Hello, I'm   Jason

As a reminder, the October .NET Valley meeting will be tomorrow (Wednesday), October 27th. For more information, please read http://weblogs.asp.net/jgaylord/archive/2004/10/14/242603.aspx.

We are now only one week away from Election Day in the US. In most states, government officials are prepping the voting booths and checking the security of the voting facilities. Voters are narrowing down their choices. Florida is preparing for an electronic vote.

This year, 15 counties in Florida will switch their push buttons and pull down levers with a touch-screen. As mentioned by eWeek (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1682520,00.asp), the Florida race is tight, almost as tight as my home state of Pennsylvania. With the race being so tight, there is now a fear of security. What will happen if the electronic systems are hacked? What happens if Mickey Mouse is nominated in Florida? The task of preventing these things from happening is now in the hands of technology. Many organizations lack all faith in e-voting (http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/).

E-Voting is not new in some countries. Australia (http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,61045,00.html) setup e-voting a few years ago. Venezuela (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1641288,00.asp) also partakes in e-voting. So, what makes America’s e-voting any different?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. All we can do is wait to see how secure America’s electronic voting systems are. Will this be another security failure? We’ll soon find out.

I’ve been using the GDN workspaces for awhile now. However, I’ve really began to notice some issues with the GDN workspaces as of late. Apparently, there are a few “rules” that need to be followed for them to work, at all. First, make sure that the 2005 .NET Framework is not installed on your PC in any shape or form. Secondly, be sure the PC is not a Windows Server 2003 box.

Bjarke Viksoe created a cool little app to add file storage capability to your GMail account. Check it out at http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm.

The ASPInsiders.com website has been revamped. Be sure to check it out at www.aspinsiders.com.

Be sure to check out http://www.aspnetwebcasts.com/ and sign-up for ASP.NET webcasts. These presentations feature areas from the current version of .NET as well as version 2.0. The presenters are all very well known authors, developers, and community leaders. Plus, if you participate in at least 3 webcasts, you’ll receive a free gift!

Has anyone tried out the new Google Desktop tool yet? It’s a great tool to setup indexing on your PC. I’m waiting to see if someone finds a use for it on a larger scale such as using this for indexing on a server. If you don’t know what it is yet, visit http://desktop.google.com/.

The next .NET Valley meeting will be on October 27th from 6pm until 9pm at Luzerne County Community College. This meeting will feature the very first open forum at .NET Valley. For more information, please visit [http://www.dotnetvalley.com/Events/227.aspx].

This week I had experienced an issue with Outlook. My Outlook is setup to talk with my Exchange server. However, when I setup a new PC with Windows XP SP2 and installed Office 2003, Outlook was slow to respond. It seemed as though there was a refresh issue. After reviewing all Outlook settings, I realized I should start looking within Windows XP. Luckily, I remembered that XP SP2 installs the Windows XP “Firewall”. By turning it off, I resolved the issue.

The 2004 WebAwards have been announced and posted on the WebAward.org website. As a judge each year, it’s interesting to see how some websites that you don’t visit change from year to year.