Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman, Richard Dumas and myself made the trek to Chicago this weekend for DotNetNuke’s first showing at CMSExpo (www.cmsexpo.net).

We weren’t really sure what to expect, as the conference was in the past a Joomla dominate conference, and while there isn’t anything wrong with that, it gave us some concerns. I must say though, all those concerns have been tossed out the Window. We had a great first day!

read the full post for all the details

It looks like Barrack Obama may be announcing tonight that Osama  Bin Laden is dead!

One can only hope that this is true and he does announce it this evening.

I was in a hotel the morning of 9/11 watching the attacks on the World Trade Center happen. Kind of fitting I am sitting in a hotel here tonight as this news breaks.

Well Richard Dumas and I made it to Evanston, IL for the CMS Expo that begins on Monday. We’re setting up the booth and such tomorrow.

It was a pretty uneventful trip, I didn’t realize American Airlines had moved at SFO to the new terminal, it’s pretty nice, much nicer than the other terminals.

Now we need to find some dinner, and find a place to watch UFC 129!

We got our lease on the place in Half Moon Bay today!

I tried to get a moving quote from Stevens Van Lines, the company that moved us here from Colorado, but I haven’t heard back from them. I guess I will have to try a few more companies.

Anyone know any good movers on the peninsula in the Bay Area?

All signs point to yes! So here we are, a year after moving, and what are we going to do again? Move, of course. I hate moving, but you couldn’t tell by my history of moving!

So we got verbal confirmation from the real estate agent in Half Moon Bay that she’ll be getting us a lease this week for the place we looked at over the weekend. Now I need to get a moving company over here for a quote on packing and moving out stuff!

So this post is actually going to cover two different things.

First, I’ve decided to stop with a few things electronically. I’ve taken part in Foursquare over the past year or so, and I find myself trying to get points checking in to places I’m driving by. I also realized that I really don’t need to check in anywhere, even the places I go. Foursquare, to be honest, is useless to me. So long Foursquare, at least for now. I also find myself playing “Cartown” on Facebook. I go there daily, sometimes multiple times a day, and all I do is click through my “jobs” and then go on to other things. As of now, the game is pointless. It’s just habit. So, that too is getting cut. No more Cartown for me.

Now for the real cutting the fat topic. Saturday I started a new weight loss plan. Right now the plan is to better control what I eat, not consume as much, not eat more than I should at every meal. I started out Saturday morning at 259lbs, my goal is 225lbs. I’ve got myself a reward attached to that as well. I want to hit 225lbs and hold at that weight (+-5lbs) for 3 months. If that happens, then I can get my reward. A Motorcycle  

I’ve tried that goal before, we’ll see how it works this time around.

So for the past week or so I’ve been working on a new skin for Natalie’s website. Well I have uploaded it and applied it to the site. I’ve got a bit more work left to do, minor styling tweaks, some additional graphics, and updating/organizing more content, but check out the work in progress and let me know what you think!

https://www.nataliehammond.com/

We spent today doing family things, and I must say, it was a great day!

First we all headed down to Half Moon Bay to check out two rental houses down there. We need to find a larger place, I need an office, and Natalie needs a bedroom, so we are looking for a 3br place instead of our current 2br place.

We looked at two places, one that was a 4br with 1100 sq/ft, and one that was 3br and 1700 sq/ft. The 1100 sq/ft house had nicer amenities, new appliances, bathrooms, etc, but the master bedroom was barely big enough to fit our california king bed, there’s no way it would also fit the rest of our bedroom furniture.

The second place was perfect! While the appliances aren’t updated, size wise it should work out great. We told the agent that showed it to us that we were very interested and got an application to fill out. I sent that in this evening, I had intended to do it earlier, but as I was filling it out, I realized that I didn’t have my driver’s license. I left it at Safeway yesterday, so I had to run out and get that.

We’re hoping to hear back on the rental here in a couple of days, it would be nice to lock that down so we can give our current landlord notice about when we are leaving. He’s been great, he understands why we are leaving, and has been very willing to work with us as we look for something else.

After looking at the houses, we drove around Half Moon Bay a bit, realizing it was much larger and nicer than we had originally thought. It’s about 14 miles door to door from the place we want to get, and the office, so that shouldn’t be too bad a drive every day, assuming traffic doesn’t bite me!

From there we went to the mall for pictures with the Easter Bunny. Here’s the result

So, time for a refresher. Why did we leave St. Louis?

THE WEATHER!

That blog post is from 2008, and it describes the reason we left. Well tonight there is more news, and more reason as to why. There was apparently more major storms in the area, even a Tornado that apparently hit and caused damage to Lambert Airport.

While we’ve had the following here in California over the past 4-6 weeks, no damage that I know of! We also have lost power since we’ve lived here, something that happened a few times a year in Missouri.

1. Tsunami warning
2. Earthquake
3. Thunderstorms
4. Lots of rain
5. Tornado warning

I still think things here in California are far better than Missouri. While we were in St. Louis in February we had ice, snow, and lots of rain. All in the period of a week.

For the past few days I’ve been working on a new DotNetNuke skin for Natalie’s website. I’m nearing completion on it!

I’m hoping to have it up over the weekend, and if all goes as planned, I’ll be using the layout (with color/graphic modifications) for ChrisHammond.com and even an overhaul of Project350z.com.

I took the day off of work today, and took Natalie and baby Jacqueline to the baby’s first baseball game.

I went to the Oakland A’s game (playing the Red Sox of course) with Mike Walsh, a fellow coworker at DotNetNuke. I wanted to scout out the stadium, and figure out how taking the baby to today’s day game was. The seats last night were great, section 111 row 12, just up from the field. The weather was perfect, the game, eh, not so much, the Sox lost 0-5.

