Explaining the practice of domain tasting and how to avoid it or get your domain back. This is an interesting Digg post on the dangers of domain kiting. This has been a problem for quite a while but it appears that its becoming standard practice for a lot of domain registrars.

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Well, I received my third consecutive Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award. This is an award that is given out to professionals who promote and show a high level of expertise with Microsoft technologies. I was awarded it the first time three years ago for my involvement as a moderator on the Asp.Net forums and as a core team member of the popular Asp.Net portal DotNetNuke. I really did not expect to receive the award again this year as over the past year, I have stepped down as an Asp.Net moderator and I have not been as active with DotNetNuke and the MS forums as I was in the previous years. I have participated just not to the same level as previously. I did participate in the update of the DotNetNuke Portal book from the core team. Actually I did a lot of the updating as everyone else was really busy and I had the time.

Well, I’m really stoked about this as I really wanted to be invited back to Redmond to participate in the MVP conference. The last one I went to was really great and there was so much information that was shared on upcoming MS technologies. I get freebies as part of the award too. The trip to Redmond only cost Airfare and they put me up in a first class hotel in Downtown Seattle and took care of all the bills. The hotel alone was 200 bucks a night. Last year I received a MSDN subscription to Team System which would have cost $10K if I would have had to buy it. And then there is always the money to spend in the Microsoft Company Store. My kid always loves this freebie as I usually buy him games for him out of the store. Everything in there is supper cheap compared to what you would have to pay retail so this goes a long way on games.

I guess I will need to change my resolution a little and start back posting more in the MS forums. I need to spend some time there anyway as I have a couple of interesting DotNetNuke modules that I want to build this year.

I usually do not subscribe to the point of making New Year’s resolutions, this has been part of the conditioning that I have been subjected to all my life. I have made resolutions in the past only to forget about them a couple of weeks later. I think this year may be different. I just read an inspirational post over on Steve Pavlina’s blog that makes me think perhaps I’ve been going about it the wrong way. [Read more...]