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Over the holiday here in St. Louis we had an abnormally large amount of rain, with that has come complete chaos in the rivers, primarily the Meramec river, but also high levels on the Missouri and flooding from the Mississippi river. I had a little time this afternoon after an all day meeting at the office to head home quickly and grab some of my gear, I headed up to Bluff View Trail, a new trail here in Wildwood, MO that has a great view over the Meramec River. Two weeks ago I went out on the trail with a buddy and rode my MTB for the first time, on Christmas Eve I took Natalie and Daniel and we went and hiked it a bit. Little did I know taking a photo there that day would provide me a cool opportunity to shot a before and during shot of the extensiveness of the flooding going on.

The photo on the left below is from 12/24/2015 and the photo on the right is from tonight, 12/30/2015

Just over 5 years after we purchased our first house, and almost 4 years to the day we sold that house, we are once again house hunting. This time, we are in St. Louis, as opposed to the last time around with https://going2colorado.com/ and ultimately https://ourcoloradolife.com/. I don’t envision building a full blown website like we did last time around, but who knows, maybe I’ll get creative one evening and do it.

So, why St. Louis? With all the bad stories lately (#Ferguson and the fact that Missouri is rated poorly) you might think, “Who in their right mind would want to live in Missouri?”.

Here are a couple of time lapse videos from the winter (spring) snow storm here in St. Louis over the past weekend.

The first video got a couple of media inquiries via YouTube this morning, and was featured on Fox 2 here in St. Louis on their 5 o’clock news broadcast. It is an hour’s worth of shoveling on Sunday morning compressed into 27 seconds.

The second one is of our trip to see the Moolah Shrine Circus at the St. Charles Family Arena.

Both videos were shot with a GoPro Hero3 Black.

This video kind of fits.

Today I had my first eye exam in 15, probably more, years. It is time to get glasses. So. I have that going for me.

For those friends/family who haven’t heard yet. We have two announcements here for the blog (besides the whole glasses thing).

1) We’re having another baby! #2 is on the way in June 2013, no other details just yet.

2) We’re moving! Again. Go figure. We’re headed back to St. Louis, our lease starts on the first of December. We’ll hopefully get a 2012 Xmas card out right after Thanksgiving with the new address for everyone. If you need it before then, email me.

Answers to a few questions:

No, we don’t know if the baby will be a boy or a girl yet.

Yes, I will still be working for DotNetNuke.

Things have been quiet around here, so I figured it was a good time for a status update that is longer than 140 characters.

We are in the middle of the process of planning our next move, true to our nature, we’ve been in Half Moon Bay for less than 18 months, and we’ll be heading back east. We’re going back to St. Louis in December, and currently looking for a place to live. I’ll be working from home and travelling back to San Mateo at least once a month to be in the office at DNNCorp.

The move and planning for such is taking up most of our time, though I am also travelling a lot for work lately, headed to Columbus next week and San Antonio after that.

Here’s a photo of Natalie and Jacqueline taken earlier this evening.

Mommy and Jacqueline at Sunset
On Monday August 21, 1995, I started college at what was then known as the University of Missouri – Rolla (UMR), now referred to as Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST). If I recall correctly I started at 7:30am with an Algebra/Trig class designed to speed freshmen into the math program if you didn’t test out of the class. Even though I had taken Calculus in High School I wasn’t successful at testing out. Today, May 14, 2011, I am done with college, not done in as I am not going anymore (I leave that option open) but done in as I have a college degree. Before I talk about that here are some stats.

So, time for a refresher. Why did we leave St. Louis?

THE WEATHER!

That blog post is from 2008, and it describes the reason we left. Well tonight there is more news, and more reason as to why. There was apparently more major storms in the area, even a Tornado that apparently hit and caused damage to Lambert Airport.

While we’ve had the following here in California over the past 4-6 weeks, no damage that I know of! We also have lost power since we’ve lived here, something that happened a few times a year in Missouri.

  1. Tsunami warning
  2. Earthquake
  3. Thunderstorms
  4. Lots of rain
  5. Tornado warning

I still think things here in California are far better than Missouri. While we were in St. Louis in February we had ice, snow, and lots of rain. All in the period of a week.

