I’m a long time loyal customer of Rick Steve’s guidebooks and travel gear. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Europe 16 times over the past 13 years speaking at various developer conferences and events. If you plan to travel to Europe, check out the various books, maps, videos, train tickets, and travel gear that Rick Steves’ company offers. And if you ever visit Seattle and you are a European traveler, I highly recommend visiting Rick’s Steves Travel Center walk-in store in Edmonds, WA. Edmonds is about 15 miles north of downtown Seattle. Edmonds is a nice place to walk around, and it’s on the shore of the Puget Sound with a ferry dock, shops, restaurants, all walking distance to Rick Steves travel center.

A few months ago I was in Paris for a week, and while there I read Rick’s travel book on Paris via the Kindle eBook format on my iPhone via the free Kindle for iPhone app.

Last March, I attended one of Rick Steves’ presentations on Italy, a 2 hour session part of an all day event near his store in Edmonds, WA. The Rick Steves travel book on Italy is apparently the #1 selling European travel book in the U.S. There are now several Rick Steves iPhone apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch via the iTunes App store. Search on Rick Steves at http://appshopper.com or in the iTunes App store for a listing and details. Later this month I go back to Europe for my 17th trip, this time back to Prague, Germany, and Austria.
 
In 2005, I blogged about the CIA World Factbook which contains great detailed information for any country you might visit. There are now many iPhone apps based on the CIA World Factbook data. I have the called World Facts installed on my iPhone. Back in 2004, I also blogged about 6 detailed posts while touring around in Europe in June 2004, including one entry that describes how I was in 5 countries within 9 hours by car. It was that series of blog posts in June of 2004 which got me started in blogging, now 5 years ago.

Two additional useful related articles I found back in 2005 are Rick Steves: Helping millions explore Europe and Europe: by train or by car?. One thing you won’t find many of on the roads in Europe are SUVs and large pick-up trucks, almost none. The price of gasoline is over twice as expensive in Europe as it is in the U.S.. The price of gas in Europe was around $6US back in June 2004 when I was in a car touring 2500miles (4000km) around Europe. I’m not sure what the price per liter is there now, probably a bit more.

Trains are a great way to get around Europe, and traveling by car allows you to stop and see many interesting non-tourist locations. The sightseeing and tourist type hot spots are usually fun and interesting, but the best part about European travel is socializing with people who live there. The train system in Europe is a great way to get around and to talk to people, both locals and other travelers.

Rick Steves has a podcast show and audio tours at http://ricksteves.com. Here is the RSS feed for the Rick Steves podcast show. There are now over 200 MP3 podcast shows already, not just about European travel but also about locations world-wide, wines, food, and sports in Europe. He as a great travel blog at http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/. As Rick Steves says at the end of all his Rick Steves’ Europe travel shows on TV, “happy travels”.

I had pre-ordered by copy a while back and copies are arriving starting today, so I’ll get mine when I return home from PDC later this week. You can see from her PDC Day 0 blog post that they are selling the books starting.

Sara is a friend of mine who lives near me, and we meet for wing or burgers and beer at the Wing Dome in Kirkland about once a month.I met with her the night she completed writing her book, and last Friday night I met her just after she received the first copies. Here is a photo from that night, probably the first photo taken of her with the new book:

CodeCast tag line: The Late Night Show for .NET Developers

I’m the primary CodeCast host, with co-hosts Markus Egger and Gary Short.

Each CodeCast show episode should be about 30 minutes even though this first one is about 44 minutes. The file download will typically be just under 100MB since it is recorded and in MP3 format at 320K bit rate for maximum voice and music quality, so it could be called CodeCast HD.

Update: Based on feedback, we are going to make the default podcast 128K which will keep the file size down to about 25MB-40MB. The result is not that much different when listening, especially the vocal audio only.

This episode introduces the podcast, the hosts, CoDe Magazine, as well as previews the PDC 2008 (Microsoft Professional Developer Conference) this week and several of the technologies expected to make an appearance at the event.

I will be attending the event, hosted by the VSX Team, the great group of people I use to work with at Microsoft (see just a few of them on the VSX team profile page).

