St. Louis Day of .Net In Review, plus other travel info

So I spent the past four days in St. Louis, my home of fourteen years, well, it was my home of fourteen years, until about a month ago when we moved to Denver. I came to town to speak at the St. Louis Day of .Net event on 8/28-29.

I got into town on Wednesday and went over to the house we lived in to clean out a few things that we had left behind in the garage. Mainly a broken engine block for the 240z and some bookshelves. I had posted on craigslist the day before that I was giving any of this stuff away, and told people to be there around 5pm, well when I got there, there was one vehicle waiting, a lady coming to check out the bookshelves. Unfortunately they weren’t going to work for her, not fitting in her car, so I was without hope for anyone to take those.

I managed to get a hold of a guy wanting the engine block for scrap metal, and he came over and picked that up. From there I visited with my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and nieces for the evening and then stayed at my buddy Nick’s house.

Thursday was an eventful day spent at the Engage Software offices in Des Peres, with an announcement from the DotNetNuke Corporation of the acquisition of Snowcovered.com, the leading marketplace for DNN extensions.

I spent a little time prepping for my DNN Jumpstart sessions for the Day of DotNet event, worked on a few client projects, lined up some DotNetNuke Training later in September, and then headed over to the hotel/casino for the speaker’s dinner Thursday evening.

Friday morning started out very early, my DotNetNuke Jumpstart sessions were scheduled for Fri/Sat at 7:30am, so I headed over to the casino around 6am Friday morning to help get things situated and then get setup for my presentation. The session went well, though it did start late because the registration for the event was still trying to process people.

I setup my office phone to forward to my cell phone while I was gone, and not long after my presentation it rang, client work took up the rest of the morning from the speaker’s room at the conference. Friday afternoon and Saturday I spent time jumping into various sessions, talking to past and current clients who were attending the event, and also talking with some of the other speakers at the event.

The event ran very smoothly, I heard more than a few people say what an excellent event it was, and more than worth the $100 price of admission. The Ameristar was top notch, and always had food and drinks available.

If you get a chance I highly recommend attending the event next year, I’m sure the planning for it will begin here shortly! I want to thank the organizers for running a great event, and also the speakers in the DotNetNuke topics, thanks for coming together so quickly before the event to put together a good showing!

Saturday evening my buddy Nick and I headed off to tear down the bookshelves in the garage, and disposed of those, grabbed some dinner from my favorite, CB&W, Crazy Bowls & Wraps, and then later on a frozen custard from Ted Drewe’s.

Sunday morning I got up and headed over to the SCCA Autocross, it was only the second one I attended this year, mainly I just wanted to go over and see some people I didn’t get to say good bye to before we left St. Louis in July. From there I headed off to the airport. I got to the airport at 10:10am, for what I thought was a 11:45 flight, but while trying to print my boarding passes I was presented with two change of flight choices. I couldn’t figure out why until I saw the “you’re too late to check in for your flight”, apparently my flight was at 10:20am!

I can’t say I’ve ever done that before, missed a flight completely. Fortunately there was another flight at 11:50a to Chicago, and now I’m sitting here in Ohare waiting for my flight to Denver, which should put me back in Colorado around 5pm this evening Mountain time. I had hoped to spend more time at home, but it looks like it just wasn’t in the cards. I’m off to Pittsburgh Monday afternoon for a few days of interaction with a client teaching them how to do module development against DotNetNuke Professional.