Jason Aaron Kiesel

I came across this blog post randomly, and I had to share it with you all. Now, I know we’re in hard time, but this seems a bit ridiculous to me. Apparently, the City of Philadelphia is going to charge it’s residents to have a blog. This article on sports blog BroadStreetHockey has some very interesting insight as to what’s going on in the City of Brotherly Love. Not so much love, would be more appropriate, I think.

I know cities are hard up for cash. We’re all hard up for cash. But come on people! I’m just glad I don’t like in Phily right now. I’d have to pay them $600 / year (this blog plus my MySpace account – every MySpacer would have to pay $300 / year as they include a blog for every account). No thanks.

And I’m going to have to keep an eye out for my city on this one. I definitely don’t want them sneaking this one by.

So I, like many other tech enthusiasts, have a million email addresses. I had been using my Yahoo! email address as my personal email address for years, but I’m finally fed up with it, and I’ve set up my auto-responder to let everyone know of my new address (yes, it’s a Gmail account). Why would I go through all that hassle and make the switch to Gmail? Well, if you have to ask that, you obviously haven’t use Gmail. First off, my Yahoo! account didn’t play well with my iPhone, constantly showing me emails that I had deleted from the mail interface days earlier. Second, every time I’d go to the web mail interface, I’d be inundated with ads. Ads everywhere. I suppose that’s what I get for signing up for a free service, but Gmail’s approach is much more acceptable in my opinion. Finally, I don’t think Yahoo! is going to be around all that much longer. I haven’t seen any innovation coming from them, and all I read about in the news concerns their impending doom.

So now that I’ve made the decision, I wanted to move all my existing mail from Yahoo! to Gmail. Simple, right? Not nearly. After about an hour online and trying a few different approaches (IzyMail and ZPOPs – both didn’t work by the way), I came across a blog that explained how to do it. Once I followed the instructions, I was able to bring all my email into my Gmail account (via their POP import feature) in about five minutes.

What was this glorious solution? I switched my Yahoo! account to a Yahoo! Asia account. Apparently, Yahoo! Asia allows their users to access their email via POP3 (in the US, you can do the same but Yahoo! wants you to fork over $20 / year).

So there you have it. If you want to bail on Yahoo! and still have all your email in your new Gmail account, you can. And you can do it for free. Hit me up at my Gmail account if you have any questions – dotnetallday@gmail.com.

I was emailed this very cool story by my uncle over the weekend, and I was laughing so hard I just had to share it with everyone. Read through the story yourself and let me know what you think at the end by leaving some comments. Enjoy!

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The kids filed back into class Monday morning. They were very excited.

Their weekend assignment was to sell something, then give a talk on productive salesmanship.

Little Sally led off: “I sold girl scout cookies and I made $30,” she said proudly, “My sales approach was to appeal to the customer’s civil spirit and I credit that approach for my obvious success.”

“Very good,” said the teacher.

Little Jenny was next.

“I sold magazines,” she said, “I made $45 and I explained to everyone that magazines would keep them up on current events.”

“Very good, Jenny,” said the teacher.

Eventually, it was Little Johnny’s turn (you remember him don’t cha?).

The teacher held her breath.

Little Johnny walked to the front of the classroom and dumped a box full of cash on the teacher’s desk. “$2,467,” he said.

“$2,467!” cried the teacher, “What in the world were you selling?”

“Toothbrushes,” said Little Johnny.

“Toothbrushes!” echoed the teacher, “How could you possibly sell enough tooth brushes to make that much money?”

“I found the busiest corner in town,” said Little Johnny, “I set up a Dip & Chip stand and gave everybody who walked by a free sample.”

They all said the same thing, “Hey, this tastes like dog crap!”

Then I would say,”It is dog crap. Wanna buy a toothbrush?”

“I used the governmental approach of giving you something crappy for free, and then making you pay to get the crappy taste out of your mouth.”

For all you .NET wonks out there, I had some serious trouble finding the solution that fit my business (CitySourced – http://www.citysourced.com) when it came to processing geo spatial elements. Yes, there’s the SQL Server 2008 and their new spatial types (which I use as well), but there was nothing that allowed me to work with geo spatial elements directly in my .NET application. We’re now using ESRI’s ArcGIS 10technology for a lot of the heavy lifting at CitySourced, but there is definitely a need for doing some of this in-application.

That being said, I’ve collected the libraries that were most useful to me and zipped them up. I’m doing this because the library I’m most fond of was the most difficult to find and get working – SharpMap 2.0 beta.

Download my .NET_GIS_Libraries

In addition to the download, I’ve decided to add links to all my favorite websites. Enjoy!

http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/
http://dotspatial.codeplex.com/
http://projnet.codeplex.com/
http://geoapi.codeplex.com/
http://mssqlspatial.codeplex.com/

And a great how to blog for SharpMap 2.0 – a must read!

http://geekswithblogs.net/JuanDoNeblo/archive/2008/04/13/showing-esri-shapefile-layers-on-a-virtual-earth-map.aspx