Our local newspaper, the Gannett-owned Burlington Free Press ran an article today entitled Trying to Keep Them Down on the Farm. (Don’t know how long the link will last). There has been a lot of discussion lately about demographics of our state, and how we seem to be loosing our kids, and what will it take to keep them here. I wrote back:

The public hand-wringing about keeping our youth (Monday Nov 27th) seems to miss a couple of points.

I grew up in Montpelier from the age of 2, and attended the Montpelier public schools. By the time I graduated from high school, the last thing I wanted to do was to join the 50% of my college-bound classmates to attend UVM. I was desperate to get out of Dodge. After seeing some of the rest of the country and the world, I was happy to return to Vermont where I’ve now been for almost twenty years.

Secondly, most businesses in Vermont are small, and small businesses can be attractive to young people who want to make a difference in their work life. However, when a small business wants to hire, and is expected to provide health insurance for employees, that can be a $12,000-$15,000 up-front cost for an employee with a family. Uncoupling of health insurance from employment would be the single most effective job creation strategy for our state.

Thirdly, young people like to work in growing industries, in a creative environment. Much of the rest of the country, and progressive countries in Europe and Asia have decided that broadband internet and wireless are essential business infrastructure and that environmental technology and mitigation of global warming are areas of growth. Sadly, led by the Free Press editorial board, and our governor, public opinion in Vermont has written off renewable power, and our state and leaders continue to be obsessed with multi-million dollar traffic projects (Circ highway, Bennington bypass) which will be obsolete within fifty years. And broadband expansion? We’ve left that to Verizon, who is attempting to sell its holdings in rural New England, and to bankrupt out-of-state cable companies.

To put this in a little more context:

1. Verizon is running around Albany New York installing fiber cable to homes. The cost for a triple play (cable, telephone, and internet access) will be equivalent to what I’m paying for cable broadband alone. (no TV….mind you, just broadband). At the same time they have publicly stated that they are minimizing their investment in New England, and indeed they are attempting to sell their landline telephone lines in Maine, New Hamshire and Vermont. Almost anyone in VT who can get broadband can get it only from a single provider. Forget broadband wireless.

2. Anything other than highways in Vermont gets short shrift. The “Circ”, a ring road around the city of Burlington was proposed 30 years ago.

3. Wind projects, which are suitable on a maximum of 5% of the ridgeline in Vermont, and which could provide between 10% and 20% of our electricity have been discouraged by the local media and our governor. Land preservation has also been discouraged by the governor, even though the wilderness areas are a tiny fraction of the land area in Vermont. At the moment we actually get over 50% of our energy from renewables; hydropower from Quebec, and biomass (wood chips). The balance comes from a nuclear energy plant in the southern part of the state and from gas-fired turbines and out-of-state power. The Quebec hydro contracts are due to expire in 2012, and the projected 30-year life of the nuclear plant is due to expire shortly thereafter.

Well, it is close to the day of Thanksgiving, and I suppose I should be grateful for all of the wonderful Microsoft software and hardware that I’ve been using for the past year or so. An update on things written about lately, with scores from 1-10, where 10 is the greatest.

Microsoft Office 2007
The components of this comprise the the usual suspects:

• OutLook 2007
• Word 2007
• Excel 2007
• Access 2007
• OneNote 2007

After using Word 2007, OutLook 2007 and OneNote 2007 for several months now, through the beta 2 Technical Refresh, I can say for sure that the winner is OneNote. OutLook remains a bloated pig, and in Word, the interface changes are radical enough that the more attractive page output does not necessarily justify the so-called ribbon interface. I’ve tried….really, I’ve tried to like the ribbon, but frankly there is a substantial learning curve there, which is going to be difficult to get people over. Score overall Office 2007 [5], Individual apps: OneNote [10], Outlook [3], Word [5]. I’m reserving judgement on Access…since there is no Access runtime available. I’m looking forward to improvements in the Access security model, which is seriously screwed up with workgroup security in version 2003.

Desktop Search: X1 [10]. A superb product with great support. Microsoft Desktop Search, by comparison, appears to be a typical version 1 from Microsoft. I had to remove it because it would periodically take over my machine and render it useless. It would be nice if OutLook didn’t have a permanent band under the toolbar that reminds me that I need to install MDS.

Desktop Video Conferencing: SightSpeed [10] No serious Microsoft alternative. Microsoft keeps talking about how they are now going to play in the unified messaging space…but they’ll be late to the party. Maybe in two years, when they have version 3?

Operating System: Windows Vista Enterprise [4]. I used the first betas of these but when trying to install the RTM version, I managed to clobber my boot record, and crashed my workstation. I know…they say don’t beta test on a production machine, but how are you supposed to know how a new product integrates with your lifestyle if you don’t use it in context with your daily work? I didn’t mind Vista, and of course new machines will have it pre-installed, but I don’t think it is worth worrying about upgrades. In contrast, people should consider upgrades to Windows XP Service Pack 2, the latest and greatest Windows XP. It appears to be relatively stable, and secure.

The main hope with Vista is that finally you’ll be able to run more software without administrator rights on the desktop. And, I hope, be able to permanently disallow any changes to services. The idea that a spammer can download a worm or Trojan and actually run this on your machine without your knowledge is ridiculous…and it needs to be stopped by the operating system…Sorry Symantec and Trend.

Internet Explorer 7 [3] Finally they have tabs! I prefer Firefox. [10]

Development Tools:
All over the map. I like the Visual Studio 2005 Express editions. [10] I just wish I had more time to play with them. For database work in a Microsoft world, Access is ascendant…with SQL-Server on the back end. Access can’t compare to Visual FoxPro, but with third party support for VFP fading fast, and a commitment by Microsoft for only a final set of libraries to integrate VFP with the .NET technologies of Visual Studio, VFP is a tough call for any new development.

For web development, I’m still using Dreamweaver and the Macromedia Studio 8 suite. [7] I’ve got two applications in production that use ColdFusion as the middleware. [5] And I think Contribute, at about $75.00 a pop…is the best thing for people who need to update an existing web site on a regular basis. [8] It will be interesting to see how Adobe integrates the Macromedia applications…right now they have a confusing conglomeration with a lot of overlap.

On the Linux side, there are interesting things to look forward to: Eclipse, a newly open sourced Java, Ruby, Rails, PHP, and the solid mySQL and PostgresSQL back end databases.

I wish Microsoft would get back to writing software. What’s with MSNBC? What’s with the XBox? Why do they feel that they have to have a finger in every pie? They should focus on the office suite, a decent set of operating systems, and development tools.

Goggle offered an upgrade to their blog software, and like an idiot I did it. Everything broke. It seems to have broken the RSS feeds, the graphics location, the archives, and the home button which goes back to the top of the main blog.

The feed problem is fixed by resetting your RSS feed reader, ie. deleting the feed in your RSS feeder in reimporting it from the main blog. Archives work now. And I’m about this far from going to WordPress.

Now that feeds can include ads, I’m wondering how long it will be before even RSS feeds will look like the dog’s breakfast, as do many blogs. The latest innovation I have noticed is two columns of AdSense ads. There is almost no more room for copy. And is anyone actually making any money on these stupid ads?

Ok….help me out here. Here is what appears to be a useful service, web conferencing. You can apparently do an audio conference for free. (really free). But, forgive my cognitive dissonance filter, what’s with the web conferencing thing?