Just plugging the next Bay.Net Education Day (which I am organizing), where Mark Michaelis will

start with a blank slate, the Visual Studio Wizard, and proceed to create a series of assemblies that comprise .NET 3.0/.NET 3.5 sample application.  The result will be a whirl wind introduction to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Ajax, SharePoint, Visual Studio Unit Testing, LINQ and much more.  Attend this all day session to catch up with where Microsoft .NET technology is today and gain insight into where it is going tomorrow.

Should be a great event - it will take place Saturday September 6, at Foothill College; you can register here.

Via Wired, came across this great website, with a more rockin' version of the "to be or not to be" dilemma:

more graph humor and song chart memes

I was just reading this post on Juan Carlos Méndez-García's blog, where he describes when and how to use harmonic averages. I hadn't seen that average in a long while, and thought his example provided a good illustration as to why this seemingly odd way to compute averages would make sense.
Practically, there is one issue, though: Excel doesn't come up with a built-in Harmonic Average function. I thought I would give a shot at writing a user-defined function that does just that. The function I wrote mimics SUMPRODUCT(), but is called HarmonicAverage, and takes 2 ranges as arguments. The first range is the weight of each observation, the second the value of the observation.

More...

Just thought I would point out this page at Acaso Analytics, where Billy Boyle used my previous post on how to use a simple S-shaped curve to model the introduction of a new product on a market, and created a very cool interactive dashboard which illustrates how the curve looks like, and what happens to it when the parameters change. I am a big fan of quantitative models, and enjoyed his other posts as well, which are an eclectic collection of "illustrated" famous quantitative models. Nothing tells the story behind a mathematical model better than a good chart, or, better, an interactive one!

First piece of good news this week, the website for Silicon Valley CodeCamp 08 is up (and beautiful!), and registrations are open. If you haven't been at CodeCamp yet, you should definitely check it out: it's free, it's by developers, for developers, and it's fun. It's a great place to go to meet fellow developers and learn; and if you are itching to try out your presentation skills and are passionate about a topic, it's a great place to get your feet wet with a friendly crowd! I plan on giving two talks this year, one on Test-Driven Development, and one on VSTO development.

Second piece of good news, after a bit of a hibernation period, the Silicon Valley / South Bay chapter of Bay.Net is resurfacing! Stay tuned on the Bay.Net website for updates - but as of now, the first session is expected to take place end July, with Scott Stanfield of Vertigo talking about DeepZoom, a spectacular illustration of what can be done with Silverlight.