Meet the winners of our Wrox Press contest. 

Three lucky winner won a 4-book XML package, and ten winners won a copy of Implementing LDAP from Wrox. Congratulations all! 

Winners of the 4-book package:

Cama Suess of Pennsylvania

Thank you so much! I am the wife of a US Marine and the mother of a 4 yr old daughter. I currently work part time at a pre-school. I have previously worked at an insurance company as a workers compensation claims adjustor, and have always had a love and fascination for computers. I would love to say I had designed a web page (it is something I have thought many times of doing) but alas, I haven't done it yet. 


Cama's Entry:

When I was in middle school - I was in the gifted program and went to computer class instead of reading and spelling. My friend and I worked very hard for weeks on this program for class - the finished product was supposed to be a Christmas Tree - with lights on it that blinked - and presents underneath and it played the song O Christmas Tree. Now this was back in the days of Basic - and this was a complicated assignment for two 6th grade girls who had never even seen a computer before this class. We finally got the Christmas Tree on - and thought we had the lights and presents set up. But, when we ran the program, the presents were on the tree, blinking, and the lights were lined up underneath! We did some switching around and finally managed to get the presents under the tree -and the lights on the tree - but we never did get the blinking problem fixed. So, our finished assignment turned out to be a Christmas tree with lights on it - and blinking presents underneath - all to the tune of O Christmas Tree!



Derek Wang of Pennsylvania 

That's great news! Thanks. 

I'm the VP of Technology and TDA (Techical-Do-All) of Xlibris Corporation, http://www.Xlibris.com/, an exciting startup that enables everyone to publish his own books, beautifully bound hardback or paperback. Besides Xlibris' web site, I have also developed a few others in the past years, among them, http://www.localmart.com/, a web site with a special local search engine, and http://www.ezitrade.com/, which enables businesses to do EDI easily on the web. Other projects I developed that are less glorious as these on the web are inhouse systems for medical office management, migration (yuk!) and various consulting and
project management using VB, ASP, C/VC++, SQL Server, and even a great (but small) 4GL system called 4th Dimension.

My new passion is XML, so your prize books will come in handy. Thanks!

The best,
Huangxin Derek Wang


Derek's Entry:

I wrote a .plan file in my UNIX shell with the message: "I know you're fingering me." Then I got calls from friends apologizing for poking around at my account!





Kathy Bryant

Hi. I am delighted to be a winner of the Computer Books Online contest. I am on my computer everyday for more hours than I care to mention. You might say that I am addicted, but aren't most of us that are online. A computer book is just the thing, I am constantly referring to them for answers about problems or just to learn more.

Currently I am in the processing of designing my webpage. I hope to establish a presence on the internet in the near future, but I really want everything to be in place before I go online. 


Kathy's Entry:

Remember back in the days of just DOS? Well, that is how I learned computers. Of course, I had to learn the hard way. If you recall, whenever you wanted to delete any thing it always said ARE YOU SURE y/n. Well one day I decided to clean up the hard drive. There are those two little files (hidden) * and ** that I had no idea what they where for, so I deleted them. Presto changeo, I had turned my PC into a terminal. One that wasn't hooked up to a network. Well, I read a lot and finally figured out that I needed to put the system commands back on the computer so that I could access the hard drive. 

So even though this is my dumbest and most embarrassing story it also is my best story, because from that point I learned that you need to be sure what you are deleting and that anything a human can mess up they will, but they can also repair it. I still love computers and wouldn't dream of quitting because I mess up. I just find the information that I need and start again and learn in the process.

>^<

Winners of Implementing LDAP: 

Mike Mayfield is an accomplished programmer and has a great contest-entering program for all you contest-lovers. Congratulations, Mike! 


Mike Mayfield has been a leader in the computer industry for over 25 years, developing three top-ten programs: Word-11, The LINK, and RPM. Mike, through Northwest Digital, the company he has run for the last 20 years, has done consulting work for many of the Fortune 500 companies on almost every continent in the world. His specialty is in product architecture, design, and development, especially in particularly complex projects. Several of the projects Mike's company has successfully brought to market were previously thought to be impossible or not cost effective by other companies. For more information on Mike Mayfield, please visit his personal web site at http://www.themayfields.com/Mike/index.html. To see Mike's latest product, SweepsWizard, visit http://www.SweepsWizard.com/.

Mike's entry: 

My worst bug was a problem in a PDP-11, RSTS/E operating system driver we developed. It was in use by over 500 people, but only one company, British Aerospace in England, was having a problem. It crashed about once a week, every week. We worked on correcting this one bug for over five months straight including a long trip to England before finally finding the correction. For our work, Guinness gave us an unofficial world record for the "world's buggiest bug".

