I have been recently been doing more photography and Flickr was only allowing me to do so much with the images in displaying them. No customization of skin, no page grouping, no post like pages. So I decided to host a WordPress blog to host my images. I really wanted to try WordPress to see what features single-hosted blog products offer that our multiple-hosted blog system could take advantage of. So far the product is very cool, I can see how such a large developer network would help produce such...
Coming to Kansas City April 8th and 9th is the Microsoft Azure Bootcamp. This event looks very promising for those developers who are looking into Azure for themselves or their companies. It covers the wide range of topics required to understand what Azure really is and is not. Space is limited so if you are considering Azure, register for this event today.Agenda:Module 1: Introduction to cloud computer and AzureHow it worksKey ScenariosThe development environment and SDKModule 2: Using Web RolesBasic...
I know this is a bit off topic, or am I kidding myself by assuming I have an actual topic. Anyway, today around lunch some planes were practicing for the Air Show in Kansas City and we got some awesome shots. If you are in town and the weather is acceptable, I would suggest this event. It looks like it is going to be awesome. Here are some shots I took with the D300. Thanks to Doug for driving me to the different locations again, he is the best photo driver. Technorati Tags: Kansas City,Air Show,D300...
During lunch today, Doug Butscher was kind enough to drive me around to take some more train pictures for Brandon's room. I can honestly say I have not had that much fun with a camera and a car in a long time. We ended up in the bottoms of Kansas City, KS near a whole lot of steel distribution plants, but most sketchy areas that made me feel like the possibility of robbery or death was in the picture. The fearless driver, Doug, was truly fearless. We were driving along side train tracks through gravel...
Over the past 3 months, I have really been getting into playing the guitar. This was never easy for me because to get into playing the guitar, I would first have to own a guitar. I can't just go out and borrow a buddy's guitar because I don't know any Left-Handed players. So I had to drop a couple hundred dollars to see if I could play music. The Squier Stratocaster I started with a Squier Stratocaster from Musician's Friend (warehouse located in Kansas City) and began my music career :D. Jerod was...
Here is the permanent link to the video. As you can tell everyone was excited. Technorati Tags: YouTube,Coders 4 Charities,Kansas City,Charities...
Coders 4 Charities is kicking off and it has been far more successful than we expected. Doug and I both asked if we thought anyone would show up as we have had registration open for 2 months. We have 29 people here who have given up their weekend and 5 charities that are getting excellent software that will help them run their organizations better after the weekend The Crew Early In The Morning Rock Band Rooms (208 & 207) Tonight is the Rock Band contest at 11:00pm, I will definitely have video...
I just wanted to send out a friendly reminder to those who registered for Coders 4 Charities that the event starts tomorrow. Doug, John, and myself are extremely excited to host this event and work with the developers are we attempt to help these charities and non-profits with applications that will benefit them immensely. If you are in the area of the weekend and want to check out the event or just help the devs with some questions, please feel free to join us. See you all tomorrow! Here is a list...
I want to first off thank the 45 members of the Kansas City .NET User Group who attended the presentation held last night. Myself, John, and Doug appreciate the dialog and questions about the topic of ASP.NET MVC Framework and hope to see more interest in the topic as it furthers in development at Microsoft. For those of you who couldn't make it or just want to see what the MVC Framework is all about, check out the samples and presentation located at the end of this post. Recap of A Model View Controller...
Speaker: Jeff Julian Date: Thursday, February 7th (Each meeting will be on the 1st Thursday of the month) Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm Location: Centriq Foss, 87th & State Line Road Sponsor: AJI Software Description: Want to know about what is offered in Service Pack 1 for Office, SharePoint Designer, or SharePoint? Join us this month where we will dive through this topic and discuss how developers can use the advantages offered in the latest bits of SharePoint and Office. Register For The Event Technorati...
Doug has been hard at work with Graffiti CMS to get the data entry form ready for registration to Coders 4 Charities. If you are interested in the event, please fill out the form and let your friends know. Ping us if you have questions about forming a team of the event itself. Developer / Designer / DBA - Registration Charity / Non-Profit - Registration Technorati Tags: C4C,Coders 4 Charities,Kansas City,Giving Back...
On the way home from We Are Microsoft, Doug and I determined we had to create an event in Kansas City modeled after the Dallas event. We ran the idea by John and he was 100% on board. One week later, we have started the site, thanks to Telligent for letting us use the Graffiti CMS product. The name of the event is Coders 4 Charities, with the corresponding domain coders4charities.org. What do we need? Everything thus far, except a web site, but we are not quite ready. First thing we need to do is...
Doug Butscher and I were outside at the EOB today and we saw the coolest contrail (new word for me) from a jet I have seen. It steadily progressed to get more squiggly as we watched it. Check it out! It looks like someone was using a pen in the sky. Technorati Tags: Contail,Jet Vapor,Vapor Trail,Airplane,Kansas City...
