Dusseldorf, Germany - Day 18

Long, but fun day today. Woke up at 7:30 am and ate a relaxing breakfast down in the lobby. My hotel actually has an amazing breakfast selection. I get to eat breads, meats, cheeses, and eggs every morning with orange juice and coffee. The waitresses are very friendly and they are always so surprised when I bring my dishes up to them after I'm done eating. I think I'm supposed to leave everything at the table, but it makes them smile and they seem to treat me better every morning because of this. I'll continue to do it each morning. I think they appreciate it too, so... :)

I made it to Bob's around 8:30 am and we hung out for a while drinking coffee and just relaxing before opening the laptops. This pretty much defined the rest of the day though. We simply hung out and bounced ideas off of each other about features and changes in a complete no-stress environment. It was great to just speak up and bounce an idea off of Bob from time to time in between long running compiles. I don't get this luxury at home while I'm in the basement and sometimes spend too much time over thinking things. A lot of progress was made today.

Around lunch time, we headed to a really nice Pizzeria restaurant named Due Mila. Bob and I both ordered a pizza and some apple juice. About 45 minutes later, we found that we were the only ones in the restaurant talking... the owner actually came out and told us that they were closing the restaurant. We had to leave. :) While some might be proud to "close the bar", we were actually pretty proud that we got to "close the pizzeria".

From here, Bob and I drove down to pick up Michelle's car from the shop. This meant that Bob would drive her car back to the flat, and I would get to drive his car. I'll admit, I was a bit nervous, but anxious at the same time. This was the first time I've driven a car in another country (besides Canada). There were a few times that I had to rush through a traffic light because I had NO IDEA where I was and couldn't afford to let Bob out of my site. :) There was another section where we drove along a rail road track in the middle of the road, and I thought I was going to get rear ended by a train. As we got closer to Bob's flat, the roads got a little tighter and I was concerned that I would scratch his car. However, I did fine we made it back to the house safely without incident.

We worked and strategized til around 7pm. At this time, one of Bob's friends came over and we enjoyed a few beers on the back porch. His name is Heiko and I'd heard so much about him for many years. There were a few times when we almost met each other, but due to schedule conflicts, we could never quite be in the same place at the same time. It was nice to finally put a face with the name. The weather was great and we all sat out side and had a great time talking and laughing.

After Heiko left, we enjoyed a delicious spaghetti dinner. Michelle had cooked spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad for dinner. We also shared a bottle of red wine from Cologne. Michelle and I talked race strategies and shared various running stories and so forth. I'm very excited for the race this weekend, and I can tell that Michelle is too. I can really feel her excitement and nervousness when she talks about it and I love it! Tomorrow we're all planning to drive the full marathon course and pick up our race packets.

Shortly after dinner, Bob and I had to attend an online sales meeting. These meetings are really cool actually, because we get together over Skype and have video chats from all over the world. Kevin calls in from London, Patrick calls in from Paris, Bob and I called in from Dusseldorf, and Steve called in from Chicago. Technology is simply amazing.

Once the meeting was over, I headed back to my hotel room and was able to chat with Jennifer for a while before she had to go to her Volleyball game. She's been very busy with the girls and I think it helps her (and the girls) stay busy and not think about how long I've been away.

Tonight was their last game and it's unfortunate that I didn't get to see all their games. Jennifer told me that Lizzie has been doing really good and that Jazzy is able to serve overhand now!! <3 I can't wait for them to show me all they've learned when I get home. I really am missing them a lot. Especially at night when it's quiet and they're out enjoying their evenings doing fun things. Rumor has it that they are finally getting their pigs tonight! I'm anxious to hear what they name them (ie. Pork and Chop? Link and Patty?). :)

Now I'm surfing through channels deciding which news is old news and which news is new news. Basically, I have two options: MSNBC or CNN. They are the only two english speaking channels on TV in my hotel room. :) I've heard all the latest world news in English and all the stories are now re-runs of the same stories I saw earlier. Last night, I actually got caught up listening to some french news channel. It let me know how much french I've forgotten. I understood about every 23rd word or so.  

