If you are anywhere in the San Francisco Bay or Silicon Valley area this post is for you. Others are welcome, but you might find the drive a little long depending on where you are.
On 3/23/2010 we are going to be holding our first DotNetNuke User’s Group here in the DotNetNuke Corporation’s Headquarters in San Mateo, CA. All are invited and encouraged to attend, it doesn’t matter if you know DotNetNuke or not yet, user groups are a great way to learn about the software, and get to meet other people using the platform for a variety of different things.
You can get more information from our website, but here is some of the basic info:
Date/time: 3/23/2010 6pm
Location: DotNetNuke HQ (Grant St)
Come out and meet fellow DotNetNuke User's from the San Francisco Bay Area held at DotNetNuke Corporation's HQ! This will likely be the one and only DNN user group meeting held in this office as we'll be moving in the near future, but we hope to have more group meetings at the new office as well (just down the street).
Topic: What are you doing with DotNetNuke?
Description: Come out and tell everyone else in the Bay Area what you are doing with DotNetNuke. Got something cool to share, please feel free to do so. If you're the quite type, don't fear, we won't make everyone talk, just those interested. You'll also get to meet some of the DotNetNuke Corp employees here in the area.
Organizer: Chris Hammond, Director of Training Programs, DotNetNuke Corporation. (recently relocated to the bay area)
Food: Pizza and Sodas provided by DNN Corp!
RSVP: So we can plan on the proper amount of food please RSVP prior to 6pm on Monday the 22nd. Send an email to info@baydug.org to let us know
Not in the Northern California area? Then be sure to check out the DotNetNuke User Groups page to locate a group close to you.
It has been quite a while, over a year, since I really spent some time washing a waxing a vehicle. My how time has flown, last year we spent time prepping for, and moving to Colorado, during that time I was without a “fun” car, having sold the Corvette back in October 2008.
Today, for the first time since likely 1995 I spent time washing and waxing a car in California. And the weather was beautiful! I spent the yesterday evening and today up at a friend’s house in Fairfield, the town I went to high school in. We had dinner with friends from HS last night, and then this morning I spent the day cleaning up my the 350z for the first time since picking it up, and boy did it need it, especially after the 1200 mile road trip (on the back of an open trailer last week from Colorado to California).
I washed the car, clay barred the various marks and such in the paint, washed it again, and then waxed the car. It looks mucho better now, if I do say so for myself. Here are some pictures of the beauty after her bath.
The rest of the afternoon I hung out and had a BBQ with friends, and new friends. I had a great time, but had to head back down here to San Mateo so I can work tomorrow. I made the drive in 1hr and 10 minutes. If only traffic were that nice all the time I might consider buying a house in my old stomping grounds and commuting to work. But I can only imagine that most days that would be a 2+ hr drive during commute times. Some day, perhaps later this week, I’ll get around to blogging about the Project350z’s first autocross which happened a few weeks ago.
So it has been over five and a half years since I started a job. I forgot how nervous one can get! I’m excited, but nervous at the same time. New people, new places, new things to do. Fortunately for me, I know some of the faces, less so some of the places, and have an idea of some of the new things to do. I’m starting up at DotNetNuke’s Headquarters in the morning.
My wife and I spent today getting things squared away around San Mateo. We came in town just afternoon from staying last night in Vacaville, California, and visiting some old haunts from my high school days.
The first thing we took care of was getting my car trailer into storage, we road tripped out here over the past three days in our truck, with my car in tow. Natalie will be spending the week here looking for rental houses, and a place to board and train her dressage horse. After which time she will be driving back “home” for a while, while we wait for the house to sell back in Colorado.
Hopefully tomorrow night the real estate agent we’re meeting with will be able to point us to some potential rental homes that will work out for us. This hotel thing will likely get really old really quick!
I’ll try to post another update later in the week after things get moving along. I’m sure I will have lots of paperwork tomorrow and then getting situated within the organization. I’m excited, nervous, and anxious to get started!
Today was our first ultrasound, we got the see our baby's heartbeat for the first time. HOLY CRIKEY this just got really real, in a good way. Natalie was brought to tears, I realized this as my cue to get up from my chair and hold her hand!
Based on the ultrasound we are now told our due date is 10/1/2010, not near as cool as 10/10/10, but it will have to do! My buddy Jim will be pulling for us to delay a day and go 10/2/10 in honor of his birthday. Dude will be 34 by then, crikey he’s old :)
So we are getting more and more excited about the coming baby. In the doctor’s office today I picked up a flyer for a cord-blood bank, something I had never heard of before this morning. I read through the flyer and the basic gist is they will take your baby’s umbilical cord blood and cryogenically store it for an amount of time in case you need it. They say the stem cells in cord blood can be used to cure all sorts of diseases. I thought this sounded like a cool idea, and figured I would check out the pricing: basically it was $150 for the kit to collect and ship the blood back to the cord-blood bank.
Then you paid something like $1800 for 18 years of storage, or $96/mo, or $65/mo for a two year term. Kind of pricey I thought. So I thought about that, and figured I would do some research over the coming months to see if this is something we wanted to do. Well, low and behold I loaded up MSN.com this evening (putting off packing for the trip to California) and saw a headline talking about cord-blood banks! Off to read it I went.
Take a read yourself, the basic gist of the article, and the feedback from the various doctors and medical societies mentioned in the article is that private cord-blood banks are pretty much a waste of money. So now I have it in my head that we don’t use a cord-blood bank, but we’ve got another 7 months or so to decide, we’ll see what happens in that time frame and what other research says.
Now I’m off to work on packing more, we’ve got a long road trip starting in the morning.
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!
So the space shuttle launch trip is going to be longer than planned, possibly. We are waiting to see when it will launch after this morning’s scheduled launch was scrubbed last minute. Hopefully the launch attempt on Monday morning goes off as planned. Terec and I are down here, ready for the next attempt, and willing to stay longer if delays occur, but I’ve got so much going on right now getting home would be great!
I’ll post photos and such over the next couple days if things turn out. So far we’ve not gotten anything great from the photos, too windy and dark.
Today marks 6 months! We’ve been homeowners and residents of Colorado for six months now, having closed on the house on 7/31/2009. It’s been fun so far, though we haven’t seen near as much snow as I had hoped!
(idea blatantly stolen from James Nelson’s Saying Goodbye post)
We’ve been together for almost 4 years, you and I. I was love at first site, but it took a internet chat conversation with 4 guys to get you where I wanted you. Once your previous owner let a price slip I jumped on the opportunity to buy you, and a week later you, and a billion parts, were loaded up into a trailer for the trip home.
Welcome to the web site of Chris Hammond, here you can find all of the recent blog posts I've made on my various blogs. For information about me check the About Chris Hammond page.
Buy My Book! Released in June 2009
I'm proud to be a member of the INETA Speaker's Bureau, as well as an INETA Community Champion
Copyright 2010 by Christopher Hammond