Amanda Scime of Canada

From Amanda:

Hi! I wanted to tell you that I am very happy that I was chosen as your winner. We got our computer about two years ago and I think I was almost really clueless about how to run one. I have managed to learn how to run one efficiently and my new task I have decided to undertake is to build a web page. I have been very excited about this new project and I look forward to all that I can learn about LDAP as well. For I have always been interested in programming, but not exactly sure where to start. I am looking forward to getting my book in the mail.

Amanda's entry:

Someone I know has a habit of deciding that stuff needs to be done to his computer while he is drinking. He came home one weekend and decided that he needed to install memory after he had drank about twelve beers, and proceeded to do so. When he woke up the next morning he turned the computer on and got nothing. When he looked he discovered that he had put the memory in backwards. When he took the computer into the computer store and asked them to fix it, they told him that he had fried the mother board.

Bruce Peat is a co-founder of the XML/EDI Group and President of eProcess Solutions.

The XML/EDI Group is a grass roots advocacy organization with a membership of more than 1300 professionals interested in improving electronic business. The Group's efforts since July 1997 in promoting XML for global commerce solutions have brought much excitement to the Information Technology industry. Reference materials and links can be found at  http://www.XMLedi.org  

eProcess Solutions, a management and technology consulting firm focused on the development of business exchange processes and pipelines. Mr. Peat has experience in the design and project planning of transaction-based systems including the integration of document/database management, XML, and EDI. http://www.eProcessSolutions.com/

From Bruce: 

Great news. Even better news that the prize isn't a book I already own from Wrox. Thank you.

Is Wrox running a contest for admission to their conference in Washington D.C.? Maybe they would want me to appear at the conference to take a seminar, uh, I mean to take pictures of me accepting the book ;-)

Bruce's Entry:

When I burned a EPROM with the latest code minutes before having a status meeting with the customer - and the code worked. phew!

Chris Bryant of Oklahoma 

Hi. Thanks for the book. I work for an e-commerce startup, HouseMart.com, doing web development and promotion. I also work for a web design hosting company, Webice.net, and designed www.sutherlandstulsa.com/. I'm relatively new to the industry, although I've used computers since I was 11, when I bought a Commodore 16 and taught myself BASIC. I'm also working on a web project called Urban Imperative Discourse, an online webzine and e-community for me and my creative friends to communicate/share/collaborate. That site is at www.urbandiscourse.com/, but is currently in development. 


Chris' Entry: 

I started using/studying computers when I was 11, went to college for sociology for two years, didn't graduate, but now have a better job than most of my friends who did graduate, all because I've learned about I.T. and the Internet on my own!

Ernan Ni from The University of Connecticut

Thank you very much for your selecting me as a winner of "Implementing LDAP".

Ernan Ni was born in Suzhou, China in 1969. He received his B.S. degree in Mechatronics from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China in 1991, his M.S. degree in Automatic Control from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China in 1994, and his Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Xian Jiaotong University, Xian, China in 1998. From 1994 to 1998, he was the systems administrator for the National Lab for Manufacturing Systems Engineering and the Systems Engineering Institute, Xian Jiaotong University. His research interests include optimal scheduling for manufacturing systems and power systems. He has also wide interests in computer area including database, C++, Java, ABAP and so on. Currently he is a research assistant with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Connecticut. A web site he designed several years ago is http://www.sei.xjtu.edu.cn.

You can visit my personal homepage at http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~enni.

Thank you again.
Sincerely yours,
Ernan Ni

Ernan's Entry:

Developing algorithms for bidding integrated generation scheduling under a
deregulated market.

Gail James of Tennessee 

Thank you for picking my name as a winner in your Computer Books Online/Wrox Press contest. 

I love computers and have been learning different ways of programming them for the last 15 years. I have just started to get into web site creation in the last couple of years and was just contemplating starting a site in which the book I have won will come in very handy. Recently I have been working with eNetGroup to get a site for my business up and running. The site can be seen at http://www.mvpplaque.com/. (Sports fan, take note!)

Again I thank you for picking me as a winner.

Gail's Entry:

My worst programming experience was in trying to write a program in Pascal. After I had completed the whole thing and tried to run it, it wouldn't do anything. I checked everything over many times and had other much more experienced programmers even look it over. Finally, after having tried to find the problem for 2 weeks straight we figured out that I'd had a comma where I should have had a semi colon on the 96th line. An extremely frustrating but educational experience. The good thing was it finally worked!




