Recently I had my eyes opened up to the wonder of the Samsung Frame TV. If you have a Frame TV you can use it as a picture frame, either pulling in art work from Samsung (with a monthly subscription) or by providing your own digital files for use as display pieces on the device.

This weekend Dave and I headed down to Blytheville Arkansas for the first SCCA ProSolo of the 2014 season. I haven’t given autocross much though since Nationals in September, the primary thought I have had since then is that I figured I wouldn’t autocross much this year. The local SCCA region really put a damper on my autocross spirits last year, so I figured I might run a few National level events, but few if any local events.

Things have been quiet around here, so I figured it was a good time for a status update that is longer than 140 characters.

We are in the middle of the process of planning our next move, true to our nature, we’ve been in Half Moon Bay for less than 18 months, and we’ll be heading back east. We’re going back to St. Louis in December, and currently looking for a place to live. I’ll be working from home and travelling back to San Mateo at least once a month to be in the office at DNNCorp.

The move and planning for such is taking up most of our time, though I am also travelling a lot for work lately, headed to Columbus next week and San Antonio after that.

Here’s a photo of Natalie and Jacqueline taken earlier this evening.

So this is totally unrelated to DotNetNuke, as most of my posts tend to be, except that I am getting ready to travel for an extended trip overseas and I was wondering how could I take some blog posts and articles that I found online that I want to read, with me on the plane trip. The problem with my flight being that I will be going overseas which pretty much rules out inflight internet (at least on United, which I have decided booking the flight on was a bad idea, but it is booked). So how can I take some articles from websites with me, without having internet, and without killing trees? Well my Android tablet of course (I assume this would also work on an IPad, but no guarantees). Using my tablet, along with DropBox, and then of course a PDF reader (Amazon Kindle works) I can read articles that I’ve saved.

If you’re going to the Travis AFB Skies over Solano County this weekend, good luck finding a schedule! Actually, good luck of finding much of anything.

The website for the show appears to be https://www.travisairexpo.com/ but it hardly has anything useful on there. The only thing that is of any use is the do’s and don’ts section of the FAQ.

I’m hoping to get out there on Saturday to see the Thunderbirds, but there is no telling when they will actually perform. I assume later in the afternoon, hopefully that assumption isn’t wrong!

Maybe next year the folks running the show will setup a DotNetNuke based website, hell I’ll even help them out, so they can see how easy it is to setup and maintain content with the best open source content management system.

UPDATE: Finally I found some info, looks like they will close the show around 3pm! https://www.dailydemocrat.com/ci_18574402?source=most_viewed

Today after finishing up the custom DotNetNuke Training I took off on the Causeway, crossing over the Lake Pontchartain Causeway bridge. The bridge is the longest continuous bridge over water in the World, so I had to take a drive over it.

From there I decided to head west to Hammond Louisiana. Why not? I drove through town, took a couple of pictures which I’ll post later, here is one I posted while I was there.

I’ve spent the last two evenings in the French Quarter. No, not drinking it up and partying like a college kid, but like a 34 year old married man, walking around with a camera looking for interesting things to take pictures of. No pictures of people yet, but check out some of the photos I took tonight.

 

Disadvantages of being in New Orleans, HUMIDITY, I still hate you.

Advantages of being in New Orleans, Central Time Zone, all the shows come on early!

Flying into New Orleans has to be one of the best views ever. It is amazing.

This evening I walked around a bit looking for dinner, a nice trip around the French Quarter. I didn’t take my good camera, just the point and shoot, but I took a couple of photos, here are two I uploaded.

 

So I am home from CMSExpo and I am trying to go through photos. I’ve finally (I think) given up on Windows Live Photo Gallery, as my library of 543 GB of photos (146k files).

I downloaded Adobe’s Lightroom 3 for a 30 day trial to see how it works. Anyone have any opinions on how best to manage all your photos for processing?

I sort my photos on the file system by year/month/date (into folders for each). Fortunately for me I also tend to remember when an event occurred, so finding photos comes fairly easily because of this.

Yesterday’s adventure to San Francisco was caught on camera! Check out the video of our drive

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.

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.

So what was going to be a single big announcement, that I’ve been sitting on for a number of weeks now, recently got trumped. So before I talk about the first announcement, I’ll talk about the one that trumped it!

