atmosphere - the developer blog of Bernard Wong

The PDC 2005 conference is returning to the Los Angeles Convention Center between September 11th and 16th. While I've only lived in Los Angeles (county) a short while, I have either stayed at or temporarily visited most of the downtown Los Angeles...

since moving down to (mostly living) in Southern California last year, i've gone through several popular chains of burrito joints. my early enthusiasm for Baja Fresh has almost completely faded away. currently, my faves are La Salsa - they really have...

OK, I'm back and have I got news for you! PDSA is a top-notch developer services and training company looking for at least one (1) .NET programmer to hire full-time salary. Those of you in Southern California (especially Orange County) are likely familiar...

i can't believe it's been over two weeks since i've last had an opportunity to blog. first, i had to begin presenting our new seminar content focused entirely upon security in Cerritos (Los Angeles) and San Diego, then i co-presented two of the DevDays...

Yesterday, an inquiry came up internally over e-mail about whether a .NET implementation of the PL/I language existed. This caught my eye because PL/I was the first language that I encountered on a mainframe (at the University of Toronto, from whom I...

so here i am up in Anchorage - my first time ever in Alaska. it's a little after midnight as i'm writing this dispatch. there's no sunlight in evidence but then it has been heavily overcast all day (and night). i'd estimate that it is the equivalent of...

Registration is now open for the inaugural edition of the SoCal .NET Technical Summit to be held Saturday, May 7th. For the past few months, I've been working with the various .NET user groups in SoCal to organize this one day developer conference...

So much for transparency... I guess it only applies to whatever is OK for you to know.

Yup, here's another exclusive developer conference discount offer for readers of this blog. If you've been sitting on the fence about going to VS Live! Las Vegas , let me sweeten the pot for you... How about a $500 discount off the standard rate of...

I received my custom advance order of six hundred of these - one for each attendee of the SoCal .NET Technical Summit coming up this Saturday in Long Beach, CA. If you're like me and lack the patience (and phat pipes) to download several Gigabytes of...

Wow! This is so cool, I can hardly believe we're just giving this stuff away. There is a very special offer going on now through November 30, 2004 to coincide with a series of free ASP.NET technical training Webcasts from Ken Getz, Rob Howard, Fritz Onion...

i finally finished (very late) writing up my submissions for the SoCal edition of the MSDN Flash e-mail newsletter that will come out next Monday. i almost missed getting this blurb in for the upcoming meeting of the San Diego .NET User Group so i...

i do my best not to use cuss words so i’m going to leave it at that. the reason that i get really, really frustrated with a lot Web applications is usually because of state. all Thursday night, i wasted hours just trying to book a few hotel...

in my last blog entry , i should have mentioned that those links to the videos of the Japanese bi-pedal robots were forwarded to me by my pal, Randy Brown, program manager for Microsoft FoxPro. props also due to our mutual friend, Alan Griver, who spotted...

just in case everyone hasn't heard yet, the Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 Toolkit is now available for *FREE* download . included in the Toolkit are the core tools that developers need to compile and link C and C++ applications for Windows and the .NET...

Announcing the SoCal .NET Technical Summit II at the Hilton Irvine on Saturday, September 23rd, featuring Rocky Lhotka, Bill Vaughn, Markus Egger, and more. Early bird registration only until Monday, September 4th for just $79....

Ever what goes into the process of selecting speakers for a developer conference? Who are these speakers, what are their qualifications and how do they get chosen?...

OK, i know my posts have been very intermittent and matter of fact to the point of desiccation recently (ever since i was asked by Windows Vista to expunge one of my posts - it was their IP, intellectual property, watchdogs too). So you know what this...

OK, I've been soliciting for interested parties in the SoCal edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter since almost forever, it's finally time to get things started for Santa Barbara's very own .NET user group now that Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005...

Steel Battalion is the current undisputed heavy-weight champion when it comes time to battle-mech sims. for good reason too. it's not just another Xbox game title that ships in a typical slipcase... it's a behemoth of a 40+ button, dual joystick cockpit...

these really have to be seen if you're an owner of an Aibo : http://www.asahi.com/video/031218run.wvx http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1218/sony_06.wmv i think these videos speak for themselves. i'd love to get my hands on one of these and...

OK, let’s get this blog started. i spent most of today writing up draft descriptions for the May/June cycle of our MSDN Event developer seminars. after writing the extended long-play version, i’m informed that what i wrote is unusable...

This will be of interest for all you developers in Southern California (or thinking about visiting here). There is a new Developer Community Web site for Southern California available now on microsoft.com Here, you will be able to find an events calendar...

On Saturday, February 19th, the Los Angeles SQL Server Professionals Group will host a special full-day workshop at UCLA featuring Ken Henderson, Microsoft Senior Escalation Engineer and author of the Guru's Guide to SQL Server series of books , and Paul...

i have a lot to catch up on from the past few weeks. the following story leaps to the top of the backlog because it speaks to the role that software (and by extension, all of us) can have in the world (disregarding for a moment whatever idealogical...