Things on my mind....

I told the Santa Barbara .NET User Group that I’d put up a link for my slides and some of the code...here it is.

Personal

I am exhausted! I think I really over did it this week. I only skated once this summer and that was for a game against the Oakland Seals. Sunday night I ran the Red evaluation practice so I was standing on my skates, non-stop, for almost 2 hours. Right after that practice was the Blue evaluation which I had agreed to be a benchmark skater for. That was a mistake. Besides the fact that my feet were killing me...I tried to keep up with the 20 some things and Marcel. Being out of shape and not having my hockey legs back, I didn’t make it to the end of the practice. I think if people were really being evaluated against me, then everyone is now in Blue. On the plus-side I looked so comical out there; the evaluators couldn’t stop laughing at me. Or maybe that is a bad thing...

Anyway, Monday and Tuesday were filled with the muscle aches and pains that come with trying to do too much. After the five and a half hour drive down to Santa Barbara on Tuesday, I was really stiff. I had fun with the .NET User Group, but I don’t think they got me at my best and one of my thread code demos wasn’t setup correctly, fortunately Rob spotted the problem and I was able to move on. One note on Rob, he’s trying to start a .NET User Group in San Luis Obispo so if you live around there you should contact him.

After a really bad night’s sleep at one of the Santa Barbara Motel 6s, I made the long drive back to Oakland on Wednesday. A great thing that happened last night was that my 4 year old, who normally doesn’t want me around, talked to me for forty-five minutes. By his own choice. That was really cool. He moved in with us when he was two and his adoption was finalized shortly before his third birthday. While I’ve been trying to help him attach to me, our relationship over the last two years has been developing very slowly. He usually doesn’t want anything to do with me. Maybe we had a break through, which would be awesome, but with kids sometimes a break through is followed by a regression, so I’ll have to wait and see if this new found affection for me sticks. Here’s hoping.

Digipede

John is back from GridWorld. His talk went well and his room was full. Digipede also won an award for Best price/performance Middleware solution for Grid implementation. That’s a mouthful! The award was awarded as a tie between Digipede and United Devices. It’s exciting to tie with a company that has such a history. John also has an article out on GridToday that you can find here.

As usual we’re busy at the office. If you missed the press release, we have announced Digital Dimension as a customer. There are a lot of things to get excited about when you land a customer like Digital Dimension. One big thing is that we can talk about them! Companies that do rendering have been using grid computing solutions to speed up the render process for a long time because rendering speed has a direct impact on their income. Financial service companies have also been in grid computing for a long time for similar reasons. The major difference between the two industries is that financial service companies are VERY close mouthed about the technologies they use. Having a customer that we can talk about, doing something people understand, in an early grid adoption industry, will really help our message.

Now if I can keep my eyes open I think there is a school event tonight...but I think I’m going to stay home with the kids and let them walk all over me. I can do that lying down.