Here are 10 of many great reasons to attend the event if you can:

1. The cost of registration for both full days of the event is only $100.
2. Developers always like to hear two words: free food.  Registration includes two days of breakfast and lunch. There will also be food at the Monday evening event Ask the Experts & Partner / Publisher Fair social gathering (where there will be more free stuff and giveaways).
3. All attendees receive free stuff including a free copy of the Wrox book Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, a $49.99 retail value (currently $31.49 via Amazon.com).
4. Receive a copy (or a second copy) of the first edition of VSX CoDe Focus magazine, published late last year which is a full 76 page issue of CoDe magazine dedicated to the topic of VSX. While the contents of the magazine all are online in HTML and PDF download at http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/vsx/ and in WPF format in the free Xiine client application, it’s cool to get a printed copy if you don’t already have one.
5. There will be several hundred in attendance at the event from around the world including developers who are VSX experts, some new to VSX, VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partners) who create 3rd party products for Visual Studio, and many people from many Microsoft teams. Networking with others at the event will be worth the time aside from the great sessions, speakers, attendees, and Microsoft employees.
6. The event includes an excellent list of speakers including some of the key architects of Visual Studio, key members of teams who work on the VS platform and ecosystem, as well as some of the top experts from the VSX developer community. Refer to the Speakers page for a complete list of speakers and bios.
7. VSX DevCon 2008 also has amazing list of 24 VSX sessions of content over the two day event. See the detailed Sessions page for the specifics. The sessions are split into two tracks, intro and advanced. Refer to the Agenda page for the timeline details.
8. Not only can you learn about how to extend Visual Studio, but there will be lots of information about the cool Visual Studio Gallery website at http://visualstudiogallery.com. The site currently has over 700 listings including many free applications for Visual Studio as well as a many 3rd party VS products. For more information about the VS Gallery website, check out Mike Yeager’s CoDe magazine article Extending Your Development Experience with Visual Studio Gallery.
9. The keynote speaker is Rico Mariani who leads the team of architects in the VS division at Microsoft. Rico is an incredibly technical, educational, and entertaining presenter. Expect the keynote to include some information about the next version of Visual Studio (code named VS10, or Dev10 including other components like the .NET Framework) as a prelude to additional announcements at PDC next month. Important to VSX and the VS ecosystem is the future of extending Visual Studio within the VS roadmap plans at Microsoft.
10. VSX is a growing community with an increasing job market demand. This means that those VS/.NET developers who learn how to extend Visual Studio using the VS SDK will open the door to an increase of opportunity in their own development work/company, possibly get a better or expanded job that includes VSX development, or as a consultant find new clients and raise rates based in the increasingly high demand for VSX developer expertise. For more information about VSX in general, check out Istvan Novak’s CoDe magazine article Visual Studio Platform and Extensibility.

I am the President and founder of MashupX, LLC, with EPS being one of my primary clients. MashupX will have some additional partnerships to announce in the near future, while some of my clients will not be disclosed on my site or blog due to confidentiality reasons.

MashupX specializes in consulting for community building around products and services, guerilla marketing techniques, multimedia creation, and software technology.

http://www.eps-software.com/PressReleases.aspx.

Ken Levy joins EPS Software Corp, VFPConversion.com, and CoDe Magazine

9/3/2008 12:00:00 AM

Houston, Texas, – September 3rd 2008 – For immediate release:
Ken Levy is joining EPS Software Corp. in the role of an Evangelist for several EPS brands. Ken is the founder of MashupX LLC, and through his new partnership with EPS, Ken will focus on EPS’ VFPConversion.com effort as well as CoDe Magazine (the leading independent magazine for .NET developers) and EPS’ custom software, mentoring, and consulting efforts around .NET and Microsoft server products. Ken is a renowned industry expert and was formerly at Microsoft driving community growth and evangelism for Visual FoxPro (VFP), Windows Live (developer platform), and Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX).

For more information, contact EPS at info@eps-software.com

About EPS Software Corp.
EPS Software Corp. is a multi-national corporation founded by renowned industry expert Markus Egger. EPS is headquartered in Houston, TX (USA), with offices in North America and Europe. EPS specializes on consulting, mentoring, and custom software development based on the Microsoft developer platform, including Visual Studio (.NET), SQL Server, and other Microsoft server products, such as SharePoint. EPS is well known for its involvement in various community efforts. EPS is involved not just in sponsorship and trade shows, but also in the organization of various special interest groups. Many EPS employees are well known presenters at events of all sizes around the globe. EPS employees have received more Microsoft MVP awards than employees of any other company. EPS is also the owner of brands such as CoDe Magazine, VFPConversion.com, Milos Solution Platform, and Xiine (among others). – www.eps-software.com

About CoDe Magazine
CoDe Magazine is the leading independent .NET developer print and online publication. CoDe Magazine provides in-depth articles for professional .NET developers. CoDe Magazine has received numerous industry awards. In addition to the main publication (which is printed on a regular schedule), CoDe also publishes CoDe Focus Magazine, which is a series of special issues focusing on specific technologies in each issue. Furthermore, CoDe includes various online properties that can be found on the CoDe Magazine web site. – www.code-magazine.com