My favorite Regular Expression resource, RegExLib.com, received a very nice face lift and enhancement recently and I thought you would like to know. For sometime now, the site was sort of broken, search features were not working, paging through the expressions were flaky and it looked like it was on the verge of going away. However, it looks like Steve Smith and the team were making some major enhancements and I am really excited to run into my next RegEx issue and being able to use this resource....
Today I had the honor of going to the Vice President's speech with the VFW (thanks to Doug Butscher) and it was awesome. I have never seen a public official of this caliber in person before and at 50 feet away is was definitely an experience. He spoke about the Iraq war, war funds, and other pressing topics of today. On a side note, the speech was at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. This memorial is also the National World War I Museum and I am really looking forward to visiting it in the future...
Register: http://www.clicktoattend.co... Presented: Becky Isserman Date: Thursday, November 1st (Each meeting will be on the 1st Thursday of the month) Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm Location: Centriq Foss Training 8700 State Line Road, Suite 200 Leawood, KS 66206 Phone: 913-322-7000 Description: Sharepoint has several tools related to backing up and restoring site collections. In this session we will learn how to utilize stsadm to back up the site collection and put it on a scheduler, so that we...
Thursday night we will be holding a meeting for the Office Developer User Group of Kansas City covering Web Content Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and I would like to invite anyone in the area to attend. As we are a new user group, AJI Software is donating an XBox 360 as the raffle prize of this month. Anyone who attended last month's meeting will get an extra ticket in the raffle, however, you must attend to win. To register, visit the Office Developer User Group's website...
One of my best friends since childhood, Justin Hall, has recently become famous with his build your own diet plan. He calls it the Chipotle Diet and he detail the plan here on Geekswithblogs.net. Check out his post and make sure you watch the video on FOX 4 in Kansas City. He has lost 43lbs to date so it is interesting to see what geeks can do when they put their mind to it. Technorati tags: Chipotle, Dieting, Justin Hall, Fox 4, Kansas City...
Tonight, John and I will be presenting on SharePoint 2007 at the .NET User Group in Kansas City. Along with this presentation we will be launching the Office Developer User Group of Kansas City to add an additional focus on Office and SharePoint development in the area. If you are around tonight, please stop by and have some free food and good conversation. TriCom Technical Services will be the food sponsor this evening so be sure and thank them while you are there. The meeting starts at 6:00pm,...
What else have I been up to lately? Well we are in the process of moving to Lee's Summit, MO, where our offices are located. Currently I drive 45 minutes each way every day to work and its starting to drain on me. Also, all our friends live on the Missouri side of Kansas City, so it just makes sense. If you want to move to KC or just around in KC, take a look at the property. For you GWB members, this room is where Geekswithblogs.net was founded. Technorati tags: Real Estate, Kansas City, Olathe,...
...here are my answers anyway. I think it is a fun topic. [Update: Or maybe I just can't read well...Chris Haaker (can't believe he isn't an MVP yet) tagged me last year and I just didn't see it.] Geekswithblogs.net was created because I was kicked off of dotnetweblogs.com (A.K.A weblogs.asp.net). The back story was, a few of us were discussing the differences between VB and C# and we can just say the conversation started to get heated. Toward the end of the conversation, Cory Smith and I were the...
The new servers will be hosted at FullControl Networks here in Kansas City. Currently they are being setup by their staff and should be available for me to configure soon. Yesterday I visited their facility here in KC and I must say I am very impressed. They have everything you would want in a hosting company and they are local for us. Something comforting about knowing your sites are hosted just a few miles from where you are. If you are in the market for dedicated hosting, I would highly suggest...
We had so much fun on this trip. I did most of the driving on the trip, because I am most comfortable behind the wheel and I have never been able to drive that much before. Being in the car with these guys on the way home from 6am to 2am was great, never a boring moment. Then something happened that just changes everyone's memory about the trip. Dru and Joseph were passed out in the back and something was telling me to quit driving for a second and take a break. After 3 24oz coffees with 3x caffeine,...
Tomorrow morning at 11 am, Joseph, Dru, Tim, and I will be leaving Kansas City to head to the South Carolina Code Camp. Why is John not going? He is, but he is speaking in Birmingham for INETA and will be driving to Nashville to meet us around midnight. The trip is estimated at 16 hours and since we have 5 drivers, we are going all the way through. Tim and I have been working franticly to get Where's Tim and PodcastStudio.net ready for the road trip podcasts. Tim has been adding Podcasts and Photos...
After driving to St. Louis for DevCares, the attendance of 4 people was a bit disappointing due to the travel (4 hours each way). On Thursday, I was hoping Kansas City would come through and have a packed room for me to present to. Well my prayers came true. We had a completely packed room yesterday during Ron Hostetter and my presentations over Windows Workflow Foundation. My presentation covered designed Custom Activities, including the designers and validators. I was a bit worried showing the...
