So if you are anything like my mother you probably are wondering what the heck has Chris been up to lately? Well, I am not AWOL, just busy!

I spent last week in Lincoln Nebraska at the SCCA Solo National Championships, what’s that? Car racing. How’d I do? eh, not worth mentioning where I actually finished, but I did get to see friends I haven’t seen since Nationals in 2008, the last time I attended. I couldn’t really believe that I hadn’t been since 2008, but that is the truth, with the move to Colorado in 2009 and then California in 2010 I just didn’t get to go. I’ll have more blog posts/videos/photos from Solo Nationals in the coming week.

When I got back from Nationals I spent two days catching up with Natalie and Jacqueline. Sunday we headed into San Francisco to get out of Half Moon Bay and see some things. We didn’t do much, but had a nice brunch in the Presidio, drove around Golden Gate Park, and walked around near Fort Mason. Here's a photo from a lookout point at the Presidio

This morning we went to Olivia's first birthday party in San Carlos. Check out some of the photos from the party. Saturday Natalie and Jacqueline went to Sophia’s birthday party as well, photos here.

After the birthday party today we had a few folks over for a crab fest. A couple of weeks ago I had a crab dinner at a local restaurant and was kind of grumpy that I paid $22+ for half a pound of crab, so I decided that we should have our own crab dinner at our house. We had the Strohls (4), Jeff Seeling (1) and Heyward and Julia (2) over for dinner tonight. I picked up some crab from the Half Moon Bay Safeway. It was $7/lb, cooked, cracked and cleaned. I had gone to the Half Moon Bay Fish Market on Sunday to see how much it was there, I thought it was a good deal at $10/lb cooked/cleaned. I am glad that I went to Safeway this morning before the party to check things out though, the Yelp reviews for the Fish Market made me start to have second thoughts. Safeway turned out to be great for this dinner.

Basically we took the crab from Safeway, put it into foil lined and covered pans with a small amount of water in them, and put them on the grill for 6-9 minutes. I think they turned out great. We had 5 crabs, probably 12 lbs total, and it seemed to cover the 8 of us, though I think only 5 or 6 of us actually ate crab, in the future I’ll likely do 1 per person if we do this again. I only took 2 photos tonight, was too busy cleaning and having a good time with friends!

This week I have a lot of catching up to do on work! It was great to have the week off, but I feel like I am now way behind at the office!

If you didn’t hear the news, DotNetNuke 6.0.1 was released yesterday, check out Joe’s blog post for more details.

On that note, I put out two new open source releases as well. I updated DNNSimpleArticle with a fix for DNN6 and made made a few other minor changes. As always, the module is released in C# and you can get the installable package, or the source package over on http://dnnsimplearticle.codeplex.com/. If you want to see the module in action check out http://www.bicycletips.com/

I also released an update for Multifunction, the World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin. It has a minor CSS fix for DNN6 (and 6.0.1). I also removed the custom actions menu it was using in favor of the new DotNetNuke 6 specific actions menu. MultiFunction is a C# skin, with both install and source packages available from http://multifunction.codeplex.com/

Be sure to rate both releases when you download!

If you don’t know Will Strohl, you are one of the lucky ones. He’s an annoying guy, a total lunatic when it comes to DotNetNuke, but even that can’t fix his flaws.

You can however help fix one of the flaws of the “Mighty” Will Strohl. Will has a problem, he can’t afford collared shirts. Seriously. if you’ve ever met him you know this.

Check out this public service announcement for Will.

Now, here’s a challenge for you, two of them actually.

1) Bring your un-needed collared shirts (size XL) to DotNetNuke World in Orlando in Florida. Will needs them.

2) Make your own video for Will! Actually, provide your own audio track. I created the video and audio in about 30 minutes. I’m looking for people who can come up with a better audio track for the video, come up with something funny, something sad, something crazy, I don’t care! Just download the original WMV file (right click, save as) for the video and remove the audio, add your own. Then upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, and tweet the link to the video with #Collars4Will in the message. http://cjh.am/strohlc

Disclaimer: this video was generated out of necessity, check out the video that Will made for me a while back.

I just need to convince Natalie that Colorado is where we want to go after California.... 

So there goes Day 3, I missed another blog post.

To be honest, I wasn’t too up for blogging yesterday. Too much going on with the conference, I didn’t feel like writing anything. So I guess it is official! I’m done with the blogging every day for the year. I’ll blog as I have content, rather than trying to blog just because.

Today is a day I don’t feel like blogging. Why not? Too much to do! I’m working on a big project in the evenings that I am hoping to finish up before I head to the St. Louis Day of .NET this weekend, so blogging will have to wait.

Today Natalie and I, along with Will Strohl and Kim Rausch (and kids), went to the Travis AFB Air Show, the weather was great, if a little windy. As we were walking around after the Thunderbirds show, taking photos and getting ready to leave I came across this spot on the tarmac

As we walked by that painted pavement I realized I had been there before.

That was where my dad retired after 30 years in the United States Air Force.

The latter two photos were taken with my first digital camera in March of 1998.

I’m a proud son!

Today after finishing up the custom DotNetNuke Training I took off on the Causeway, crossing over the Lake Pontchartain Causeway bridge. The bridge is the longest continuous bridge over water in the World, so I had to take a drive over it.

From there I decided to head west to Hammond Louisiana. Why not? I drove through town, took a couple of pictures which I’ll post later, here is one I posted while I was there.

I’ve spent the last two evenings in the French Quarter. No, not drinking it up and partying like a college kid, but like a 34 year old married man, walking around with a camera looking for interesting things to take pictures of. No pictures of people yet, but check out some of the photos I took tonight.

If you want to read the details, check out yesterday’s post. If you want to see the video, you are in the right place!