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Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 1:09:38 AM

So tonight after work and before the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting I ran to Borders to see if I could find my book on the shelf. Well guess what, I did!

My book at Border's

I was pretty stoked to find it, but was shocked to only see the DNN4 book on the shelf, not any of the other DNN books. Well after digging around for a while I found them on another section, so I took the opportunity to organize a little :D Here’s the result.

DotNetNuke Books at Border's

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 12:13:36 AM
So Saturday at noon I booked a flight for Natalie and I to Denver, for our 5th trip to Colorado for house shopping. There were two homes that popped up last week, at the end of the week, that we thought looked great as prospects for us. We considered putting in offers without even going out and seeing them, but just couldn’t quite pull that trigger. After skating 12 miles Saturday morning, well to be honest I skated 11 and walked the last mile due to hardware issues with my skates, I came home and talked to our agent, and then started looking at flight options. I tried and tried to make Priceline work for us, but the best deal we could get on priceline was $350/person, way more than we wanted to spend. After a few hours of effort I finally came across a last minute deal on Travelocity with airfare and two nights hotel in the Denver Tech Center for $280/person, I booked it and less than four hours later we were on our way.
Chris Hammond
Monday, June 29, 2009 5:37:25 PM
So it’s been way too long, 6 months to be pretty exact, since we had a new release for Engage: Publish . Well last Thursday it finally came! We released Publish 5.4 on our website, though without announcement because of everything else we have had going...(read more)
Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 28, 2009 2:13:07 AM

At noon today we booked another flight to Parker Colorado, and it’s not midnight here in CO. We got into town around 10pm, drove by the two houses we’re looking at tomorrow to see what things look like at night.

Hopefully tomorrow will be fruitful, two great looking houses, both are NOT short sales. I brought the good camera this trip. Time for bed.

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 5:03:53 PM
So it’s been a long time coming, but finally, today, there is a stable release of the next step in the evolution of DotNetNuke. Version 05.01.00 was released today on www.DotNetNuke.com   If you’ve been under a rock, DotNetNuke 5 has been coming...(read more)
Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 1:36:38 AM

We got back from Colorado on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon I was out in the driveway power washing the extra suspension for the 240z. I got quite a bit done, it looks a lot better than before, and I also managed to get most of the disassembled so that I could get it sand blasted. I did manage to get grease all over the driveway though, which then go on the dogs when Natalie decided to try to wash the dogs in the driveway while I was out there. Whoops! Lesson learned, grease gets everywhere.

I’ll hopefully have some time this weekend to get down to Egypt (my boss, with the sandblaster, lives way down in the sticks of MO) to work on sandblasting some of the parts so they can be painted and then reassembled. I’ll take pictures if any of that happens!

Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 21, 2009 2:13:34 AM

Seems like each trip is turning out the same way. We find a few houses, mostly short sales, that we like. We make an offer. Rinse, repeat.

Natalie and I got back from Colorado again this evening. I’ll post a longer update from the trip later, but here’s some pictures of the latest house we’ve offered on. We actually upped our offer A LOT, right before we left this afternoon.

This house appears to be made for us. The upper level is nearly 100% tile floors, which will be great for the dogs. The backyard has hardly any grass in it, and what we saw was being chewed on by one of four dogs, so that will need to be planted/sod. The interesting thing about the backyard is that it is 60% (rough guess) paved, that’s right, paved. There’s concrete all the way around the sides, and somewhat down the middle. You might ask why. Well we figure it’s because of the dogs. Our dogs at the last place we rented ran a track around the yard at the fence, I figure that they paved to account for this.

The inside upstairs is great, only a few things (trim to pain) left to do. The downstairs is another story. It was finished at one point, but our guess is the dogs made a MESS of the carpet, so it was all cut up. The basement doesn’t smell good, but hopefully we can get that corrected if we end up buying the house. It’s a short sale, so who knows if we will ever hear anything on it.

The Front
IMG_1171

The Deck
The Deck

The View
The View

The Kitchen
The Kitchen

The Backyard (some of it)
IMG_1159

Chris Hammond
Friday, June 19, 2009 10:39:18 AM

When people hear that we are moving to Colorado the most popular question by far is, Why?

