So it’s just after 1am on Monday March 9th, 2009. Pat Renner and I have wrapped up and submitted the final chapter of our DotNetNuke book. We are far from complete on the whole book writing process, but we are at least at the big milestone of being done with the majority of the writing of the book.
Now we begin the process of editing our chapters that we are getting back from the editor and technical editor. I got the first chapter back for author review before my trip to Orlando last week but had to set it aside and focus on finishing up the writing process before starting on it. Tonight (Monday) will begin the process of the author review and cleaning up the materials so that they can be sent off to the production department.
The book writing process is interesting, fun, painful, a great education experience. I’ve learned so much about DNN, but more importantly about how to communicate what I know about DNN in an easy to understand manner. At least I hope I have! I guess we will find out when people start reading the book!
I’ll post more about my trip to Orlando later this week, I wish I had stayed another night to watch the Kepler launch, but because the book wasn’t finished I had to get home.
So December 15th was our first book deadline. Pat and I met early Sunday morning and went through both of our chapters making some reviews. He ended up submitting his chapter on the 15th, mine was submitted late due to some pretty major overhauls we made to the structure of the chapter. I found the first chapter hard to write, I think the next few chapters will be easier. Chapter 1 was the intro/overview of all things, so it was hard to try to wrap all that information up into basic content that our intended reader will be able to understand.
We’re waiting on feedback from our editor for the submitted chapters, hopefully we’ll get some of that before our next deadline of 1/15, otherwise we feel like we’re writing blind. We’ve already started on the next chapters for the deadline, I’m dealing more with actual DNN content in these chapters, so I think they will be much easier to write now.
More updates in the future.
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.
My good buddy Chad Hobson has launched a new site, here's a blurb about it.
"The late Carole Bizzack's family have launched a new website for the Memorial Foundation they've created in her honor. Check out a good cause here."
So you might have seen all the DotNetNuke posts lately, but what about just a Chris and Natalie post? Well here it goes! (you can follow along with some of the photos here on Flickr)
Natalie and I had a blast in Las Vegas this past week. We went on the 3rd, a day before her Birthday. Her parents came out on the 3rd as well so we got to spend time with them for a few days before the DNN conference started up. During those few days we went and saw "KA" at the MGM, took a trip out to the Hoover Dam. After the Hoover Dam we took a quick jaunt North of Las Vegas looking for Red Rock, only to figure out an hour north that Red Rock was actually West of Las Vegas, so we turned around and headed back towards LV.
It turned out perfect though, our little detour had delayed us enough to see the most brilliant sunset I've ever seen from Red Rock.
Monday I had a DNN Core Team lunch, and then came back to the hotel to go with Natalie and meet Rich and Henry (two owners of Engage Software) and their wives for dinner and drinks. We repeated that process on Tuesday evening after the conference as well. Wednesday evening Natalie and I went to a gathering of people at Mix In Las Vegas, the restaurant on the 64th floor of "THEHotel" which is attached to the Mandalay Bay. The dinner was great and I must once again thank Tracy from www.t-worx.com for the most excellent evening.
Thursday evening a large group of us, 17, got together for dinner. We met up in the bar at the Mandalay Bay and then decided to take Taxis down to the Venetian. Somehow we all actually made it to the same place and got to eat dinner together at one restaurant. It was a great time and I got to talk to Erik quite a bit, hopefully talking him into trying to get me to speak at SDC in the Netherlands next September! One can only hope :)
Friday Natalie and I took off by ourselves for once. We went to Grand Canyon West, with the main goal of getting out onto the SkyWalk (www.grandcanyonskywalk.com). It was roughly 120 miles from the hotel, though took 2.5 hours as there was 14 miles of dirt/gravel road. The funny thing (well one of them) about the road, this 14 mile stretch was County maintained, as soon as we got to the Indian reservation grounds the road became paved... We were in Minivan for the trip, it was what you might call dirty at the end of the day. Lucky for the Minivan it didn't have a handbrake, just a footbrake/e-brake, otherwise I would have had an easier time getting the tail end of the car to swing out around the corners.
We had a good time at Grand Canyon West, even though I have a little beef with the operation they have running there. The SkyWalk is very cool, and you essentially have to pay $79/person to get out on the SkyWalk. They don't allow you to take any personal items out there, for fear of you dropping them on the glass, or worse over the edge into the Canyon below. So you can't take a camera out there with you, they of course will gladly take your photo for you and sell it to you for $25/each. We ended up buying 2 photos, so we got the third one free. But they can only print them, not give them to you on CD, or even email them to you. The prints weren't what I would acll the highest of quality. I'm hoping I can email the staff there and try to get better quality photos from them.
