So I went to the autocross today, kind of a last minute thing, and boy am I glad I did.

I left the house at 11:30am, got there and changed tires and then ran around 2pm (or after due to a bunch of timing issues).

I was pleased with my runs, my time being faster than a few cars I was sick of being beat by (ST civics!). Though when I went to check the results I was in 6th out of 7 in the Index class I run. I run Index, not in the standard BSP class at SCCA events because I want to compete against the fastest of the fast, no offense to the regular BSP competitors.

6th of 7, eh, at least I wasn’t DFL. But then tonight when the results are posted I ended up 10th on the overall index for the event! Woot!

*happy dance*

I believe the first heat of the day had a drying course, and the event overall was smaller (122 drivers) but I’ll gladly take a 10th on overall index any day here in the Bay Area!

I’ll post videos from the event tomorrow. I would have had three angles, but my original GoPro is such a POS that it didn’t get a single recorded video.

Within the past week or two I started getting notifications that a version of a domain name that I owned was available for purchase. I’ve owned the .ORG for the domain name for 5 years or so now, but the .COM was taken (not being used).

These notifications that I started receiving were for the .COM version, and made it sound like they owned the domain and I could purchase it from them. I probably got 5 or 6 different versions of this email, from different people, so I started wondering what was going on. I figured out that the .COM version of the domain was actually expired though not yet released.

So I checked on Godaddy, and I had a backorder credit that hadn’t been used yet, so I setup the backorder for this .COM domain name that was coming up for deletion. The domain went into the “pendingDelete” state which usually lasts 5 days. This morning the domain was officially deleted

Godaddy came through and acquired the domain for me. So, now I am thinking. Should I email back the spammers who said they could get the domain for me and say “Thanks for the heads up”

Sunday when I was getting ready to come back, I got an automated call from AA telling me that my flight was cancelled. They fortunately rescheduled me through Dallas instead of Chicago and I made it home, later than initially planned, but at least I made it home.

Today, Natalie and the baby get to the airport in STL and find out that their flight to LA then SFO is cancelled. So they also get routed through Dallas. They were supposed to be home 3 hours ago, and they are still not scheduled (due to consistent delays) to actually arrive at SFO until almost 11pm tonight.

Thanks American Airlines. Now that my frequent flier miles are used up I think I will ditch using your airline and use one that actually has flights.

If you didn’t see Shaun’s blog post earlier this week you should give it a good read through. The post announced the fact that starting with Version 6.0 (targeted for Q2 2011) DotNetNuke will no longer be developed/released as a VB.NET Application. All development of the core platform will be in C# (this does not mean that the community modules for the platform will change languages).

Most of the feedback I have seen so far has been rather positive, most folks who use DotNetNuke on a regular basis understand that the language that the framework itself is written in really doesn’t make a bit of a difference to 99.9% of all DotNetNuke based websites. The framework is there for you to build on top of, and while it is open source, it is actually recommended by all experts that you don’t modify the “core” code of the framework, if you need to make changes you do it through the use of modules and custom providers.

Extensions (modules, providers, skins, etc) for DotNetNuke have always been language independent, you can develop your extensions in whatever language you want. I personally have developed all modules for the past 4-5 years (besides the Wiki module) in C# rather than VB.NET out of personal preference.

So the framework being VB.NET or C# shouldn’t make a difference to most people.

People have questioned the decision still, why would DotNetNuke Corporation bother spending time with the conversion? Aren’t there plenty of other things in the platform that could use the attention? What about all the “bugs” this will introduce into the platform? That is the biggest question I have seen from people so far, and I’ll be honest with you. I was one of those people, I had the very same concerns.

When the discussion to convert to C# began I was very much against it. Every one of those folks listened to me and heard my arguments. Having worked at DNN Corp for a year now, and having been part of the community for 8+ years, I know there are plenty of things in DotNetNuke that could use attention to make them better, easier to use, etc. I told Shaun, I told Rob (VP of Engineering), and I told Navin, our CEO.

Before the final decision to convert was made I made some phone calls to engineering and got myself a copy of the C# version of the upgrade package, with VERY VERY early DotNetNuke 6.0 code. I wanted to test this code out myself, I wanted to prove that moving to C# at this point in time was a bad idea.

So I downloaded one of my production websites, I got it up and running locally, and then I upgraded from v5.6.1 6.0.