Well this is our answer.

IMG_1090

This is the view from our hotel room. We hope to find a house with a similar view.

Chris Hammond
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:23:43 AM

So I need a goal in my skating, here it is 50 miles in 30 days. I started yesterday, 6/15, so I’ve got until 7/15 to reach the goal. Why 50 miles? Well in the past year (after yesterday’s skate) I had done just around 50 miles on my K2’s. 50 miles in thirty days shouldn’t be too hard to do, but the key will be to actually continue to keep skating. As of right now I’m at about 12.6 miles, skating 6.3 yesterday and today both. Yesterday’s account is posted on Connect.garmin.com, but today’s isn’t, apparently my Forerunner didn’t charge last night, so it didn’t last at all today.

I skated the same route as yesterday, Grant’s Trailer, today hurt though. I had to stop and rest for a while, whereas yesterday I felt fine the whole way. I don’t know if it was the heat, 90+, the fact that I slept 4.5 hours last night (was up late reskinning www.dnnvoice.com) or that I had two granola bars and a smoothie to eat all day.

Lesson learned, sleep more, eat better, and move somewhere cooler!

I likely won’t skate again until Sunday, at least not outside. I’m hoping to play inline hockey tomorrow night with the old gang. We’ll see how I adjust back to hockey skates, it’s been a year or so since I last played.

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 11:52:56 PM

We’re off to Parker again Thursday through Saturday to take what I think is our 5th house hunting trip? Maybe it’s only trip four, either way, we’ve seen a lot! Hopefully this will be the winning trip.

Chris Hammond
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:17:08 PM

With the success last night I decided I had to work on the car this evening a bit. The first thing I did was get it up on all four jack stands so that they were under the frame and not under control arms of the car. This would allow me to begin working on the suspension pieces.

When I got the car from Jeff, uhhh over three years ago now, it came with a second suspension that had been pulled off another car. This other suspension has springs (yellow), new(er) struts, a larger front sway bar, and also the addition of a rear sway bar. It also is a lot cleaner then the current suspension. So tonight I started pulling off the front suspension, starting with the sway bar, and moving on to removing the rest, at least what I could, of the right front.

I got stuck at the tie rod, but I did manage to get most of the other bolts removed. I came to a conclusion though, I’m going to likely just drop the whole front suspension out, including the cross member as the second suspension has one as well. In order to do that though I am going to have to dismount the motor. I will attempt to do that by lifting the motor up off the mounts with the cherry picker, hopefully without having to disconnect the transmission and not removing the whole thing from the car.

Before I do that though I will likely fully disassemble the other suspension and take it to a friend’s house to sandblast everything. I’m heading to Tampa for a conference tomorrow, so that will have to wait until the evenings next week. I’ll try to get everything disassembled during the week, both front and rear suspensions, and then probably go down to his place Saturday if he’ll be around.

Chris Hammond
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 1:37:25 AM

So tonight after work I came home to get the starter out of the car and took it back to Autozone, fortunately the lifetime warranty was honored! Though I did have to run off to the Autozone Hub to get the replacement starter. The guy at the hub was kind of lost, but he eventually got everything worked out and I headed home with the new (remanufactured) starter.

So the last starter started off working, but after a few days just started spinning without engaging the flywheel, no grinding either. This one, once all wired up worked like a champ. I even got the car started up for a minute or so. I did all this without hooking up the computer, so I didn’t want to spend too much time keeping it running.

So now was the time, time to hookup the laptop and get the video camera out and record the car actually running! Well I am proud to say it was successful, here’s the video below.

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 09, 2009 11:34:46 AM
So I meant to get this post put together yesterday, but was totally busy getting a number of other things done, so here it goes for today! Day of DNN So this weekend (Saturday 6/13/2009) is the big event for DNN so far this year, the first Day of DNN...(read more)
Chris Hammond
Monday, June 08, 2009 11:47:13 PM

Today I received an email from a title company out of Aurora Colorado, attached to the email was a bunch of title paperwork regarding one of the short sale homes we have a bid on. I didn’t get my hopes up too much though as back in April I received pretty much the same paperwork on this house, with different purchase price numbers as this bid is lower than that other bid. The last time this came through prematurely as the bank hadn’t yet accepted the offer, and it looks like this time it’s the same mistake.

