*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I think it is unanimous that everyone really enjoyed Lansing Day of .Net.  I know I did.

I arrived Friday evening close to 6:00 PM outside of Lansing, MI in Okemos and met up with the LDoDN organizers at Kinkos.  Jeff put me to work and I wound up preparing all the speaker name badges.  After I finished my task I thought I would personally let each speaker know that I had carefully and ever so tenderly taken care of their speaker badges.  Thus I signed the back of each and every one saying:

I folded your card. – The Elder

Once we finished at Kinkos all of us headed to the Festival of the Moon in old downtown Lansing for the speaker get together.  After an hour or so we headed down the street to a pizza place to sing karaoke where we were joined with some local developers.  Jeff, Alan, Dan and myself put our names in the pot to sing. 

I didn’t think I was going to get to sing but they called my name last.  I sang a rousing rendition of a Billy Vera and the Beaters classic called “At this moment”.  The pizza placed closed at 11:00 PM and it was a long day of travel and time to get some sleep.  We headed back to Jeff and Carla’s home where they had graciously offered up their home for out of town speakers to stay (thanks again guys!). 

The next morning I got up and stuck around the house to work on my slide deck.  I had started going down the path of reworking the slides and had to finish my “theme” I had started. 

I arrived at the conference about 9:30 AM on Saturday and met up with old friends and people I hadn’t seen in awhile.  I gave my talk on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Solutions in Visual Studio at 11:00 and the room was packed.  There were 70 chairs in the room and there were people standing up in the back of the room.  I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and later that night at the get together that said it was a really good talk.  I think reworking my slide decked helped that a lot.

After the LDoDN event ended instead of all the speakers and organizers going out to eat, Jeff and Carla decided to have the get together at their house.  Like Jeff said, it was cheaper to just buy food and have everyone over to the house than trying to go out and eat somewhere.  Not only that but a lot of the attendees came over as well which is what made it worth it for me. 

Once it got dark a bond fire was started and we sat around the fire playing guitar and singing.  This is me playing blues on Corey’s harmonica with Alan.  A bit later Rock Band was broke out and we played until about midnight.  I hadn’t played Rock Band in probably 3 months so my drumming was incredibly rusty.  I need to get back into practice mode.

The bar was definitely raised for Day of .Nets with LDoDN and I was happy I got to participate.  I can’t believe how much “community” has been built in the Midwest region just over the past year.  I think it all started with Codemash a few years ago and it has just been a snow ball rolling down hill since.  I also think Twitter has played a large roll in keeping the community together as well but that is a post for another day.

Great job to the organizers and a big thanks to Jeff and Carla for opening up their home to us.