So today was our second full day here in St. Louis, and I tell you what, we sure haven’t missed the weather here since we left. It’s been rainy, icey, and sleeting pretty much since we arrived. Between icy winters and hot HUMID summers there isn’t much to like about the weather here!

Today Natalie and her sister and the kids went to the mall for a while. I headed over to Best Buy to check out the new Motorola Xoom tablets. I must say, it was hard not to walk out of there buying one (two actually because Natalie wants one too) but I held off. I’m curious to see what happens with pricing here in the next few weeks. I have a feeling with the IPad2 announcement likely next week that the Xooms may be changing things a bit, we will see.

This evening we went by SoloPerformance and saw Dave Beth and Sam there, then headed down to Bill’s house for dinner with Kathy and the kids.

It was a good day, great to see old friends.

St. Louis

We’re headed back to St. Louis for the first time as a family tomorrow. I’ll be in town until Sunday, Natalie and Jacqueline will be there until the 4th of March.

We’re trying to see as many friends as possible, but will also be spending a lot of time with Natalie’s sister, brother in law, and our nieces.

See you there!

If you haven’t been reading my blog lately (what’s the matter with you?) you may have missed the couple of blog posts about the upcoming St. Louis Day of .NET that is going on in St. Louis. If you’ve missed those posts, check them out.

In conjunction with that event (which is on a Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st) we’ve been planning another event more specific to DotNetNuke in conjunction with the local user group. We are glad to announce the next DotNetNuke Hackathon. As with the previous Hackathon events (held in Orlando and Washington DC) we will be broadcasting this event live online, and encouraging people both in St. Louis and around the world to get involved.

A short review for tonight, perhaps a longer one in the morning, perhaps not. Ashes Divide, eh, not a fan. They performed well, I'm just not a big fan of their music. Saliva, great live, I might have to buy an album of theirs on my Zune this week. Chevelle, good show live, sounded great, but not a huge fan of their music, I have one album, not likely to buy another soon. STP, amazing, great show as always. My first concert back in 1994 was STP at Arco Arena in Sacramento. This show wasn't as flashy but still good nonetheless. I think this is my third time seeing STP, and 4th Scott, I will definitely make the trip again sometime if given the chance. We were sitting in what amounted to the 5th or 6th row, in front of that was the "mosh" pit, but I can't say I saw any moshing today. I shot some video on my phone, will try to upload it tomorrow if it turned out at all.
So STP is coming to town! They were the very first concert I ever went to, back in 1994 at Arco Arena with Jim. It was an amazing experience and I've seen them one other time here in St. Louis. It looks like they will be back in town on June 8th, 2008, I'll be there for sure!
So we were awaken this morning by a 5.4 magnitude earthquake out of West Salem Illinois. Read the full blog post for a lot more information about the quake! There are quite a few comments posted as well.
Today I went downtown, near Busch Stadium. Though I paid $25 to park, I wasn't there to watch the game. I was there for our first DotNetNuke Training class. Everything went great, the feedback from the attendees was good, and I think i successfully filled their heads with all sorts of information. I did miss opening day, but got to see a lot of the stadium and the crowds. The training facility is literally across the street from the stadium, so we had the blinds open all day and got to take in the crowd while everyone learned.
So when I got up this morning I was disappointed to find that it hadn't snowed much over night. Lucky for me I stayed home though, by 4pm this afternoon we had 10+ inches on the ground! I spent about 45 minutes outside shoveling the driveway. I didn't do it all, but enough that I think I can get both cars in and out, and made room if the neighbors need to park at the end of the driveway.
Cardinals Opening Day March 31st, 2 Standing Room Only (probably gonna sell those) Red Sox at Yankees 8/26 in New York, I'm definitely going to this! Yankees at Red Sox 9/26 AND 9/28, I'm there baby! Yeah
Wow, got home from dinner tonight and the news is filled with information about Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton who apparently went nuts at Kirkwood City Hall this evening shooting 7 or more people and killing from what they say 5. Where is Kirkwood in relationion to where I live? Not far, I actually have been to the building where the shootings occured, a few times. I used to live in Kirkwood. Our office in Des Peres is in the city that borders Kirkwood.
Here's a small rant. Why does St. Louis have to FLIP out at the prediction of snow? The forecasters are calling for 4-6 inches, 6 inches folks, that's nothing! There is no reason to flip out that it MIGHT snow! I'm sure everyone will clog the highways tonight trying to get home early before the snow, I'll wait it out. As long as I can get home and run at the YMCA, and then watch LOST, I'll be set. Anyone watch the Season 3 finale last night of LOST? Amazing, I'm totally stoked about LOST again, I was starting to fade because I hadn't watched it in 9 months!
If you're looking for a search engine optimization specialist in St. Louis you've come to the right guy. I enjoy analyzing and providing reports focused on assist your company move up in Search Engine rankings. If you wonder what qualifies me to do so? You found this post didn't you? Point proven. Beyond that though I've been doing SEO for over 10 years with my work in web design and development. So if you're looking for the St. Louis SEO specialist, be sure to "contact me" now!
Well we made it to Park City this afternoon. No issues, weather out of St. Louis was good, we got to the airport in plenty of time. Our flight was on time, though the 8:45 Minneapolis flight I believe left after we did, ours was scheduled for 10am. I'm pretty sure I've never been that far north in the US except for on the east coast, so the flight out of MSP to Salt Lake City was nice, though I'm not sure where exactly we flew over. I slept most of both flights, had to make up for the 3.5 hours of sleep last night! Philip and Sandra picked us up at the airport and brought us up into Park City. The condo is beautiful, so is the town itself. We ran over to Park City Resort and picked up our gear for tomorrow. Looks like I'll be the only one snowboarding! Hopefully I'll be typing a blog post tomorrow night, still with all my bones intact. Checkout some of the St. Louis snow photos over on...
So I was fortunate enough to locate myself a Wii on Black Friday. I actually lucked out and found one on Amazon.com at 2am, so I purchased it. I have friends who I thought would want it. Well it ends up most of them have already decided not to get one, so instead of going to Ebay I put it up on Craigslist. I think I have received well over 30 responses to the ad! I wish I had 30 of them to sell, though, if I did then I would have to start dealing with taxes and all that so it's probably better that I only have...