At least we know something is still moving, I called the title company to see what they had to say, they said the bank hadn’t yet come back on the offer, but they were shooting for a July 15th closing if the bank were to accept. So we’ll see what happens, we’re still keeping our fingers crossed as this is the house that is our first choice. We’re looking at another trip out to Parker probably next week to do some more house shopping and possibly start looking at apartments in the area if we’re not able to locate a house here soon.

Chris Hammond
Sunday, June 07, 2009 6:02:55 PM

So one of the complaints I’ve had in this whole process of looking for a house is the lack of websites that actually show you good photos of a home. For some realtors don’t or can’t upload high quality photos of a house. Well we finally found a home that has high quality photos online, and I must say it is a great thing to see!

Here’s a link to the photos of the house I found. (click on start tour, then click on Full Screen).

http://homesite.obeo.com/viewer/default.aspx?tourid=542611&refURL=&locale=en-US

Now, that tour doesn’t show you the garage, which is another one of my beefs, but it is definitely a step up from most of the listings we’ve seen.

Are you a realtor? Do you realize that people want to see large, high quality photos of a house? Are you not able to upload those to the listing websites?

Chris Hammond
Saturday, June 06, 2009 12:18:45 PM

So we gave up on the house we were making offers on earlier in the week. We gave them our final offer and they came back with an offer that wasn't close to that so we are done with offering on that house for a while. I got an email from Realtor.com this morning, it looks like they dropped the price $3k recently, too little too late for us. We'll take a look at making an offer again in the future, but it won't be any more than we've previously offered, perhaps less.

So right now we have two offers out on short sale homes in the Parker area. We're hopefull that one of those will go through, but we're not expecting to hear much back on those any time soon. I did get a realtor.com email last night with an interesting house that just went on the market in Parker, so perhaps we'll see if we can't line up a few more new listings and make another trip out there in the next month and look around.

We're starting to think we may end up doing a short term, month to month, lease on an apartment out there if both of these short sales fall through.

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:53:53 AM

So here we are, two and a half months into our house hunting in Parker Colorado and as of right now we have one offer out there on a short sale, the original short sale we offered on. This third offer was more of a, hey see if you can get the bank to do another appraisal, kind of offer, lower than our rejected offer, but it is still out there.

We were looking at a house in Whooping Crane (street) in Parker Colorado, but the owners have yet to respond to our offers with any sort of a reasonable counter offer. They countered to our final offer, but remain about $5k off the mark, so we’re going to just drop that house and move on. We’ve got another short sale that we are likely going to pursue, the benefits of this house over Whooping Crane are that it is newer, larger, nicer, and has a pool in the neighborhood.

Here are the fronts of the two houses

Whooping Crane

Whooping Crane by you.

Short Sale

From the Front by you.

What do you think?

Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:37:05 AM

An interesting article on MSNBC this morning, yet another reason to move to Colorado!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30991972

If you want to be in the right place when the recovery starts, that place may be in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas or Washington.

The recession didn't start at the same time in every state, and it won't end at the same time either. A new forecast from Moody's Economy.com predicts that jobs growth will return first in those five states, starting in the last quarter of this year. Four of those states benefit from strong high-tech industries, and the fifth, Texas, has a strong base of energy industries.

Chris Hammond
Monday, June 01, 2009 1:24:29 AM

So with the “state” of the economy, and all the drum and glum you hear/read about these days, and everyone says it is a buyer’s market, someone must of forgotten to tell the sellers! We’re having a hell of a time trying to come up with something in Parker Colorado that fits into what we want.

