I'm OK

This year I attended, for the second time, the Dallas Day of Dot Net convention, or, well, I attended the half of it that fell on a Saturday as I had to work during the half that fell on a Friday. Typing this, I'm now fifteen days out from my exwife's death and I'm in a better place to type up actual blog entries on the stuff I saw instead of the crazy notes I gave eight days ago from the HTML5.tx convention. I'm OK.

There is going to be a series of blog postings from me on each of the talks I saw. They will not all come today and some may even take a backseat (in terms of my documentation) to the talk I'll see tomorrow at the Austin .NET User Group. I'll try to type up notes on Jimmy Bogard's talk next (today). I left him for last the last year and then by the time I went to type up notes, my notes no longer made sense to me. He gave a great talk on NServiceBus that I did not retain.

OK Tom, stop babbling.

Richard Campbell of .NET Rocks fame gave a talk called "Saving the World in 60 Minutes: The Humanitarian Toolbox" in which he suggested a digital path to volunteerism. http://humanitariantoolbox.net/ is a forum where geeks may volunteer their time towards building for charities and comparable organizations. Even if you are replacing that old, 1998 web site with Drupal, you are helping! Charities need this stuff. I interfaced with Austin's Family Connections quite a bit before its demise and gained an appreciation for how tight the budget for web development may be in the nonprofit space. Such enterprises could indeed benefit from digital volunteerism. The most interesting thing in Richard's talk was a fact he gave: "I'm OK" is the most common text message. This really comes out in crisis situations. He had worked on an app that allowed one to easily broadcast "I'm OK" from a cell phone and have it cascade to social media, email lists, etc. Cool stuff.

I want to end with two pictures from eight days ago at HTML5.tx. I have decided they are too awesome not to share. The first is Jesse Cravens speaking on The Internet of Things:

Below are Paul Herrera and William J. Moner having a dialog in the "Background in Bullshit" open space. If you are good at "Where's Waldo" you may also see Cori Drew in this photo.

I'm OK.