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It’s been over a year since I lost Murphy and while I still think about him almost every day it’s time to move on. Welcome Gus, a goofy puppy who started life in a Kentucky Kill Shelter and found his way to Burlington, Vermont.  We adopted him through Peaceable Kingdom Animal Rescue in New York, a program I can’t say enough good things about. We’re told Gus is part Border Collie, Labrador and Springer Spaniel. He’s smart, loving, laid-back and a great addition to the family. One thing about...

This is one of my staple Pennsylvania Dutch recipes that I'm posting to easily reference it in the future. I'm planning to make a chocolate cake tonight and I had to look it up on one of my office PCs. Thank God I put it in a safe place.  You may think, "Why Peanut Butter and not Chocolate Frosting?" Chocolate Frosting is good, sure, but it's a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. In fact, back in my South-Central Pennsylvania home town, this cake is a staple at local farmers markets...

Microsoft did a fantastic job making PDC09 accessible to everyone, even to geeks as far away as Vermont. Their real-time HD video coverage of the keynotes and conference presentations was awesome. And what Microsoft didn't provide at http://microsoftpdc.com, Twitter did. The combination of microsoftpdc.com and the #PDC09 stream allowed me to feel like I was at the conference without having to fly across the country to get there. Fascinating, really, the ability to follow the flow of a PDC conference...

This past weekend the Burkes drove from Burlington, Vermont to pick up our daughter from summer camp on the east side of New Hampshire near the Maine border in Ossipee.  To get there we drove down beautiful I-89 Vermont, then on beautiful I-93 New Hampshire through Franconia Notch and the beautiful Kancamagus Highway.  Did I mention it was beautiful?  I took a number of snapshots from behind the wheel, which I rarely ever do.  Wanted to share a bit of the beauty of Vermont and...

As of this afternoon, my wife and I now sport new 32GB 3GS iPhones. Our purchase and activation couldn’t have been handled more smoothly by the nearby South Burlington AT&T guys at the Dorsett Street store. (And the place was a zoo!) Now it’s time to contemplate how a Zune Man like me will live with an iPhone. Here are the broad strokes I know to be true. First, I won’t be loading iTunes on any of my machines. There’s no way I’m loading both Zune and iTunes on the same machine. I love my Zune...

It’s always a good holiday weekend when it results in new additions to my photo gallery. Taking advantage of my Photo Gallery recent photos display, I walked through several pages and grabbed the weekend’s 60-some photos. They include today’s visit to the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. I’ve been there several times and have stayed there, but it was the first time I walked the grounds and some of their trails. I took a few pictures of the Vermont Lake Monsters game this evening, with several of...

Early Wednesday afternoon I was at my desk remotely configuring a client’s IIS server to support some weird CAD file extension when I started getting the chills. Within minutes I was shaking pretty bad so I headed down the hall and straight to bed. The flu had come calling big time. I was exhibiting all of the symptoms of the Swine Flu, so on day two I called the doc for counsel. He told me how the rules of Swine Flu response changed each day and on the day I called, if I had recently visited one...

March is my favorite month of the year. When you hike in Vermont during March the temperatures are cool, the skies are often blue, the sun starts to feel warm for the first time of the year, and yet you get to walk on snow! The combination of the sun’s warmth and the coolness rising from ice and snow is a perfect Vermont ying and yang. There’s something else about March in Vermont, the promise of Spring. Spring doesn’t officially arrive in Vermont until May, yet the promise of Spring’s return in...

This post is essentially a collection of tweets about my Christmas 2008 experience of visiting wife-side family in Manhattan, Kansas for 5 days. I’m of the opinion that more than 3 tweets in succession should take a different form, so I am sticking them here in one place. This post might also be viewed as an Everyman Links-Lite, instilling faith that the genre has not died and another full-bodied Everyman Links post is coming soon. We flew out of Burlington for Manhattan, Kansas on Christmas Day...

Having access to the full cuts of millions of songs and classical performances with the Zune Pass has changed how I experience music, and at three weeks into a Zune Pass I think I can draw some conclusions. Below are the additions to my Zune Collection since I became Zune Pass Man. My tastes aren't yours, but here are some observations about what's different with The Pass that you can probably relate to . First of all, none of the items below were "purchased," yet I can listen to...

I'm Day Two into being a Zune Pass subscriber. Being a Pass subscriber means I can download anything in the Microsoft Zune marketplace to my Zune for $14.99 a month. I was focused on having full play access to Zune Channels as the primary Pass benefit and didn't realize that I had full-play access to the entire Zune library. That's huge. For an example of being Zune Pass Man, I was on my Nordic Track yesterday and with my laptop on my reading rack I went to the Zune Marketplace where...

I really wanted to do an Everyman tonight, but I have to get this political bookmark monkey off my back first. It's that damned Palin. She drives me frigging nuts. I feel like Jenny's angry boyfriend in Forrest Gump. He runs around frothing, treating Jenny like crap, then falls back on "It's just that lying son of a ***, Johnson!" in apologizing for his violent outbursts. When a client asks me, "Dave, do you have that report online yet?" and I respond, "I was...

Trend Micro PC-cillin came installed on my 2-year-old Dell XP laptop and I've been quite happy with it. I particularly like PC-cillin when it alerts me real-time to the presence of a trojan like it did earlier this evening. Had I stopped with deleting the file, if it weren't for Windows Defender I would have still been infected. The bad news is that Defender permitted the files to enter the system, the good news was that it gave me enough information to purge the bad stuff myself. I knew...