Richard Colbert of Florida 

I am a Webmaster and part time computer technician. I have designed the
following sites either for myself or for the company that I work for.

http://pcheaven.webjump.com/
http://www.militarydepot.com/
http://www.nailite.com/
http://www.y2kisp.com/
http://www.gold-4-me.com/  
(some no longer exist)

Richard's Entry:

I put my hard drive in my roommates computer, backed up my data to his drive, then ran fdisk to delete the partitions on my drive to re-install everything and I accidentally deleted his partition table instead. I did however manage to recover the entire partition table and all the data. Only took me 5 minutes to restore everything, but it was still embarrassing as heck.

Michael Chupa, of Mississippi, is a Research Asst. I at MSU Engineering Research Center 

From Mike: 

Thanks for selecting me in the "story" contest. 

I'm working in scientific visualization R&D with most of my work centering on environmental model visualization. Prior to my move here, I taught high school math, physics and computer science.

Again, thanks for the pick!

Cheers,
Mike Chupa


Mike's Entry:

The time I saved a file titled '*', and then used 'rm *' to get rid of it. Needless to say, I also removed a few things I didn't want to at the same time.

Stacie Yates of Kentucky 

Thanks!

I graduated May 8 from Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, KY with a 
double major in Computer Information Systems and Math. I am just ending my
first month at a new job... database technologist at Centre College in Danville, KY. 
I'm getting knee-deep in UNIX system administration and doing a bit of programming as well.


Stacie's Entry:

In a COBOL class in college, I generally breezed through the programming assignments. But on one toward the end of the second semester, I kept getting this obtuse error message. Two professors and myself had never seen anything like it. For days I slaved, looking for the error, retyping and recompiling. Always, the same error. Finally, one of the profs spotted the problem. Several lines above the line the compiler kept flagging was the spot where the line DATA DIVISION should have been. That was a rookie mistake. Boy, was my face red! After fixing that, the program ran without a hitch. I couldn't believe I did that!




Ron Miller of Michigan 

I feel privileged to have won, and thank you.


A little about myself -- 38, M, married, w/ 2 great kids, honor roll 12 yr old, and obnoxious 2 year old. I am an educated Microbiologist, BS '82 from Ohio State, avid Buckeye Sports nut, and my interest in computers did not begin until about 1994 when my partner and I purchased our first computer for our business. I read everything and anything, almost as much as would have been required for a degree. Learned DOS, then moved to the windows environment. The partner died shortly thereafter and left me to run the business for nearly 3 years on my own. Tired of the endless work hours and effort, I made a move to 9-5 sales for an ISP in Michigan where I presently run the sales and marketing division. That's about all, oh, one more thing, I am an avid gamer. Multiplay games over the net, I just can't seem to get enough of, and most recently that addiction has been with Sid Meiers new one, Alpha Centauri.

Thanks again. 
Sincerely,

Ron Miller
VP Sales
Msen, Inc.

Michigan's Oldest ('91) and Best Run Internet Service Provider!
Ron@msen.com



Ron's Entry: 

Fact is, Father's Day is just a few days away, so I'll include good old dad in the category of best computer story. When I was a young boy, I remember often times as a systems analyst with IBM, my father would come home with his huge clunky terminal, dial a number on the phone, we'd hear a loud tone or two, stick the phone directly on top of the terminal awaiting that god awful handshake. Probably connecting at speeds that were considered obscene at the time. We'd occasionally play a text version of horse racing together, or compete to see who could leave the less apparent crater on the moon, in a mathematical text version of Apollo landing. Mostly though the whole setup was used by him for work from home (he was the original telecommuter). He did so very much enjoy his work, so late into the evenings it turned me off to computers completely. So much so that even as a college student in the '70's I would refuse to listen and admit he was right when he advised me to minor in computers. I'd stay away from any course that had even a remote chance of using computers in class. Quite often he'd say "... but computers are the future", much in the fashion I have heard others claim "... but plastics are the future..." or "... but aluminum is the future..." only because these individuals worked within these respective industries. I ignored my fathers recommendation, ultimately graduating with a microbiology degree, spending years involved in Cancer Research, and fairly quickly found burning myself out from laboratory work. I then proceeded to Enter the Educational Sales arena under the auspices of Macmillan Publishing for over a decade, and within the last 3 years find myself now employed as VP of sales and marketing for a major Internet Service Provider in Michigan, working 8-10 hours a day on computers and loving it. Another 6-8 hours from home working and gaming. Move over Apollo landing for Alpha Centauri. My children, now 2 & 12, vie for my attention constantly, as so does the wife. A situation not unlike many other computer owning families battle with. I find myself saying on a daily basis through each and every sales presentation, to small and large businesses alike "... but the Internet is your Businesses future". All of this proof positive we are, as adults, a result of our childhood surroundings or environment.

Though the more I think about it, it really could be the genes? I mean, it could be that all IT professionals are born with blue blood, "Big Blue" blood.

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