Today’s game was different. The weather, not so great, more on that later. The seats, they were even better, though only one row closer and 2 closer to home plate.

We got to the parking lot just as the Star Spangled Banner was being sung. We got into the game and to our seats, after walking through the rain! It started raining on the way into the stadium. By the time we got to the seats though it actually stopped raining.

We watched the first couple of innings, and the baby enjoyed looking at all the new people around. About the third inning we brought out some formula and the baby took a bottle and passed out in my lap. We shifted her over to Natalie so I could run up to concessions and get us some lunch. While I was up there I missed a homerun, and then the rain started.

I ended up back at the seats for a couple of minutes, but then we decided to call it a day. Too much rain, no ponchos, and the stadium staff told us out umbrella was too big! So we headed home.

Overall a good day with the baby, even if we missed the end of the game.

If you are in the Chicagoland area, or are up for a trip to Chicago, you should check out the CMS Expo coming up the 2nd through the 4th of May, 2011.

What is CMS Expo?

“CMS Expo is a 3-day learning and business conference designed to help content pros get the facts, find the support and make the contacts needed to help them succeed. Hosted by the CMS Association, CMSX delivers timely, relevant and actionable insights to help leaders make informed decisions for business.” – https://cmsx.us/

Where is CMS Expo?

The CMS Expo is being held at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, IL

Who is going?

Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman and myself (Chris Hammond) from DotNetNuke will be presenting sessions, and we will have Richard Dumas along for the ride as well. We have a number of sessions that we are providing, as well as prizes that will be available at our booth. You can see a full listing of our sessions from the DotNetNuke page of the CMS Expo website.

Today, Natalie and I took Jacqueline to the park down the street to get outside a bit. We stuck her in the swing and let her play in the grass.

The swing just kind of exists for her, she can’t really do much except sit there and hold on! Here’s a video of some of that excitement.

The grass was much more entertaining for her, she has never experienced grass before, and she found it useful to hold on to while trying to maintain her balance.

If you have a 3 bedroom house for rent in San Carlos California, and are open to dogs, we can be your future tenants!

Natalie and I are looking to find a larger place than we currently are in, as we feel the baby needs her own room, and I need to maintain an office. The baby doesn’t necessarily need a room for herself, but we need a room for her so we can try to start sleeping more!

We actually love the place we are in, the location is great, we are up in the hills and have some amazing views! But we have just outgrown the 2br space. We’ve asked the landlord if he could just add another bedroom on for us, but no luck! He’s a great landlord, and I’m sure if he could make it happen he would!

We are looking for a 3 bedroom place in San Carlos, Belmont, Redwood Shores, Redwood City, or somewhere similar. If you have something, use the Contact Form here on the website.

After a team building event tonight after work I was taking Will Strohl home, driving on Woodside we saw a Delorean driving down the road. I think I’ve seen one on the road before, but I couldn’t tell you when.

We were on Woodside road, the same road I saw my first Hell’s Angel on.

You see things in California you definitely wouldn’t see in Missouri!

So the other day I was at the airport waiting to pick up Natalie and Jacqueline from their flight back from LAX. I walked into the book store just outside the security gate. I found a couple of books I liked, and almost thought about purchasing them. But I stopped,  I chose not to purchase them. Instead, I loaded up amazon.com on my Droid and I found the three books there.

I chose not to actually purchase them at that point, but I added them to my Wishlist so that I would have them there to purchase later on.

I actually did something similar a few weeks ago, not quite adding things to a wishlist, but when we were in St. Louis I went to a Borders that was closing, and had everything at 30% off. I picked up 3 or 4 hardback books and was about to check out. But I then decided to do a quick search on Amazon to see how much the books were. One of the books from Borders was $19.95-30%, from Amazon it was $8.95 in hardback, brand new. Wish Amazon Prime, and lack of sales tax, I can get the book for $8.95 shipped two day.

Sorry book stores, but I don’t see how I will buy much from you in the future.

So here we are at day 101, I have to keep going!

Today’s blog is going to be to “correct” the blog posted last night. I used google voice transcription to post, and it didn’t exactly get what I wanted. First you should read the original post over here.

And here’s what I really said

“Hmmmm so here I am driving home from El Toro and I realize that it is day 100 of blogging every day this year I need to get a blog post done. I don't have a computer handy so I need to go ahead and use the audio features on my android phone. I meant to get the blog post done today while I was at the event site but I was unable to do so today, so I have to get day 100 of 365 done. I will go back and edit this blog post to accurately convert the proper word on day 101 but for now you have to try to translate what google really thought I meant verses what I actually said”

So today I did some testing with UStream and the FM Audio Broadcast at the El Toro ProSolo. I think I managed to come up with a way to broadcast the announce stream out on the internet (audio only) using UStream.

I setup a new “Channel” for the ProSolo on Ustream, we’ll see how it works out tomorrow, but if you want, give it a listen by going to (only active during competition, and if it works)

[LINK REMOVED]
 

This is completely unofficial, and if it goes down it goes down, no promises that it will work!

Between the live audio and https://sololive.scca.com you might be able to feel like you are actually in El Toro being miles away! The event is supposed to start at 9am, we’ll see how things work out.

Tonight I went to the Southern California DotNetNuke User’s Group. It was a great meeting. Darcy from DocVerify.com presented a very good presentation/discussion on how to speed websites up. Not in particular DotNetNuke websites, but everything covered related to DNN.

Check out his website, it is pretty darn fast www.docverify.com

So Jacqueline got to try out Carrots for the first time yesterday. Here’s a video of that, at least the beginning. I have an ending video as well where things really start to go downhill! I’ll try to get it up next week when I get home.