About VFPConversion.com
VFPConversion.com is a community portal and service offering for current or former Visual FoxPro (VFP) developers with an interest in adopting newer Microsoft technologies such as Visual Studio, .NET, and/or Microsoft SQL Server. The VFPConversion.com web site offers a wealth of free information such as articles and blogs. In addition, the VFPConversion.com team can assist developers in assessing their current VFP applications and in converting them to, or enhancing them with the aforementioned new technologies. – www.VFPConversion.com

I’ve been using the Twitter.com web page for reading and posting on my Blackjack II Windows Mobile based phone, and I use the Twitterific Premium application on my iPhone. While I have the Windows based Twhirl application installed on my computer, I find I generally just use the Twitter.com home page signed in when reading and posting from my PC.

Stephen is the author of QuickBooks for Dummies, Quicken for Dummies, and Excel for Dummies, and has sold around a half a million books worldwide over the past years (just click on Books on his web site to see a list of some of his publications).

One of the great resources on his website is a Do-it-yourself LLC Formation for all Fifty States eBook offering. I ended up buying the eBook version for the state of Washington, the premium version (PDF and Word files) for $49. While I could have stepped through and eBook and created my own LLC online, I realized that Stephen’s office is in Redmond, WA and only about 4 miles from where I live in Kirkland. I had some questions about various company formation options as well as questions preparing general accounting and taxes, so I setup an hour with him a few days later. It cost $235 for the hour with him, and I not only left with every one of my questions answered with additional great advise, I also left with my application all filled in online for applying for the new LLC. The next afternoon, I received a confirmation email from the office of the Secretary of State in Washington approving and confirming the formation of my LLC. I then had to register my new business which was easy with the included document in the LLC formation kit.

I also bought Stephen’s book called QuickBooks 2008 for Dummies (rated with 5 full stars on Amazon) in the Kindle eBook format since I recently bought a copy of QuickBooks 2008 Pro.

Stephen is the type of CPA who helps people as much as he can with his website content and books, and tries to focus on having clients who he can help the most. For example, he encouraged me to do as much as I can myself and then just hire a tax accountant for tax purposes. He said he would be best used for taxes if I were to ever convert my LLC into an S Corporation which requires more complex tax consulting.

Even if you are not located in the Seattle area or in the state of Washington, Stephen’s website has a ton of great resources for businesses, accounting, and taxes including a great FAQ page. If there was some type of MVP program for CPAs for contribution to the self employed business community, Stephen would get my nomination.

Update: The URL above goes to a FeedBurner page with various types of methods to subscribe. You can subscribe directly to RSS XML at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mashupx/klevy?format=xml.

Update: I’ve you’ve encountered any RSS XML errors from my blog here, it is due to some WordPress blog bug summarized in the WordPress forum post RSS Doesn’t Work – XML Parsing Error. It has to do with some WordPress plug-in files with extra spaces outside of the PHP code block definition. It appears I was able to fix it after making recommended in that forum thread.

Update: Thanks to a tip from Steven Black, I was able to auto-update the blog default RSS feed to auto redirect to the FeedBurner URL. This means there is no need to unsubscribe and re-subscribe as I indicated above. The information on how to do this with WordPress was at the blog post The right way to redirect a WordPress 2.0 feed through FeedBurner.

Update: I think this will be the final update on this, finally. I did have to install one more WordPress plug-in to get the auto RSS feed redirect working, the FeedSmith Plugin. The trick to get the blog source RSS feed to always work properly was to remove one blank line from the Yahoo plug-in for WordPress called Customizable Permalinks. it took several hours to track down this tiny bug, but in the process I learned a lot about the folder/file structure and architecture of the open source WordPress application.

In this video interview I did a few weeks ago (a few days before my last day at Microsoft), I talk to Toby Richards, General Manager for Community Support Services and the MVP Program at Microsoft. The interview includes discussions around the current state of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) community and the roadmap for the MVP program and the next MVP summit.

Toby took over this role in early 2008, and he is responsible for programs that identify, award and enable community influencers around the world, creating deeper relationships and richer feedback opportunities that improve Microsoft products and services. Also discussed in the interview is online support strategies and how MVPs help users and developers who are not MVPs.

