I’m in San Francisco for VSLive this week. I like visiting San Francisco – I don’t know that I could live here – but I really enjoy coming to the conferences. I get to catch up with a lot of people that I don’t see very often.

For example, I had dinner last night with Gabriel Torok and Paul Tyma. Gabriel, along with Bill Leach, runs PreEmptive Solutions which produces the Dotfuscator. Paul was one of the founders of PreEmptive but he’s now working at Google. As such he lives here and enjoys it.

As we were walking to the restaurant, I saw a farm style tractor parked in front of a really high end hotel. I was laughing about that and comment that I really need to carry my camera everywhere because you see things that people wouldn’t believe without photo evidence. Paul laughed and said, “I’ve learned that should always avoid the guy on the subway wearing slippers!” I laughed and then thought about that – and it’s profound. There’s a reason that guy’s wearing slippers on the subway. Most of the time it’s not to go get the paper if there’s a subway or any other public transport involved. There may be a completely acceptable reason for the slippers but do you really have the time to find out?

My quick advice on visiting San Francisco that I’m posting here so that I remember it next time I’m coming out here.

Do wear comfortable shoes – you’ll do a ton of walking and most of it on hills.

Do bring a sweater and a pair of shorts – it’s nice and warm in the daytime but the evenings get chilly. It’s usually 65-75 during the day but it will get down to 45-55 at night so be prepared for that.

Don’t rent a car, parking a car here costs as much or more than renting it – most of the hotels are north of $40.00 a day to part your car there. Even the public lots are $30+.

Do, ride the shuttle from the airport – it’s $15.00 and will drop you where ever you need to go. True, it’s not quite as quick as the taxi, but the taxi is $45.00 and you’ll need that extra $30.00 to eat here or buy Starbucks coffee – see below.

Don’t take directions that start “Go to the Starbucks and…” There are 63 Starbucks within 2 miles of where I am. There’s even one block with three star bucks on the same side of the street within a block. That’s nuts. Don’t get me wrong, I like Starbucks as much as most people but that’s a lot of coffee.

Don’t pull out a map – that’s a clear sign of weakness and the pan-handlers will be on you faster than you can unfold it. I really like Pocket Streets because it allows me to use a map and others think that I’m checking email or somehow fitting in well here. Also, peek at http://www.ipodsubwaymaps.com. I thought that was a cool use of the IPod.

Do take your camera everywhere you go – see above. You will see things that others’ won’t believe unless they see it for themselves.

Do avoid the guy in slippers on the subway or bus or any other public transport.

Monday, January 30, 2006 4:06:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Jim Holmes posted pictures of the code camp last week.

It was a lot of fun to be involved in. In fact, it was enough fun that we are going to be doing a one day conference similar to it here in the Ann Arbor area later this spring.

Stay tuned for more details coming soon. If you would be interested in speaking at that - let me know.

Friday, January 27, 2006 4:10:22 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Rockford has a great group. It's a young but enthusiastic group. They had just outgrown their old venue and moved to Hamilton Sundstrand. It was a good location, but we had to sign in at security and there was a list that you had to be on to get in. Other than that, I really liked the facility.

They are working out some of the logistics of growing. We spent quite a bit of time after the meeting hanging out and talking about best practices on running a .NET group.

I'll post some of the thoughts that I shared with them in the upcoming days.

Friday, January 27, 2006 2:45:19 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

ActiveNick (Nick Landry) posted a ton of pictures! I'm actually in some of them too.

http://www.infusionblogs.com/photos/activenicks_geekish_celebrity_sightings/picture266.aspx

I'm excited that he's starting to blog again. He's always got something interesting to say - just no time to say it.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006 5:29:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

While on vacation this past fall, I met up with Miguel Castro and Bogdan and had a beer at the City Tavern.

I gotta say, I liked the Wassle. I had never had that before - but since then, my wife Phoebe had looked up a recipe and we've enjoyed it on several special occasions...

If you haven't heard of it - the City Tavern is where the founding fathers of our country got together for drinks and where they wrote a good portion of the Constitution. It was actually burned down and rebuilt at some point but it's very authentic feeling and the staff is all dressed for the period.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006 4:08:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

The Dayton-Cincinnati CodeCamp was a lot of fun. Jim Holmes organized the whole event. He posts about the event here - http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/01/dayton-cincinnati-code-camp-big.html.

I did three talks:

ASP.NET Security Whiteboard

This was interesting because I did a hour ten about ASP.NET security and didn’t talk about cross site scripting, sql injection attacks or any of the usual suspects. I just answered questions for an hour plus. Most people talking about security immediately jump to those items, but many of these people just needed to know what a role was and how it applied in ASP.NET and so on.

Roadworthy ASP.NET

In this talk, I talked about ASP.NET for mobile devices. Smaller crowd, but it was a blast.

True Mobility

In this talk, I gave my definition of Mobility which is not just mobile devices. It’s letting your customer/user leverage their data wherever they happen to be. That could be in the car, but a lot of times, it’s at their desk or at a coffee shop where it makes more sense to have a desktop app or web page. All of the different front ends have their strengths and weaknesses so you might have to write more than one UI. Therefore, architect your application so that it can accept multiple UIs.

There were a ton of good speakers at the event – here’s a short list in no real order:

James Avery

Nino Benvenuti

Dave Donaldson

Greg Huber and Jason Follas

Drew Robbins

Craig Utley

Rob Keefer

There were some others that I’ve forgotten or didn’t meet and I apologize to those folks.

I have to say that the event pumped me up to do one here in the Ann Arbor area. I have been wanting to, but this really gave me a lot of good ideas on the scope and such. I think that this is definitely doable. Stay posted here for more information coming soon on the Ann Arbor Day of .NET.

Monday, January 23, 2006 9:03:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Wednesday January 4, 2006
AACS Meeting Time: 6:00 pm
Location: IT Zone Launch Pad.  330 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor MI

Tuesday, January 03, 2006 4:01:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]