Natalie and I are having a baby! So far we’re only about 5 or 6 weeks in, with a tentative due date of 10/16/2010, though I am really hoping we can pop that kid out on 10/10/10! We are most definitely excited about this, though it wasn’t exactly planned, it definitely is something we look forward to. I keep telling her I want twin boys, and my good buddy Leigh over the pond suggest that if we do we name them Jack and Daniel, I love it!

Now, for the original announcement ;) We are moving to California! Years ago I left home. I went to Missouri. I went to school. I got a job. I changed jobs (a few times). I lived in Missouri for 14 years, my parents even lived there for a while, but to be honest, I never really considered it home, it was just where I was in life. Just over 6 months ago we moved to Colorado. We purchased our first home. We love it, but even Colorado still doesn’t quite feel like home, it does more so than Missouri ever did, but there is still something missing here. (We actually love Parker Colorado, and have the best neighbors ever, they are some of our closest friends.)

I’ve always thought of home as California. I went to high school (3 of 4 years anyways) in California. I left for college, and I always said I would go back if I could make things work out. Well things are working out. Natalie and I put the house on the market two weeks ago and we are moving to California! I won’t torture everyone in the way I did with our move to Colorado (think goingtocolorado.com) but I will try to keep friends and family who are interested up to date as things progress.

I can’t go into other details just yet, what I’ll be doing there, who I will be working for, but I can tell you that I start working in California on March 1st. I look forward to catching up with friends from high school and ages past, and Natalie looks forward to winters that don’t get below freezing constantly :)

If you are interested in purchasing a great house in Parker Colorado be sure to check out ours, it is for sale!

Tonight after another day of DotNetNuke training I went up to Mountain View to meet up with a friend for dinner. This friend used to live/race cars in St. Louis, but now lives out here in California and works for Google. I took the opportunity to drive up to the Google campus and take a look around a bit. I also realized that the exit for the Campus is the exit in which I got into my first car accident, back in 1995. We were on our way to a Live (the band) concert, and I ran into the stopped traffic at the exit, a friend then running into me.

So tonight I took for for San Francisco, it wasn’t too far, about an hour drive from my hotel down to Pier 39, maybe a little further due to traffic. I got the camera out, and after fighting with the parking meter headed off to take some photos. I hit the Pier for a while, taking a collection of photos, and then headed off to find Lombard street, the windy part. Fortunately I’ve been using my Droid (phone) for navigation this trip, and ...

It’s been a year since I was last in Cali, and I’m heading back! What’s the big deal? Well I half consider California home, even more so than Missouri even though I lived in MO for 14 years. I spent 6-9 grades, and 11-12 in California, in both Southern and Northern California. I got married in California, my brother lives in California, and quite a few of my friends do as well. So any chance I get to go back I look forward to.

This time around I’m heading out to the Bay area for a few days of DotNetNuke Training with a client, I’ll be there later tonight training Tues thru Thursday, and then flying home on Saturday. I’m going to visit with some friends from high school Friday night at a little dinner get together I’ve arranged. I’m also hoping to check out the DotNetNuke offices in San Mateo on Friday while I’m there.

I’ve yet to decide what camera(s) I’m taking with me, I’d like to take both DSLrs but I don’t want to carry them both. If I had a flash attachment for the 5D Mark II I would leave the old Rebel at home, but I currently don’t, so I need the Rebel if I want to shoot any flash shots of the gathering Friday night, though I guess I could just use the point and shoot for that.

It looks like 2010 is going to be another busy travel year, I am headed to Rhode Island next week for 2 days of DNN consulting out there as well.

Stay tuned for some pictures of my Cali travels later this week.

So it looks like my travelling is starting back up here pretty quickly. This weekend Natalie and I are headed to Colorado to do another round of house hunting. We’ll be back in town either Sunday or Monday, thankfully Kim is staying at our place again to watch the dogs while we are gone, thanks Kim! For more info on that trip check out https://www.going2colorado.com/

Next weekend I’ll be cruising around Missouri and Illinois on a Harley with Kevin, we did this two years ago and wanted to do it again before the move to CO. The week after that I’m headed to Virginia for a couple of days of DotNetNuke Training. I’ll be back in town the weekend of our niece’s birthday party, and then the following week I head to Tampa Florida for the Day of DotNetNuke. The DayOfDNN is actually on Saturday but I’ll be doing a DotNetNuke Essentials Workshop on Friday, and also a DotNetNuke Best Practices Workshop on Sunday following the event.