This video is a kind of part 2 to the video interview I did last year with Sean O’Driscoll in the video Channel 9: Sean O’Driscoll, a General Manager for Community Support and the MVP Program. Sean, who will be leaving Microsoft later this year, was in the role Toby has now taken over. In that interview with Sean, we discussed  the history, current state, and future of Microsoft MVPs and the MVP Program. So the video interview with Sean is a good prequel to the Toby video sequel.

I was an MVP for much of the 1990s before joining Microsoft, and I was an MVP product group lead for both Visual FoxPro and Windows Live Developer groups, followed by mostly MVPs who made up the VSX Insider group. I’ve been involved with the MVP program and summits in some form since the mid 1990s, starting about a year or so after the MVP program started at Microsoft.I will be working with a variety of current MVPs in my new company (MashupX, LLC) ventures.

Thanks to Dan Fernandez for posting this video interview on Channel 9. For more information about the MVP Program, refer to http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/.

• The kitchen has a voice-activated digital recipe guide via a display on the kitchen counter, using an HP TouchSmart PC.
  When someone stands in front of the magic mirror in a bedroom superimposes a digital wardrobe paper-doll style including jewelry and hair styles).
• Another bedroom projects storyboard images on the wall when reading a book out loud.
• Microsoft’s Surface technology is used for the dining room table to display pictures, videos, or a digital light show.
• A projector and screen are used in the living room play music and movies via a media library from an HP Media Center PC.
• There are about 150 digital picture frames around the house that change images whenever guests enter, based on an RFID chip they wear on their cloths to identify the person.
• LCD touchpanels by LifeWare are all over the house to allow control of most every system including lights, media, temperature, and access to news and weather.

The official home builder of the Dream House at Disneyland is Taylor Morrison, the company my brother works for in the Phoenix area selling new homes. He was invited with a group of co-workers to visit Disneyland for a day just after the opening.

I haven’t been to Disneyland or Disneyworld in over 20 years. Anyone who is about my age or older probably remembers when they charged per ride and various rides had their own type of ticket from A to E, with E tickets being the most expensive for the good rides like Pirates and the Haunted House – thus the cliche’ that still exists today an E-ticket ride.

About 75% of what is on display in the Dream Home is actually available to consumers today. What I (and probably most people) would be most interested is in the 25% category of not available to the public, which is a consumer version of the Surface table.

Below is a Radio Shack and TRS-80 history timeline that I copied a while back, not sure of the source but it appears accurate:

• 1921: - Radio Shack begins as a one-store retail and mail-order company catering to ham operators and electronics buffs.
• 1963: - Charles Tandy buys the chain of stores, and within two years turned a $4 million dollar loss into a $20 million dollar profit.
• 1977: August - Radio Shack announces the TRS-80 Model I microcomputer for US$600.
• 1977: September - One month after launching the TRS-80, 10,000 are sold.
• 1979: May - Tandy/Radio Shack announces the TRS-80 Model II.
• 1979: October - Radio Shack begins shipping the TRS-80 Model II to users.
• 1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, priced from US$700 to US$2500.
• 1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Color Computer, and sells for US$400.
• 1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Price is US$230.
• 1981: January - Radio Shack ceases production of the TRS-80 Model I, and recalls units from the US market, due to failure to meet new FCC radio-frequency interference regulations.
• 1982: January - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model 16, with 8-inch floppy drives, and optional 8-MB hard drive.
• 1982: January - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, Model PC-2, for US$280.
• 1983: March - Radio Shack announces its TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer. Price is US$799 for 8KB version, to US$1134 for the 32KB version.
• 1983: May - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model 4, for US$2000.
• 1983: June - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 PC-3, for US$99.95.
• 1983: October - Tandy/Radio Shack announces the "transportable" TRS-80 Model 4P, for US$1800.
• 1983: Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, Model PC-4, replacing the PC-1, for US$70.
• 1983: Tandy releases the TRS-80 Model 2000, which uses the Intel 80186 microprocessor.
• 1983: Radio Shack unveils the TRS-80 Model 12 at the CP/M ‘83 Show. Price is US$3200.
• 1985: March - Radio Shack introduces the Tandy 6000 multiuser system. It features Z80A and 68000 processors, 512 KB RAM, 80×24 text, graphics, 1.2-MB 8-inch disk, optional 15 MB hard drive, TRS-DOS, or XENIX 3.0. It supports up to 9 users.

I have two mobile phones, a Blackjack II Windows Mobile phone as my primary phone, and the original iPhone as my additional phone line. I’ll post more about the iPhone 2.0 firmware upgrade and new features soon, as well as some tips I’ve been archiving to post about using Windows Mobile based phones.

For a reference to the blog I posted to from 2004 to 2008 while working at Microsoft, refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy.