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!

Since we couldn’t decide who to tell first we decided to just blog the news. NATALIE AND I ARE HAVING A BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So this weekend has flown by! It’s almost 1:30am on Monday morning and I am wrapping up writing another chapter for the book. I’m going to call it a night and try to finish up the remainder of the work tomorrow, I basically have to read/review the chapter and take screenshots and then I can submit it to the editor.

So what have I been up to this weekend? Well Friday night Natalie and I watched Wanted, an Angelina Jolie movie, I must say the movie wasn’t what we expected, I knew it would be silly, but this one was exceptionally hard to believe because of the stunts/effects.

Saturday my buddy Terec and I spent the day driving around MO and IL hunting Bald Eagles. Now, before you freak out, we were hunting them to take photos! We rented a very $$$ lens from a local camera shop and spent nearly 11 hours driving around trying to get great shots. I took way more photos than he did, at a rate of about 4 to 1, but I would say from the previews I’ve seen of his, he got way better photos than I did. I can however claim the closest/largest in flight shot as I had grabbed the big lens at one point in Pere Marquette park, just after that a Bald Eagle came soaring by.

I’ve only uploaded a few shots, you can see them over on Flickr.

After shooting all day we ended up back at my house, Nick came over and Natalie got back from her girl’s night out with her sister. We rocked out to Rockband2 for a few hours before I kicked the guys out and crashed for the evening. I slept in this morning and then headed off to the office to meet up with Pat and talk about the next two weeks of book work. We are coming up on our February 20th deadline quickly! We are anxious to be done with this first phase of writing, and looking forward to hopefully having something resembling downtime during the editing/reviewing process! We’ll see how that works out :D

So if you aren’t playing Mobwars on Facebook, I recommend you don’t get started, it is addicting! I’ve been helping friends out who have started to play, by giving them tips. If you start playing and need some advice, I’ll try to update this post over time with new tips. Here’s the one I started tonight.

When starting out one of the most important things to do is start growing your mob, and grow it big. When you start you’ll have a max size of 500 or so members, once you hit a certain level (75?) you can start adding more members, 2 per level as you increase in the game. The bigger your mob, the stronger you can be.

The basic idea here is you need a lot of facebook friends to be in your mob, well if your friends are like mine, many of them don’t want to play, so you won’t have a big mob. But here’s a way to increase your mob, and hopefully not increase your friends list, except temporarily. What we’ll do is quickly add a lot of friends, get them to join your mob, and then delete them from your friends list, they will stay in your mob.

First thing to do, create a new email address somewhere, tie it to your facebook account, something like mynewmobemail @ gmail.com or something. You’ll use this here later on, you can use your normal email address, but I recommend setting up a mobwars specific one.

Once you done that, join this group on Facebook, once joined go to this thread http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=46792873184#/topic.php?uid=46792873184&topic=5507

You need to go to this thread, last page of the thread, copy the email addresses there, put your email in this list(the one you setup earlier) and reply to the thread with the full list of emails, plus yours. That way the next person who does this will also add you to their friends list.

Now that you have this list of email addresses, you need to invite all these people to be friends, you do this through the normal invite process that facebook provides. As more people start to add their email addresses to the thread they will start sending you requests as well, so you’ll continue to grow your mob. After while if you fill up your mob you might want to go back and reply to the thread again, but this time remove your email from the list of emails.

Once these friends start accepting your requests you can add them to your mob. The easiest way to do this is to visit their profile page and clicking on their “join my mob” link if they have the mobwars box on their profile. That is one important thing as well, make sure you have the mobwars box on your profile to make it easier for these people to add you.

Once you’ve requested to join someone’s mob you can then go back to your friends list (use the recently added option) and delete those people from your friends list. This all takes some work and patience, but it is the fastest way I’ve found to grow a mob.

Stay tuned for more mobwars tips from www.chrishammond.com

So I’m home this weekend working on the book, our first deadline is on Monday, so Pat and I are both working on finishing up our submissions. To procrastinate a little I decided to do a quick search on Amazon, not expecting to find it, but I did! I found a listing for our book! Here it is!

DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running

Now, I must get back to writing.

A few weeks ago at St. Pat's some of my fraternity brother's were giving me trouble about owning the Corvette. They thought if I owned the Corvette I also needed to have a Mustache.

Well here it is, probably the only mustache I will ever grow.

Natalie loves it (not). I think it looks great (not). It is coming off in the morning (so)!