Do you want to know what happened? The damn website worked….. The upgrade worked. I was very surprised. Sure there were a couple of very minor issues, a problem with the ADMIN pages, but digging through the website, my custom modules worked, my pages worked, my content was all there. My event viewer (event log) was fine, it wasn’t throwing errors, things were working.

This was very early code, sure there were a few things that still needed to be worked on (removing old VB files, etc) but the website was working, and it was working far better than I had expected it to be.

I was sold. I called Rob, I called Shaun, I apologized, I told them I was wrong, and I told them I supported the move to C# because I knew the ultimate benefits would be worth it (see Shaun’s post for those).

So, for all of you doubters out there, I totally and 100% know where you are coming from, I’ve been there, but I think that you will ultimately find that this move is going to be great for DotNetNuke.

That’s not to say there won’t be issues, there are always issues, but DotNetNuke Corporation strives to make each and ever release of the platform better, future releases won’t be any different.

If I haven’t eased your mind, or even if I have, I would encourage you to check out the CTP for V6.0 when it is available later this month. Test out the C# version, run some of your production websites through upgrades in a test environment.

We definitely need your help making sure things work, I will sure be doing a lot more testing of my websites before the official release, far more than I typically do as I generally am limited in time. I will make the time over the next month or two to make sure that I can do all that I can to make 6.0 the best release yet.

I hope this isn’t the start of a hellacious travel day. This morning I got an automated call from American Airlines telling me that a portion of my trip today had been cancelled. Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but at least they provided me with a new booking on another flight leaving a little later, and arriving a little later.

Instead of flying through Chicago and then on to SFO, I’m flying through Dallas. I’m just hoping I get out of STL before the thunderstorms move in so we don’t get delayed by that somehow!

For today’s blog post (Day 57 of 2011) I was going to write a blog post on my phone, but I wanted an app to do it with. Well guess what? There don’t appear to be any apps in the Android Market that support MetaWeblog API, which is what this blog (running on Engage: Publish) uses for remote publishing.

I did find a reference to a project on code.google.com called Mobilogger, but after some testing I am not even going to bother linking to it as the application is far from complete and useful at this point.

So here I sit, writing a blog post from Windows Live Writer on my laptop. Perhaps now that my course is done I should really look into writing an  Android application, and maybe a blogging app would be a good place to start? hmmmm

Those of you from Vacaville may recognize the title here, those of you who aren’t, maybe you’ve heard of a little band called Papa Roach.

Anyways, today in St. Louis I ran around a bit. I went to lunch with a guy who got me where I am today. My first real boss after college, though I also worked for him before I left college. Bobs as I like to call him (Roberts is his first name) is the guy who got me into the .NET world, and without that I wouldn’t be doing what I am today, I am very thankful for all that he has done for me over the years. Though I really should thank my dad, because had they not played golf one day back in summer 99 I wouldn’t have met Bobs to begin with!

After lunch I ran up to UMSL (University of Missouri St. Louis) to see if I needed to do anything while I was in town for my final course that I’m waiting for the grade to come through on. I had to fill out a change of graduation date form, but other than that there wasn’t anything else to do.

This evening we went to a little party put on at the Nelson’s house. It was great to see a lot of my fraternity brothers and their wives and all the kids running around, We had a little graduation party, and it even included cake! I hope my Final score was enough to get me to graduate, otherwise I probably need to give the cake back! Unfortunately we had to cut short from the party as Natalie came down with some sort of stomach bug this afternoon, hopefully she feels better tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my last full day in St. Louis, we’re planning on heading out to a barn so the baby can see her first horse, hopefully they scare her and she never wants to ride them! Daddy can’t afford two ladies in the family riding!

So today was our second full day here in St. Louis, and I tell you what, we sure haven’t missed the weather here since we left. It’s been rainy, icey, and sleeting pretty much since we arrived. Between icy winters and hot HUMID summers there isn’t much to like about the weather here!

Today Natalie and her sister and the kids went to the mall for a while. I headed over to Best Buy to check out the new Motorola Xoom tablets. I must say, it was hard not to walk out of there buying one (two actually because Natalie wants one too) but I held off. I’m curious to see what happens with pricing here in the next few weeks. I have a feeling with the IPad2 announcement likely next week that the Xooms may be changing things a bit, we will see.

This evening we went by SoloPerformance and saw Dave Beth and Sam there, then headed down to Bill’s house for dinner with Kathy and the kids.

It was a good day, great to see old friends.