Well Friday night I picked up the Vette, so far it's great! You can see pictures of it over on www.corvettez06.org. Don't ask me how I got that domain, I'm not sure, somehow it expired in August and no one else had picked it up, I purchased it Friday morning for $6.99! Saturday I spent the day driving the Z06 out in the rain, yes, I know, I'd probably get kicked out of a Corvette club for driving it in the rain, but lucky me, I'm not in a club! It was probably also good throttle modulation practice. I took the car over to Andy's, and took his wife for the requesit new car ride (she got a ride in the 350Z before Andy as well). Then I picked up good ole NJack (my new name for Nick Jackson) and we cruised around St. Charles for a while. From there I ran down to South County and took Russ for a ride, over to his brother Matt's and showed off the car there as well. On the way home from Russ' I stopped by the carwash and gave her a quick spray down. Sunday morning I got up and hand bathed the car. I put two coats of wax on, Rain-X, and then headed out to Natalie's show. On the way to the show I took some pics, and then on the way home I stopped again and tried to get some cool shots as the sun was going down. I've decided, I really need to take a photography class, I take a billion photos, and 99.9% of them suck! Now, for the rest of the week. Monday night I'm speaking at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User's Group meeting. Thursday night we (9 of us from Engage Software) are headed to the Tulsa Tech Fest in Tulsa Oklahoma. I'll be giving three presentations in Tulsa, and leading a roundtable question/answer session for DotNetNuke topics as well! More on the presentations later this week, if I find time between writing...

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Chris Hammond

Chris Hammond is a father, husband, leader, software developer, photographer and car guy. Chris focuses on the latest in technology including artificial intelligence (AI) and has spent decades becoming an expert in ASP.NET and DotNetNuke (DNN) development. You will find a variety of posts relating to those topics here on the website. For more information check out the about Chris Hammond page.

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