In other news I also got word this week that I’ve been accepted as a speaker for the third year in a row for the DotNetNuke OpenForce conference held in Las Vegas in November. I’m honored to have been selected to speak again, there were a lot of submissions this year and a lot of big names in the community included in those submissions. Also a quick congrats to my fellow Engage employee Cuong Dang for having two sessions at OpenForce this year, his second time attending and presenting.

It’s turning out to be a busy summer, hopefully we find a house this weekend so we can get our move on and get settled so we can enjoy all the upcoming things!

So I'm here in Minneapolis teaching another week of DotNetNuke Training. It's an interesting town, but I'm looking forward to being home again this weekend and working on the Datsun www.project240z.com

Monday it looks like I am driving to Indianapolis for the day to meet with a new client, then driving home Monday night. That'll make for a long day, but I would rather do that then stay over night.

Check out my flickr feed for some photos www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/

While i've been here I've been trying to finish up a few chapter reviews from the production layouts for the book. I have one chapter left to review, and Pat has a chapter or two to finish up. After that I "think" we're done with the book, but we'll see what the publisher says!

Natalie and I just booked another trip to Colorado using Priceline. We're going 4/3-4/5, Friday morning, and returning Sunday morning. Now to do lots of homework before we make the trip!

I used Priceline tonight, which restricted us from choosing the times we fly, but we got two tickets and a rental car for $428. Going through Frontier directly the flight would have been $642, without a rental car.

No, this isn’t a hang over blog post. I’m here in Connecticut doing some super secret (not really) work and got to hang out with the cast of Mondays What Sunday Threw Up for dinner tonight.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not much of a podcast guy, I have tried in the past, but I like my music too much to listen to something else throughout the day. That might have to change now. As soon as I get home I’m going to add this to my podcasts on my Zune software to start syncing up the show. These guys are damn funny in person, the clip I heard from a show from a few years ago was even more funny, so I am going to have to give this a whirl. I question, when would I listen though? I’m concerned if I listen while driving down the road I might laugh myself off the road…

Thanks for dinner tonight guys, it was fun and I hope to see you all again!

So last year I made it all the way through April with blogging at least once a day, and while it will look like I blogged on the 7th, the date for that post was really on the 6th. This is posting on the 8th, so, I made it 6 days before I missed a blog post :(

I guess I will have to try again NEXT year to blog every day of the year. I tell you, this week has been nuts, if you follow my twitter feed at all, I posted that I already have 33 hours in our time tracker, after just three days of work. I have a lot left to go, and another book deadline for next week, along with travelling out of town next week. It looks like it will be another busy weekend!

I am going to make time to see a movie with my wife, we’re going to go see Gran Torino on Friday night.

Carol and I went to the first game of the double header today at Fenway Park in Boston. We had standing room only tickets but with the weather managed to get ourselves seats in the grandstand after the second inning.

Another loss for the Red Sox, at least they won the 2nd game of the double header this evening.

I'm flying back to St. Louis in the morning, with a 2.5 hour stop in NY. I'm going to try to get to bed now, more tomorrow as Natalie and I prepare for Amsterdam.

So I am sitting at the Newark Airport, ready to fly home. Flight is just a little over an hour away. Talk about a long two days, but it was definitely fun. Met some great people training today, hopefully they learned a lot from the session. I'll post another blog tomorrow when I can must up some energy.

It has been a long day. Cliff Notes: Flight to New Jersey (slept), Picked up rental car, parked rental car in daily parking with my stuff. Train to Penn Station, Wander around NY, random Subway trips. Yankees Red Sox Game (Sox Win! Sox Win!) Subway back to Penn Station. Train back to Newark Airport, hop in rental car, drive to Parssippany to hotel. Read tons of email, go to bed.

While I thought I had this whole trip to New York tomorrow to see the Red Sox play the Yankees turned out to be far more complex than I had imagined. I ended up getting a rental car this evening so I would have a place to store my bag(s) while I head into the city tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise I would have had to pay $60 each way for a car ride to/from the hotel to drop off my bags.

I also could have rented a storage locker with Amtrak at Penn Station, but that would have required me to get an Amtrak ticket, the cheapest of which I found was $40.

So I got a car for $142 for two days from Priceline, compact, not too bad I guess. Now to finish packing so I can go to bed early.

What should I wear tomorrow to the game, a red sox jersey? Will I get killed?