CodeMash 2009 - Day 1

Well, I arrived at CodeMash last night right before the roads got bad. Found my old DD family immediately as I walked in the door (James, Mike, and Phil). They helped me move my drums in (thanks guys) and then we headed out to get some dinner. I ended up eating WAAAAAY too much and wound up refunding my dinner later that night into the porcellan bucket. I suffered from some insane insomnia well after that ordeal and didn't get to sleep until after 3am.

I wanted to wake up early and get in my 3 miler, but ended up sleeping in til almost 7:30am (alarm clock "am/pm confusion" issues). Since breakfast was almost over, I just grabbed my room key and headed down to the dining area to get in on the feast. Breakfast was excellent and I made sure I didn't over indulge this time. :)

Venkat Subramanium keynoted here at CodeMash this morning and he was a great keynoter, I laughed a lot and learned a lot. The first session I attended after that was 'Introducing Prototype and Scriptaculous" presented by Leon Gersing (aka: FallenRogue). He talked about using Javascript utilities (namely Prototype and Script.aculo.us (as well as various references to JQuery)) and I must say that it was very informative. I couldn't find any gleaming reasons for me to switch from my focus of learning JQuery to using these though (thoughts?)... I think I'm full speed ahead on my endevor to master JQuery. (Sorry Sergey) :)

The next session I attended the "Developing for Microsoft Surface"computing by Jennifer Marsman and... "Joe" from VectorForm (sorry Joe, great job though) :) It was very cool. They showed how all the pieces work together to provide the rich experience, including the way that real world objects can be recognized using a new type (infinitely unique) "bar code" pattern. Jennifer Marsman sat down and even took an old WPF sample app and converted it to a Microsoft Surface app using simple RegEx find/replace in the XAML, and had it running on the Surface in less that 2 minutes (literally). This is not recommended of course, but the fact that they CAN do it says that it should be fairly easy to get geeks using it. After the session, I went out and tinkered on one of them in the hallway. They are very cool to play with, but that's about it for me...

After that, we broke for lunch and then I headed to the "Adobe Flex with MVC Frameworks" session by Robert O'Malley. Unfortunately I thought it was something that it wasn't and I wasn't understanding anything that he was talking about. I think the session assumed that I was familiar with (at least) one of the technologies that he was talking about, and I wasn't. :( I turned to Mike and we went out into the hallway and geeked out on our laptops instead and talked about some programming issues we were both struggling with. Much more funner?? IMO. :)

The next round of sessions, I chose to attend the "Functional Concepts for OOP Developers" session by Brian Webber and it was pretty intense. It was well done, but it covered a lot of different functional syntaxes (namely Haskell) and functional concepts (namely these) that I simply wasn't familiar with (YET). I was able to "keep up" for the most part with my understanding of how implementing the same object oriented concepts would work, but the talk was a little more involved than I thought it would be, to say the least. 

For the last session of the day, I headed over to see the "Microsoft Virtual Earth Now in 3d" session by Aydin Akcasu. The last talk I saw from this guy included a Wii remote sending data to a C# app that (in turn) controlled a robot bird (that flew) the he let people fly over the crowd using bluetooth to send commands to it... again, using a wii remote. Talk about cool!? Anyway, this session Aydin showed people how to EASY it was to embed rich 3d mapping technology into existing apps with absolutely zero effort (3 lines of HTML, that's it); here is the page he built to give his talk with, right click and view source to see what I mean. Basically, Microsoft Live Maps offers a free mapping technology that lets users (ie. anybody that has a web page) expose an interactive 3d world (think Google Earth... but...) inside a web browser. To extend it and make it do things, simply create buttons with javascript to call methods on it. Beautiful! At the end of his talk, I went up to shoot the breeze with him and he showed me this cool 3d mouse called SpaceNavigator that he used to fly around the (virtual) world with. Very slick!

