Pauly and the Fatman

Michigan's economy sucks. Duh! The North American econmoy has shifted from a manufacturaing economy to an infomating economy. Similar shifts have happened in the past. When North America shifted from an agro-economy to manufacturing agriculture-rich areas suffered. Michigan has lead the last 100 years with cars. Building cars and the jobs they bring are history.

Regional economies that lead one economy seldom lead the next. Our (Michigan leaders) are myopic. History teaches these lessons and they can easily be learned. It is time to shift to information, anticipate bio-technology and nanotechnology now.

Michigan rode the car horse, but it is time to move on.

Just returned from PDC in LA. We gave out 1,000 copies of "Professional DevExpress ASP.NET Controls" courtesy of DevExpress. Julian Bucknall signed about 500 or 600 of those copies, which took most of the week.

Its good to be home--at least for a couple weeks more before the next trip. I am working on a new 'secret project', so will be very busy.

Attendees got a free multi-touch Acer machine which was given out Wednesday, a poor choice, because most attendees of course spent all day Wednesday playing with their new toys. (Who could blame them?) However, I suspect the sponsors were pretty annoyed.

I was at an internal presentation at Microsoft. The presenter was David Chappell, well known author and speaker. I brought Alan Grenspan's The Age of Turbulence to read while I waited for Dave to begin. David said something about wanting to read the book. I said it was a very interesting book.

I asked David if he thought that outsourcing jobs was a necessary thing or not. My initial premise was that outsourcing equaled greater world wide prosperity and more customers for our goods. David's response was that we imported more than exported, so he didn't see how outsourcing helped. That got me to thinking. Why is outsourcing necessary?

The answer is so that the rest of the world can buy our goods. A natural response is that the rest of the world doesn't buy that much from us. Wrong answer John; tell them what they have won.

The rest of the world buys one product writ huge: U.S. debt. Our nation, our prosperity, like it or not is funded by about $5 trillion dollars in debt. And that debt includes all debt, like your credit card or car loan. If the US becomes an island of prosperity who will be able to debt-funded prosperity? No one. Eventually countries like Japan and China will have enough US debt in their portfolio and will spend elsewhere and our growth stalls.

So in eventuality, low and moderate paying jobs must be replaced with increasingly higher paying jobs like IT jobs, and eventually IT jobs for something else. For now the US gets rid of a lot of stinky manufacturing so we can export more debt and fuel the next level of prosperity.

Do individuals get hurt? Yes. Do the economic cycles from agrarian, to manufacturing, to informating, to whatever seem to be shortening? They do to me. But, this is inevitable. If we save 100,000 manufacturing jobs or IT jobs from export we sacrifice national economic growth and dominance. Capital seeks a better return. Manufacturing is just becoming a less desirable return on capital at this point.

The result it is that it is incumbent on every individual to have a service to sell, save and invest, and remember the government can't and shouldn't stop this trend.

I am reading Dick Morris' "Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics". (I know it was published in 2003, but my reading list is very long and political books get pushed to the back of the line.) Morris guided Bill Clinton and now works for Fox News, so my feeling is that like many of us he is chasing a buck (or he and Bill had a falling out and its payback time).

Anyway, in the book Morris talks about the "left believing that poverty is the root of all evil", and that's what interested me. Is poverty really the root of all evil? I believe not. I think an ignorance of the innate evalue of human life, absence of a basic moral compass, and fear of suffering and destitution are at the core of evil's root.

Do you need Microsoft sample code, patches, toolkits? Then, checkout www.codeplex.com. The codeplex is a microsoft site used to store all of the goodies you need. for example, you can download the SQL Express 2005 Advanced Services SP2 which will add SSMS (SQL Services Management Studio) Express and Full text Indexing to SQL Express. Check out the codeplex!

When you install Visual Studio it install SQL Server Express, but not SQL Server Management Studio (why anybody would ever want this configuration is beyond me). My workstation had Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server Express on Vista. As many people know get SSMS installed with this pre-existing configuration is a pain in the butt. This approach worked:

1. Control Panel|Programs|Uninstall
2. Select Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (we won't uninstall express)
3. When the uninstall option pops up de-select everything and make sure workstation components is checked (only)
4. Let the uninstall run.
5. Place the SQL Server disk in the drive, navigate to E:\ENGLISH\SQL2005\ENTERPRISE\32BIT\Tools\Setup
6. Double click on SqlRun_Tools.msi and double-click
7. Select the components you'd like to install.

This seems to work just fine.

I don't endorse products for just money, and I surely don't endorse them for free meals. I do endorse products I believe in, and if I can I get paid (for writing articles) about those products not by the vendor. This applies to CodeRush and DevExpress. CodeRush is a must have meta-programming tool. CodeRush helps you produce code maybe as much as ten times faster and that code is uniform, which should mitigate the need for goofy coding standards meetings.

That said, if I could be bribed by hospitality Ray Navasarkian and Mark Miller from DevExpress would certainly have made the cut. The DevExpress team, including Mark, Ray, Dustin Campbell, and Oliver Sturm hosted a sumptuous meal at the Metropilitan Grill in Seattle on Thursday (4/17/09) night. The atmosphere was handsomely appointed, the conversation was collegial, and the food was superlative.

Ray, Mark and company provide first class products and are first class hosts. Thanks for your hospitality. (I have to go now because I have to hit them up for sponsoring our Day of .NET in lansing, Michigan on June 21st, 2008.)