On our trip yesterday we flew to Chicago, then down from Chicago to St. Louis. As with a lot of flights into St. Louis there were a ton of recruits on the flight making their way down to Fort Leonard Wood. Two of them were girls, sitting in the row behind us. First things first, I respect anyone who commits to our nation’s military, and I applaud them for doing so.

That being said, holy cow  are we in trouble. The first 30 minutes of the 1 hour flight were spent with each of them trying to show how dumb they were when it came to geography. Neither of them knew where Missouri was, and I’m sure you could have asked them where ANY other state was (besides Connecticut or Wisconsin where they were from) and they wouldn’t have a clue where they were on a map.

I tried to tune them out, and Jacqueline tried to drown them out with a little bit of crying, but it was hard to do. The best part, or worst, was when we finally came down out of the clouds and were about to land in St. Louis. They both looked out the window and commented on how “crappy” Missouri looked” I wanted to turn around and say “welcome to winter, if you aren’t covered in snow and white, this is what the rest of the country looks like at this time of year”.  But I didn’t, I chose to let it go.

But I must admit, they are right, it sure is brown here! A totally different kind of brown than Colorado was, and much different than California is. It is rather desolate looking.

If you have any interest in doing DotNetNuke Module Development you should check out the Module Development Webinar that starts next Tuesday. The class runs from Tuesday the 1st through Friday the 4th, and runs 8am-12pm Pacific Time the first three days, the 4th day runs from 8am-10am.

Here’s a brief description of the webinar

Module Development in DotNetNuke is the primary delivery mechanism of extended functionality for the platform. This course will get your team started by first setting up their environment and then going through the architecture of a DotNetNuke module. At the end of the two days you will have a custom module developed and packaged, ready to install onto any your DotNetNuke web site.

In this course you will learn:

• To create modules using C# or VB.net
• To create Visual Studio projects targeting DNN
• Best practice SQL recommendations
• DotNetNuke API basics
• To package and deploy modules

You can find more details about the webinar at https://www.dotnetnuke.comhttps://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Training/tabid/1299/Default.aspx

If you are interested in taking the course though you should email [email protected], we have an unpublished Training deal going on right now, but you need to talk to one of our account reps to get the details!

St. Louis

We’re headed back to St. Louis for the first time as a family tomorrow. I’ll be in town until Sunday, Natalie and Jacqueline will be there until the 4th of March.

We’re trying to see as many friends as possible, but will also be spending a lot of time with Natalie’s sister, brother in law, and our nieces.

See you there!

The night before what should be my last final of my college career (though I leave the possibility open of going back for another degree in the future).

I’ve got a final for my Money, Banking and Financial Markets class at 2pm tomorrow. Assuming I pass it should be the last final I have to take.

15 years, 5 months and many days after I started. I likely won’t be “official” until May, but at least I should be done! *knock on wood*

So I’ve been finding it harder and harder to use up my Zune pass credits every month lately. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a month or two as well.

What am I talking about? If you subscribe to Zune pass ($14.99/mo) you can pretty much download almost all the music you want (ex: the social network soundtrack is apparently not available), but that music is only good as long as you have a subscription.

With your subscription you also get 10 “credits” a month that you can use to download and keep 10 songs, meaning they won’t expire if you cancel your subscription.

Lately I’m finding myself not really branching out into new music, I listen to Cake and Pearl Jam primarily, and often times I just use Pandora to pick my music for me. I’m thinking it is likely time to shut off the Zune pass subscription, at least until they come up with some “video” content that would allow me to cancel my cable service…..

The past two days I’ve been commuting into San Francisco in the mornings to conduct some onsite DotNetNuke Training for a customer of ours. Rather than try to drive in and find a parking place downtown I took the Caltrain in from the San Carlos Station. Having only taken the CalTrain to the Milbrae station previously and then taking Bart the rest of the way in I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The train left the SC station and I arrived at the client location (after hoping on a Muni bus) in less than 40 minutes! Pretty damn sweet for a cost of about $13/day ($9 for the caltrain day pass and then $2 for the Muni).

Tonight coming home however it was a little more difficult. I managed to miss the Muni ride after I was done, so I had to wait around for the next one. I still managed to make a Caltrain that left the station in SF at 5;27pm. I think I finally got off the train though in San Carlos around 6:40pm, much longer than my trip in. We ended up getting delayed for some reason due to "mechanical difficulties” on a train in front of us.

I don’t think I would like to make that trip every day, but for the past two days it was a nice little change of pace from my 9 mile commute I usually have every morning.

It’s almost 10pm here on the 40th day of 2011.

