I'm so far behind in my feeds and blog postings it isn't even funny. What really sucks is how far behind I've slipped in my personal life. Well, I haven't slipped that far, but I sure am lagging.
Last week my laptop officially died. That sucked. I got a new laptop at work. It is nice. My boss is awesome. Vista Ultimate is so cool. My productivity is sooo down the tube in getting this thing ready with all the software and dev environments setup. I love getting new machines. I hate getting these new machines up and running and ready to use.
Last week I also got a new workstation at home. It is fast, and quiet. I purchased a 19 inch LCD screen on Saturday, and that sure is nice on the eyes. If I could just stay awake, I could look at this thing for hours.
Saturday sucked. I spent most of the day trying to salvage the data off my old laptop (the one that died). Eventually I got it all off. Then I had to salvage the data off my portable hard drive that got dropped. Almost all of that data has been salvaged as well. It was not a fun day, spending all day fighting blue screens of death as I tried to rescue whatever data I could. Like I said, I was finally able to get there, but it cost me my whole day. The worst part about it is that Saturday was Carrie's birthday. Ouch. Double ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch! Let's just say I've got my work cut out for me over the next year in making it up to her.
So there you have it. Hopefully I can get back to blogging, developing, attending local events, and providing the feedback on which groups to attend and which you should shy away from. Wednesday and Thursday is InnoTech. If you can go, do it. Thursday is a free MSDN event. If you have to choose between this MSDN event and InnoTech, attend the MSDN event. The content there is much more important to your career and where development for the web is heading. If you're looking for a job, go over to InnoTech. Wednesday is also PADNUG at InnoTech. You should attend PADNUG no matter what, it is by far the best user group in Portland (of all that I've attended). Next week is MIX. I'll talk more about that later. Next week is also Web Visions. Web Visions is a little more pricey, but has great content. I'd recommend following the online content for MIX (urls coming later) compared to attending Web Visions. Yes, I think MIX is that much more important, but only for developers. If you are a designer and are not attending MIX, head over to Web Visions. You won't regret it.