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October 2006 Entries
10-Time World Champions!

I'm old enough to remember the Cardinals winning the World Series in '82, but I don't remember where or with whom I watched it.

I don't think I'll ever forget where I was they won the '06 Series, though.

I was flying back to St. Louis from the Heartland Developer's Conference in Omaha, and was very disappointed that I wouldn't be able to watch what could be the championship-clinching game.

About half an hour before landing at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport (blast American for moving their hub out out of St. Louis so you can't get a direct flight to/from Omaha), I was able to pick up the Dallas ESPN Radio station on my radio and hear the game starting with the bottom of the first inning.

At the airport, there was a mini TGI Friday's bar/restaurant with TVs showing the game, and a group over 30 Cardinals fans gathered outside to watch.

We boarded the plane to St. Louis just as the top of the ninth started, and the flight attendant let us know when there there was one and then two outs. At the exact moment that the plane pulled away from the gate, he announced that the Cardinals were World Series champions, and the passengers let loose with a big cheer.

Cardinal fans got a little spoiled the past two seasons with 105 and 100 win seasons, and at the beginning of this season, the chances of the Cardinals winning the championship in the first year in their new ballpark looked pretty good.

The chances sure didn't look good as they limped to the end of a frustrating regular season, though. It seems like there's always some Cinderella team that catches fire in the post-season and, for once, that team was St. Louis. (It looked like the Tigers might be this year's Cinderella team, but their magical carriage turned back into a pumpkin as Halloween approached.) I've got no ill will against the Tigers or Jim Leyland - they should be a really good team the next few years, but I do enjoy the seeing "experts" like that sphincter Bob Nightengale of USA Today who picked "the Tigers in 3" and said "The Detroit Tigers' biggest obstacle to a championship will be keeping a straight face" eat crow.

Congratulations to Tony LaRussa for becoming only the second manager in history to win a World Series in both league, to the Cardinals, and to their fans who aren't old enough to remember '82 - I hope we don't have to wait another 24 years for another day as sweet as this. 

Posted On Saturday, October 28, 2006 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
"taking off momentarily" doesn't "jive"

Sorry to be a grammar Nazi, but I heard the same mistake made in two consecutive presentations at the HDC: "That doesn't jive with me".

"Jibe" means "to be in harmony or accord". "Jive" kind of means the opposite. The correct term is "doesn't jibe".

A slightly more serious nit-pick: It scares me when flight attendants say "we'll be taking off momentarily". "Momentarily" doesn't mean "in a moment" - It means "for a moment". When my plane is about to take off, my hope is that it will remain airborne until it arrives at another airport, not take off "momentarily" and plunge into the lake at the end of the runway. 

 

Posted On Saturday, October 28, 2006 8:13 AM | Comments (9)
Heartland Developers Conference 2006

I'm back home (to St. Louis, home of the world champion Cardinals!) from the Heartland Developers Conference in Omaha. The presentations that were most valuable to me were:

I met Robert Hurlbut on the walk from the hotel to the convention center, and he told me that the speakers were not paid for their presentations and travel, although their hotel rooms were paid for by the conference, so I won't mention any of the presenters I didn't care for by name, but one piece of advice for anyone giving a presentation:

Read Scott Hanselman's Presentation Tips, especially the parts about making sure your fonts are large enough so everyone can actually read what you're showing. Get your big fonts ready before the presentation, and use Zoomit for apps where you can't increase the font size. 

I can't imagine how much time and work the guys who organized the conference had to do, so I hesitate to criticize, but I was disappointed by a couple of things:

  • If you say that registration starts at 7:00, please start registration at 7:00, not 7:21 - Don't make people stand in line when they show up on time.
  • The evaluation forms were used for the prize drawings, but the forms didn't have a place for us to write our names - not a big deal, but they said that they'd made the same mistake last year. Please update the form now so you don't forget it again next year.  
  • A couple of the presentation topics were changed from the advertised topics. I was very disapponted when the second day keynote: "The Best .NET Best Practices" by Andrew Troelsen was changed to yet another LINQ presentation - the fourth of the conference, and pretty much a repeat of the last part of Andrew's "C# 3.0" presentation from the day before. I may be biased since he's a homeboy who works at the same company I do, but I thought the LINQ presentation by Denny Boynton at the St. Louis .NET User Group Monday night was at least as good as any of the similar presentations at this conference.

I would definitely recommend next year's HDC to .NET developers in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota.

If you're from St. Louis or the lower Midwest though, and looking for an affordable conference with great speakers, I would suggest the devLink conference in Nashville (I hope they plan to do it again next year!).   

 

Posted On Saturday, October 28, 2006 7:43 AM | Comments (1)
devLINK 2006 - The Tennessee .NET community rocks!

Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors of the devLINK conference, held in Nashville last Friday.

It was well worth the 5 hour drive from St. Louis:

  • big name speakers like Markus Egger, Ken Getz, Billy Hollis, Bill Vaughn, Mark Miller, Eric Sink and Wally McClure
  • great prizes
  • great food - breakfast, lunch and dinner (I've never heard of a conference where they fed you after all of the sessions had ended!)
  • It was all FREE

My only complaint was that there were too many good sessions going on at the same time and I couldn't attend everything I was interested in, but they videoed several of them, and I'll able to see them on their web site.

Thanks again to everyone involved!

Posted On Wednesday, October 18, 2006 7:27 AM | Comments (0)
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