Unfortunately I don’t have the energy to write a full blog post! So this will have to do I have a couple of big ones I need to get written here soon though

If you’ve ever needed to send a backup of your DotNetNuke database to a developer for testing, you likely trust the developer enough to do so without scrubbing your data, but just to be safe it is probably best that you do take the time to scrub.

Before you do anything with the SQL below, make sure you have a backup of your website! I would recommend you do the following.

1. Backup your existing production database
2. Restore a backup of your production database as a NEW database
3. Run the scripts below on the NEW database
4. Shrink the NEW database
5. Backup the NEW database

Today was our longest day away from the house with the baby, and all in all things went very well.

We left around 10am and headed up towards Vacaville, timing it so that the baby had a bottle around 8:30, and was up until we hit the road at 10. She fell asleep and woke about 20 minutes into our lunch at Panera Bread at Nut Tree in Vacaville. From there she had a bottle and was awake for more of the next couple of hours as we did a little shopping at the outlet mall in Vacaville.

Then we headed off to a Super Bowl party in Fairfield, Jacqueline got another bottle there, but didn’t get down to sleep till probably almost 5pm, it was loud, and she wasn’t too big a fan of the cheering (mostly from silly Steelers fans) but she held up very well.

She got another bottle right before we left and slept the whole ride home. Natalie fed her again when we got home, though I think she slept through most of that feeding. We’ll see how she sleeps tonight, hopefully most of the night! I’m off to bed early as well, I am going to hit the office early so I can spend a few hours in the  afternoon dealing with the Nissan Leaf which is at the dealer waiting.

Seriously, where does the time go? I get home from work, spend some time with the family, eat dinner, start working and next thing I know it’s 10pm.

I would write a longer blog post but I really don’t have time! I’m going to study now and get my final assignment done for my Economics of Money and Banking course so that I can get the final requested and hopefully take that in the next two weeks to finish things up!

So what’s gone on so far in 2011? Let’s recap on this 33rd day of the year.

So far I’ve kept up with my blogging commitment, every day, You can find a list of all the blogs at https://www.chrishammond.com/

I’ve managed to post 33 photos of myself for #Flickr365 and 33 photos of Jacqueline for #Baby365. The baby is growing! She’s up to 13lbs 13oz last time she was weighed and in the 95th percentile for height at her age, a jump from her last measurement.

I’ve managed to autocross the 350z once already this year, and have at least 2 more events coming up this month, with a possible 4th as well.

The Super Bowl is coming this weekend, I’m ready for it, we’re going to finally get up to Fairfield and see some friends we haven’t seen in probably 8 months!

Sunday I partook in the NorCalUFO autocross, their second event of the year, my first attending since the baby was born in October. I got to the event and heard that they had a course worker get hit at their last event, unfortunately he was hurt pretty bad and of course doesn’t have insurance, so they were taking donations. I assume that their insurance doesn’t cover the injuries? I believe (could be wrong) that SCCA events always have insurance that would cover someone who got injured, but perhaps I’m wrong. The odd thing is this is the SECOND course worker they’ve had hit in the past 6 or 9 months. Not exactly something that you want to hear when you show up. (Mental note, keep that in mind when signing up for worker positions)

WOOOOOOWHOOOO! Fun at an autocross again. It’s been a few events since I’ve really had fun at an autocross. This time around I was still on the crappy street tires, which actually I think are worse than before as the rears are getting pretty bald, it was wet, so that made things more interesting.

So this isn’t the blog post I had intended to write today, but I think it’s a useful one nonetheless.

For those of you who autocross, or partake in any other motorsports. How do you travel with your video equipment? Discussion on where you mount your cameras and such, and what types of cameras will be left for another set of blog posts, but for now, how do you get your equipment to a race?

If you’re a small time autocrosser like me, you likely aren’t towing your car around on an enclosed trailer with lots of storage space.

At this point I have 3-6 potential video cameras I could take/use at any one race. Two GoPro’s (one HD and one of the SUPER CRAPPY original versions), a Chase Cam/PDR, plus a Canon HV10, 5d Mark II and a point and shoot that will do video. Now granted, I will almost likely never put the 5d Mark II on the car, I do take it to events so that I can take photos.

So what’s the best way to get things to an event? Right now I’m packing things into a lowepro 300aw, and that is probably the best solution for the time being, but with all that equipment I’m going to have to trim back what I put in the bag (less lenses for the 5D).

What do you use? A Pelican case? A bag? Something else?