Though I love winter weather, and really miss the quantity and quality of winter weather that we had while living in Colorado, there are a couple of things I had forgotten about that I absolutely don't miss:
Unable to staunch continual financial hemorrhaging, divine is reportedly close to declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy (perhaps even today). As a premier CMS package, we think divine's...I'm very glad that I helped steer my employer away from Divine's CMS when we were looking to replace our content repository recently.
[Trends and Features from CMSWatch]
The site contains some incredible medical animations and illustrations.
I've not attended a FWDNUG meeting since I went to the very first one, but I will not miss this one.
Out of curiosity, if you are a .NET developer in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, shoot me a note either via the comment system here, or email. If you belong to either DDNUG or FWDNUG, let me know as well. Also, if you have a personal weblog, or site, please include the url. I am just curious at to whether any local .NET developers are coming across my site.
By the way, the food was really good, I had the filet mignon -- cooked to perfection.
Pleasanton seems nice enough. I did some driving around after checking in to my hotel. There's a nice little downtown area with a lot of places to eat and shops -- it was very busy when I went through there. The one thing that really caught my attention was the number of shiny new office buildings that are sitting empty.
All right, time to pay attention to Alias.
I usually look forward to attending conferences, not only for the cool stuff I will learn about, and the great people I will meet, but also as a time to simply get away and unwind. I just don't know that that is possible when attending a conference in your home town. I mean, do I hit my company up for a room downtown so that I can be close to all the action? If they agree to that, what will my wife say? And my son? "Daddy's gone on a trip...to Dallas." Gee, that is something we do all the time. And what if my company doesn't agree to that? What if they say "no, you are less than 30 miles away, we can't get you a hotel room." Then what? How likely am I to spend 12+ hours a day around the conference when I am waking up at the crack of dawn to get there and then not getting home until 10 or 11 PM? Where is the chance to unwind in that?
Perhaps I am off base, and I get a little too much pleasure from attending conferences. Maybe I should just be glad that I have a job at a company willing to pay for any of it at all.
What have y'all done when faced with the option of attending a conference in the same city you live in, or in a nearby city?
What I'd really like to do is attend this.