Fueling the Fire of Recession

After reading the January 24th edition of the Redmond Channel Partner newsletter, I was rather dismayed at the magazine’s top article titled “Reader Feedback: You Are Preparing for a Recession”.  You can read the originating blog post here.  President Bush isn’t the smartest man out there, but he knew when he took office the first time, in order to get out of a recession you have to encourage spending.

I keep hearing all this talk about a recession and “preparing” for it.  But frankly I’m quite shocked at how people would rather prepare for dark times than encourage good times.  I’m a huge Chris Farley fan, and in my immature youth I learned something very important from one of his movies, as stupidly funny as it may have been.  Tommy Boy featured Callahan Auto, a business that was experiencing tough times.  But the critical piece of information that I think we should all learn from his movie is that when business is on a downward slide, it’s time to expand.

Apply that lesson to our recession, and I think it’s a great time for all of our business to expand.  Manpower, materials, and loans will be cheaper, and there’s no better time to do it now.

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Free Microsoft Webinars for Partners - Ajax, Silverlight, Exrpression

Microsoft is offering the following free webinars for Microsoft Partners:

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Fort Smith .Net User Group forming

I was able to meet last week and help the new group who is trying to form a .Net User Group in Fort Smith.  I will post more information as I find it.  If you are interested in attending, learning about, or helping form the new FSDNUG, please contact one of the following people:

Michael Paladino - mpaladino (remove) @ (remove) goeagleone.com

Kerry Jenkins - kerry_jenkins (remove) @ (remove) data-tronics.com

Jeremy Sloan - sloan (remove) @ (remove) data-tronics.com

They tentatively have the following meetings planned:

March 3rd - Raymond Lewellan (MVP)

March 31st (April meeting) - Chris Koenig (Microsoft Developer Evangelist)

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AutoRuns for Windows - Diarrhea never felt so good!

AutoRuns for Windows - Diarrhea never felt so good!

It’s hard to believe that the Sysinternals group at Microsoft are on their 9.02 version.  For those that didn’t know, Sysinternals used to be it’s own company, until Microsoft recognized how important they were and bought them out.

I hadn’t ever heard of the AutoRuns application until today.  The jest of the application is to list every Automatically ran application during bootup.  You can then disable and remove them all.  It is extremely detailed and even includes the list of applications when you right click a file in Windows Explorer.  After downloading and running it, I removed several applications that I knew I didn’t need running.  The beautiful thing was, after reboot, it significantly made my system more responsive!

So go blow out all those apps you manually unload after reboot, and let me know if your system runs faster too!

(Another great way to use the tool is to find those nasty popups and get rid of them)

Download the tool here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

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We Are Microsoft 2008 Event in Dallas

We Are Microsoft 2008 Event in Dallas

This past weekend seems like a dream.  That’s probably because it was a sleep deprived coding marathon of epic proportions.  Some getting more sleep than others.  Of course it didn’t help that I didn’t get much sleep the night before we left.

The We Are Microsoft event was to help non profits with their development and website needs.  To hear some of the podcasts given by the GeeksWithBlogs.net crew, visit http://geekswithblogs.net/jjulian/.

You can view pictures of the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonlar/sets/72157603771093349/

A BIG thanks goes out to Toi Wright, Amy (forgotten her last name), our Microsoft evangelists, BravoTech for hosting, all the sponsors, all the charities and most importantly all the programmers!

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