Friday evening we returned back to Vegas and went to see "O" at the Bellagio. It was another great show, definitely worth the investment to go see if you're in Vegas anytime soon.
Saturday morning we headed back to the airport and flew back to St. Louis. We got home around 7pm and pretty much crashed. Sunday I headed out with Nick and went hunting. It might be deer season here in Missouri but I was hunting bugs, one particular blue one that I hear rumored to still be around Alton Illinois. Our hunt was not fruitful, we didn't find my old Super Beetle, but I will keep hunting.
Sunday evening we joined Dominique and Colby for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory to...
Chad Hobson is an angry angry man over there. Though, if you're looking for a DotNetNuke Developer in Lexington Kentucky be sure to drop him a...
Chad thinks I'm not his God anymore. But I beg to differ. Without my assistance he wouldn't have his site up and running. So, yes, yes I...
Well, I decided to check out Chad's website again. And, not to my surprise, he hasn't done anything with it! I am still a...
Google even tells me so!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=excellent+programmer <--currently 5th on the search results for excellent programmer.
I will be number one, I will be the most excellent programmer of them...
Are you looking for an Excellent Programmer? You've found him! If you're looking for mad programming skills from an excellent person, you've come to the right place!
(inside...
Coming back from Lexington Kentucky yesterday we stopped just into Indiana for some lunch. We got back on Highway 64 and immediately stopped in a traffic jam. We were sitting there for about an hour. When we finally made it through the traffic causing accident we saw a single Ford Explorer, I saw the passenger window broken, I assumed from rolling over. Apparently it was from gunfire!
Check out the story...
Well, as you may have seen in my previous post, my good buddy Chad Hobson was razzed a little about his lame website, www.chadhobson.com. His response to my razzing was to throw up a little picture, and make a few text changes. Though he's still yet to provide anything functional on his website, he has called me a god, to which I am...
If you're looking for St. Louis Dressage Training check out Natalie's...
I've posted some of the photos I took from the reunion. You can see them here at the Vanden High School web site I setup a while back.
I'm hoping to get copies of photos other folks took at the reunion as well, and post them on the...
This post is mainly for search indexing, but have you seen the new SCCAForums.com? After over a year of putting it off waiting for good software (communityserver) and over a month of hard work, I got the new SCCAForums.com launched this past weekend. Check it out! Many more enhancements are...
If you are looking for Krekeler Jewelers you need to check out KrekelerJewelers.com. Jeff and Sheila have launched a new web site with the help of Christoc.com.
If you're looking for jewelry, diamonds, gold, silver and engraving, in Eastern Missouri Krekeler Jewelers is the place to...
I'm doing a Intro to dotnetnuke presentation at the St. Louis VB.Net user's group meeting this evening. Not sure how many folks will show up for the event, but I'll be there nonetheless. I'll most definitely be keeping the presentation trimmed down a bit more than the one I did in Springfield back in January. I tried to cover way too much information in the time alotted and went over by about an hour. Hopefully I can drum up some interest to get a dnn User's Group started here in STL so I can get working on...
Well, somehow I have gotten back into doing web sites for friends! I'm currently working on 3, already setup one for Brian, setup one for Greg but need to tweak it to give it a good look and then train him on how to use it. I've also gotta set one up for Faye, but hers will have to wait till she buys a domain name, and so I can come up with a look/feel for her site as well. I'm using the new CommunityServer release from Telligent Systems for these sites, it allows for blogs/galleries/forums all in one app, and once I get the skinning down the sites will be pretty...
Well, I need to start generating some traffic to TwoPimps.com, so here is the official announcement and hopefully web spider link generator for TwoPimps.com!
TwoPimps.com is a new project that Butcher and I are working on.We are currently working on T-Shirt designs and have one design completed and in product testing! Look for more information on TwoPimps.com...
What happens when you google for Chris Hammond? Well, you get mostly baseball news, one of my weblogs, and then some travel and photography pages for other Chris Hammond's out there.
I've been attempting to get my results up higher in the rankings for 9 months now, with quite a bit of success, but still unable to beat out ESPN for the #1 spot.
So today I was driving home and though of a new idea. “Google Me”
More on the idea later, but it looks like I have another idea for a project that won't generate any money :) ...