Monday I presented at the DevCares event at the Microsoft St. Louis office. The presentation I did covered Windows Workflow - Designing Custom Activities. I am presenting the same session tomorrow morning at the Kansas City DevCares event, so it should be fun to see how the attendees react to WF. On the way to St. Louis, after I stopped in our office, I set the destination of the hotel in my Garmin Nuvi 350 and it said arrival time would be 11:34pm. Now most the time it recalculates the arrival time...
Saturday 8:30PM CST - This past week I was in Vegas with a client demoing some products we have been working on and the show went great. Saturday night the show wrapped up and we were planning a night of fun with some gambling. I cracked open my first beer sitting is a very nice suite at the Wynn and my phone started ringing. I noticed it was my wife so I thought it was our normal evening call we have when I am out of town. I answered and I could immediately tell from the sound of her voice something...
Architecture. Custom Development. Mentoring. Training. Development Methodology. Launching and expanding your enterprise systems requires more than just installing the software and turning it on. That’s why at AJI Software we offer a full spectrum of expert development and consulting services for your organization. While these words may be tossed about nearly to the point of being cliché, to us they represent a firm commitment to reaching your business goals through the effective use of technology....
Wow, I must say I haven't had this much fun recording a podcast. Last week, the Indigo Road Show came to Kansas City and we had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Turner and Payam Shodjai of the Indigo team to discuss what the Indigo Road Show is, as well as answer many of the questions developers have about Indigo. MP3: http://www.podcaststudio.ne...
The Visual Studio 2005 Developer Conference by Microsoft is coming to Kansas City and St. Louis in late May/early June and I will be presenting two sessions at each. The sessions are Leveraging Data in ASP.NET 2.0 and What’s New in ASP.NET 2.0. The events should be lots of fun and they have some great speakers in each city. If you are new to .NET or have been a seasoned veteran, this event is right for you. Registration is low (Only $99) and you will also walk away with the precious beta discs...
First off, Happy New Year everyone. This year my wife and I celebrated with another pregnant couple by watching TV and playing Scene IT: TV Edition. Unlike the past two years, I promised my wife I would stay awake to watch the ball drop as I accidentally fell asleep waiting for midnight. After a victorious game for myself, we got ready to watch the ball drop. KMBC-TV, the local ABC station, was playing Dick Clark's Rockin New Years Eve, along with some commercials. But the station manager that night...
Special Kansas City .NET User Group Meeting - December 16thLocation: Microsoft Kansas City OfficeTime: 6:00PM - 7:30PMTopic: Software in a Service-Oriented WorldIf services are the next big thing—and they are—what impact will this change have on software development? David Chappell will give a perspective on this question, focusing on the impact this move will have on .NET. Drawing from his forthcoming book on Indigo, David will describe how this new technology fits and what it does,...
INETA has giving the Kansas City .NET User Group the luxury of having Jeff Prosise speak at our group tomorrow. Unfortunately, I will be out of town during the presentation. If you are in the area, this event is highly suggested. I'm leaving for the airport in a few minutes to catch a ride to Kansas City. Tomorrow night I speak to the Kansas City .NET SIG. Join the fun if you're in the area. I have a new prop to try out in tomorrow night's talk. I won't say what it is so I won't ruin the surprise....
Recently, John Alexander, from Vision Data Solutions has been recruiting me for his .NET Practice team. Well this past weekend I accepted the offer and will be starting on June 21st. This is great news for me, even though I will miss the individuals at PRL. It was a great team to work on, but the excitement generated by the VDSI team is too much to pass up. Being the only development-oriented MVP in the Kansas City area working with the RD for this area, I can see great things coming out of the building....
Jason Beres and Andrew Flick have been discussing their feeling on the Imagine Cup and I agree with everything they are saying. I would like to say that I agree from personal experience, but I didn't have the luxury of judging at a competition. The Kansas City area had 3 competitions canceled because of lack of contestants. Yeah thats right, not enough student interested in winning $25,000. Crazy! I think it is the lack of .NET course ware in the area though, because .NET to most schools in this...
Today, I found out I have been MVPed in the area of XML. Wow!!!!!!! I am completely ecstatic. If you see someone walking around in Kansas City without a face, just a grin, that's me! Congrats to all the new MVPs
We have a bus, 54 seats, and an XBox to giveaway. What else could you ask for? If you are in Kansas City and want to go to the “ASP.NET Roadshow” in St. Louis, please contact me and I will get you of the list. This is going to be fun! The date is 12/4/2003 and we will be leaving around 1:30. Update: Microsoft has actually set up an event for us. http://msevents.microsoft.c...
I just picked up a nice Longhorn Machine for $279. The “Super Computer Sale” is in Kansas City right now, so if you are here and need a spare box, they are cheap. It's kinda funny because last week I was talking to Bill about the machine he was building and told him to wait for a computer sale like the one here