP.NET 1.1 Web Applications
Explore how to build high-performance Web applications running on Windows Server 2003. We?ll examine how to monitor and stress test Web applications, and then demonstrate optimizations for key performance considerations like data access and server controls.

Membership & Personalization
Discover the new Membership and Personalization features in ASP.NET 2.0. The new Membership services and security controls will provide your Web site with secure user authentication and protect its contents from anonymous users with a minimum of coding on your part.

Object Oriented Programming Fundamentals in VB.NET
Learn the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with the features of Visual Basic .NET. We?ll demonstrate how Visual Basic .NET provides support for all four of the key tenets behind the OOP paradigm ? abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism – leading to code that is easier to test, maintain, extend and reuse.

Programming with MapPoint Web Services
See what location intelligence and graphics the MapPoint Web services can bring to your applications. With this hosted, programmable XML Web service, you won?t believe how easy it will be to add high-quality maps, driving directions, and other useful location-based information to your own Web sites and applications.

I think we were going to try and get a .NET Pub Club together after the seminar. Does anyone know of any good establishments down by Ford City?

Also, for all you Northern Illinois folk, the MSDN Events team is making a stop in Rockford on November 3rd. I wonder how many .NET developers are in central Illinois? Could an MSDN Event be coming to Peoria or Bloomington? I think the Central Illinois Dot Net Users Group needs to speak up here.

The Chicago .NET Users Group is putting together a one day mini-con appropriately named “Day of .NET“.

We’ve worked hard trying to pull together an agenda that will cater to all levels of .NET Developers. Whether you’re a beginner or a certified guru, there’s something here for you. Here is a sampling of some of the session topics:

* NUnit – Test Driven Development
* Build Management tools
* Overview of Visual Studio 2005
* Building Smart Clients with Visual Studio 2005
* Introduction to ASP.NET
* Introduction to Windows Forms
* Advanced ASP.NET

In addition, we are conjuring up two sessions (yes, two!) on ADO.NET. As well as sessions on Biz Talk 2004, Sharepoint and Yukon. I’ll be giving the Build Management tools session where I plan on talking about how we utilize NAnt and Strider in our project build process.

So come join me and my close friends as we spend a whole Saturday geeking out to .NET!

As any self professing geek can admit, I spend a lot of time at my computer (much to my wife’s chagrin). Whether it’s of the 9 to 5 variety or the late night hours feeding my brain with the latest and greatest in .NET Land. I’m one of those types of people who just can’t stand sitting in silence. I’ve always needed some background noise to keep my sanity. 95% of the time, my noise of choice is listening to music streaming off of Rhapsody. I really enjoy my Rhapsody subscription in that it allows me to stream as much music as I want, for as long as I want, for a mere $24.95 every 3 months (or $9.95/mo). Sometimes I bounce around to all sorts of musical genre’s ranging from Bluegrass to Folk to Alternative to Punk to New Age to Classical. My musical tastes are all over the board. I’ve never been that up on Heavy Metal or Rap but I can appreciate a few songs here and there.

Rhapsody gives me the ability to find artists that I normally wouldn’t have run across. I’m really hooked on a band that I came across a couple of weeks ago called ‘The Secret Machines‘. I think I’ve listened to there latest album “Now Here Is Nowhere” about 30 times. As you can tell, I really dig it and it’s nice background noise to work to. As it turns out, The Secret Machines recently had an appearance on MTV2′s $2 Bill with The Killers – another group that I happened across on Rhapsody and what can I say, they’re Killer. Anyhow, there’s a few video clips of these2 bands from their $2 Bill concert up on MTV2, check them out.

When I get tired of listening to music and I want something a little different, I might pop in a DVD now and than. This is all fine and dandy as long as I have a DVD on hand. I recently came across the new venture the Starz! movie channel is offering up, Starz! Ticket. Starz! Ticketis a subscription-based service that allows you to download movies to your computer and view them as much as you want, for as long as you want. For as long as they’re offered on Starz! Ticket that is. From what I can tell, they offer up a number of movies that seem to coincide with what’s on the Starz! movie channels. Each week they remove some titles while replacing them with new offerings. All of this for only $12.95/mo. Doable! They’re currently offering a 14-day Free Trial which doesn’t seem to have any limits on their service. I’ve tried it out and I’m impressed. I’ll be more impressed when they start offering more movies, specifically newer titles. The best part about the service is you can start watching the movie while it is still downloading. I haven’t noticed any degradation in movie play or machine performance – very nice.

There are other options for online movies, but these services don’t appeal to me as much because they cost more than my local Blockbuster. Why would I want to pay more money to wait for a movie to download that is less quality than my DVD rental. I’mwaiting for the day when these movie sites offer up something like an affordable subscription model or a $.99 pay per view. Shouldn’t this be possible? Wouldn’t this drive more customers to your service? Maybe there’s too many hands in the cookie jar to get the price levels these low.

Ido subscribeto Netflix which is a nice service as well. But sometimes I want that instant satisfaction. There is usually a 3-4 day turn around for my Netflix movies. It will be interesting to see what Netflix is cooking up with Tivo.

It’s nice to see that some of these services are finally catching on. Both Rhapsody and Starz! have a subscription model that works for my tastes. There’s room for improvement, but it’s a step in the right direction. Bravo Rhapsody! Bravo Starz!