Dinner was damn good, then I hit the gym to get in my 3 miler before attending the jam session. The jam session was really cool! I only played a couple of times, but I did got to rock out with Carl Franklin, Brian , , and . It was a very bluesy mix this year. Last year was mostly acoustic and low key for the most part; whereas this year was ampliphied crowded and bluesy. Carl rocked out like a true entertainer, and I got to see Dustin Cambell jam on a guitar too (that dude is good). Corey Haines brought his harmonica and guitar again this year, and he played some really cool stuff (major talented musician). Surprisingly (maybe not?), there were a lot of poeple playing instruments this year, and it was much more "the norm" this year than last year. This was awesome to see. CodeMash is so cool. Plus I think they're starting bring out the good musicians (marketing ideas guys, Jim, Jason, Jeff,..). :) 

I ended the night with a bunch of geeks down at the bar. We discovered that Raji loves to buy drinks for people, just don't ask him for water... :)

CodeMash 2009

I CaN't WaiT!! Jason just posted his excitement about the session list for CodeMash 2009! I must say that it is very impressive. This event kicks ass! This year will be very different for me, as it's the first time ever that I'm going as an attendee rather than an exhibitor. The first year, I took my family, last year I went with my DD family and had a blast. This year, I'm going solo! No family, no booth, and no last minute presentation changes to worry about with James. I never minded hovering around the booth talking about Data Dynamics great products, but there was that whole "look professional" aspect to it.

This year, InfoPlanIT is sending me and I'm free to not worry about anything for 3 full days. I will be wearing un-tucked street clothes and I'm going this year to just learn, learn, learn. My latest project at InfoPlanIT has got me doing a lot of web development these days. I've been trying to learn the best way to build customizable enterprise business intelligence web portals... from scratch. The session list at CodeMash is very impressive and gives me a lot of different opportunities to learn from (Ruby, Silverlight, Flex, F#, and so on..).

If you are into technology and can talk your employer into sending you to CodeMash, then, by golly, do it! This is the hippest event in the midwest and you will get your money's worth, ten fold! Not only in the value of the sessions, but also in the fun factor, I mean it's an indoor water park!?. When you're not hanging out with geeks talking about code, your jamming out to Rock Band or screamin down the slides at the indoor water park. Oh yeah, you can also learn about the latest and greatest technologies in the industry by some of the smartest people in the industry.

So there it is! Lots of .NET, Silverlight, Flash, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, F#, you name it... there's even sessions on developing applications for Microsoft Surface computer and the iPhone. Excuse the huge link, but I'm that impressed with where it takes you. :) I'm going with a wide open mind this year and not restrict myself to any one topic. Hope to see you there! Oh yeah, did I mention I'm taking my drumset again!? I told you this event kicks ass!

My New Job

As I recently stated, I changed careers... Well, last week was my first full week working for InfoPlanIT and I really like it so far. My new job title is not really defined, but I guess you could say that I'm a "business intelligence developer". My role is to develop business intelligence solutions for clients. Period. I am also the lead developer on the company's flagship product: Business Analyzer

The company is based out of Chicago, but InfoPlanIT has clients all over the world. So there is definitely an opportunity for travel. Jennifer and I took a few days earlier this month and went up to Chicago so that I could meet everybody and get acquainted with the main office. We had a lot of fun, though we didn't really get to go around and hang out together a lot. Jennifer had a lot of free time, therefore she shopped while I was out getting introduced everywhere. In her defense, she did shop at the "discount stores" in downtown Chicago. :) We took lots of pictures, and I'll be sure to upload them to my online photo album soon...

So going back to my role in the company: if you look at Business Analyzers' homepage, you will see that it has a large focus on a certain pivot table control. Yes, that's right, the Business Analyzer uses DynamiCube to deliver a dynamic dashboards and reports in a completely disconnected manner. Since I've come on board full time, I plan to integrate Data Dynamics Analysis and Data Dynamics Reports heavily into the product for the next version.

As an old employee of Data Dynamics, I know exactly how solid their products are and how committed they are to ensuring top quality and ingenuity into their products. Integrating Data Dynamics Analysis into Business Analyzer will add so much to the product.

So there it is, I have moved from a focus in .NET components to actually using them in real world .NET applications. How exciting!? I must say that it's really fun being on the other side of the API. Most of all, now I get to do all fun things like continuous integration, test driven development, refactoring, and all the other fun stuff that us .NET developers love to do.

Best of all, I get to do it from the luxury of my own basement.