We’ve now made 7 offers on 4 different houses, and we’re aren’t any closer than when we started. 2 of those 4 houses are short sales, one we actually still have a pending offer hanging out there, and the other we are likely to bid on again as our 8th offer we’re about to make will be the third on the particular house, and I don’t think the seller is going to come down in price where we want. So far the buyer has only come down in price by $2k, and based on our request for the hot tub, washer, dryer, they cut the closing concessions by half. This next offer, which we’ll sign in the morning, will be the last offer we make on this house. We’ll see how the seller comes back.

Needless to say we are getting very frustrated with this process! We would like to move, but  we really don’t want  to settle on a house we won’t be happy with.

Chris Hammond
Friday, May 29, 2009 6:02:40 PM

So we heard back on our offer, they countered with 97% of the asking price, taking into account the closing costs we asked to cover but leaving out the hot tub, washer and dryer we asked to be included. We offered 89% with $6k in closing costs, and the washer/dryer/hot tub.

So now what? I think we raise our offer by $10k and continue to ask for the washer/dryer/hot tub. If they counter again we might go up a bit, but we’ll raise the closing costs.

I hate house shopping! I just want it to be over so we can get our move on.

Chris Hammond
Friday, May 29, 2009 4:50:39 PM

What’s that? The motion based content has finally moved over to Garmin connect? And GC now accepts the Forerunner 305???

http://blog.motionbased.com/2009/05/garmin-connect-opening-to-all-garmin-fitness-devices.html

Whoooooohoooooooo now I need a dry day to go skate!

Chris Hammond
Friday, May 29, 2009 12:19:26 PM

So yesterday we put in another house offer in Parker Colorado. This time for a more reasonably priced house, with the offer being around 89% of their asking price. I’m not sure if they’ll accept, counter, or just ignore us like the last offer. We’re anxious to find out. If they were to accept it that will put our closing date on 6/30, which once you start to think about it is just right around the corner! yikes.

I’ll post an update when we hear about the offer.

Chris Hammond
Friday, May 29, 2009 12:50:32 AM

So last night after work I came home with the intention of trying to figure out why the car wouldn’t start. My intentions were to check the positioning of the 36-1 wheel for the VR sensor that drives the Megasquirt/EDIS setup. After checking the positioning of the sensor I was going to do a compression check on the motor. Well I threw those intentions out of the window, I wanted to see if after charging the battery the night before things would be better as the changes from the night before were not completely tested due to the drained battery.

Flash Not Installed

Chris Hammond
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 4:17:37 PM
Back in January of this year I took a trip out to Connecticut and spent a week recording some of our DotNetNuke Training on DVD with none other than Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks fame. It was a fun week, Carl has an amazing studio going out there. What...(read more)
Chris Hammond
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 12:42:38 AM

So tonight I came home from work and decided it was time to work on the Datsun a bit, after over a week of barely even looking at it when walking in and out of the garage to and fro. Terec came over and helped me out for a bit as well.

The first thing I checked was to see what the starter looked like, I was worried based on the noises that I’ve been hearing that the newly installed starter was bad. Well I pulled it out, it looked fine, as did the flywheel itself, so there went that theory. I put the started back on the car and connected the wires. From there I attempted to start the car again. The grinding happened a bit, but I swear it doesn’t last, and even got less frequent as the night wore on.

Terec showed up as i was attempting to start the car. We spent most of the evening trying multiple things, rewiring the VR sensor for the megasquirt was the main thing. I attempted it multiple ways, running some new wires for the sensor, and trying different combinations of connections on the wires. At the end of the night we really didn’t seem to get anywhere. Throwing the timing light on the car it does appear to be close to the correct timing, though I need to find TDC again tomorrow night and check to make sure that the VR sensor is 60 degrees from the missing tooth on the wheel.

The last attempt at starting the car seemed to only get 100rpm from the starter, so we assume that the battery was drained a bit too much. Because of that we threw it on the charger and called it a night.

Another thing that just struck me, I need to check the compression on the motor tomorrow, that hasn’t been done :(

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Saturday, July 04, 2009
About Me

Welcome to the web site of Chris Hammond, here you can find all of the recent blog posts I've made! For information about me check the About Chris Hammond page.

Buy My Book! Currently slated for a June 2009 release date

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