Personal

More Changes...

MOSSLover — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:18:37 GMT

Stuff has changed drastically for me in the past two to three years. I moved over 1000 miles from Saint Louis. I go outside and I get up in front of crowds with less issues. Now I'm changing jobs again. I'm not really sure what to say here. I was obviously unhappy and I needed to do something different. So quit two days ago and I guess it worked out that I end with B&R this Friday, then head to TEC and SPS Huntsville and a week from this Monday I start my new job at Gig Werks. I'm not sure what to expect or where I'm heading, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I won't really know what kind of impact this will have on my life for at least another 6 months to a year.

For some reason I can't sleep tonight and I think it's really a reflection of my last day. Tomorrow is an ending and a beginning at the same time. So it's both kind of sad and exciting. I don't know why I'm really excited to go to Disney Land for the second time ever in my life time. I get to ride the Teacups. For the longest time when I was a kid I wanted to go to Disney Land. I wanted to ride the teacups. In 2007, at the age of 25, I rode the teacups for my first ever visit to LA. That was the start of finally syncing up with my childhood goals. I wanted to live near a major city. I wanted to visit all the major cities in the world. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone. This job change will probably turn into something great I just don't know it yet. I'm walking again outside my comfort zone and stepping into uncharted territory. In 2-3 years I'll probably write another blog post how this week lead to something great. It just stinks when you have to leave behind something you know and love. I will miss all my current colleagues, but I'm sure I'll gain some new ones and keep in touch with the old. To 2010 being a great year for change and hopefully by the end of the year I can say I went to Europe. To reaching my goals and my dreams. Don't let anyone stop you from getting what you want in life (unless you are axe murderer please don't kill anyone that's just wrong). Have a good weekend everyone!

Strange Happenings

MOSSLover — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:00:33 GMT

There are weeks we go about our life thinking nothing is going to change nothing will happen. Then there are other weeks a billion things happen at once. Friday started off very weird for me. I flew into Atlanta and I met some cool people for another SharePoint event. I had some good conversations. Saturday then hit me and my virtual machine bombed in my presentation after the auto updater ran. I was writing code on the board and describing everything in notepad. I would say as presentations go it was the best and the worst presentation all wrapped into one. The next day I was in Baltimore and I hung out with my aunt which was relatively uneventful and great. Then Monday hit and half my presentations failed or succeeded and my screen freezes so I start describing the code. I was on top of my game until Monday night. On top of the world. I'm exhausted I get into Raleigh and one of the craziest stories of my life happens. So my boss has been renting cars through Priceline this week I got a different company than the other weeks. The company gives me a Ford Focus and I plug in the coordinates on my IPhone where I want go. I head out and then I get to the destination hotel (or I thought I did). I go inside it's the wrong hotel the other one is a few miles away. I walk outside hop into the car and it sounds like a gunshot. Nothing is starting...Am I doing something wrong? No I'm not the car is completely dead in the water. I call the rental car facility and they tell me to call roadside they are closing for the night. Roadside says they can't give me a new car but they can get me a jump then I have to take it up with the facility. They send me a tow truck to give me a jump the guy can't jump the car. He tells me this vehicle was towed about an hour ago. He shows me a copy of a slip from when he towed it. We also notice the rental car company left one of there price scanning guns in the vehicle. I call up roadside and now they are interested in getting me a car because I need to be onsite tomorrow. They get the manager of the facility on the phone he apologizes profusely and he says he'll be there in 10 minutes. About 30 minutes pass and him plus another dude show up with a Ford Escape leather interior. At this point I hand him the gun tell him someone left it in the vehicle and that I'm not so happy with them. I ask them to comp my rental they can't due to Priceline, however if I call him again this week he can get me a voucher. It's about 2 am and I'm ready to get to the hotel I don't make it in the next morning until 10 am. I would say this was a crazy week all forms of technology are trying to tell me something. What I have no idea, but we'll see the outcome soon. I feel so weird tons of change is about to happen. I don't know if it's good or bad. I think this week is some form of omen.

New York Area Community Stuff

MOSSLover — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:10:35 GMT

I’ve been running around trying to find my place in the community not quite situated yet. This past Monday I attended a community social event where all the community leaders in the area got together and discussed upcoming plans for the year. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly interesting. I thought there would be a lot more people in attendance of this event. I always assumed this area had so many more people. That I would be this tiny itty bitty fish in a very large pond. It didn’t really feel that way at all. I guess for one it’s because I was one of two SharePoint people in attendance. Also, there were only about 5 other girls. I thought there would be more girls, but 5 or 6 girls is about 5 or 6 more girls than the Kansas City area ever had in attendance at one of these events. The coolest thing in the world that hey discussed was women in tech events. They want to do something for young girls. I really hope we can get something together, because I’ve wanted to get more young girls involved in technology in high school and college (maybe even younger). I want them to know that this is a field where everyone can thrive. Just because there are more guys does not mean there isn’t room for girls by showing them how the rest of us are doing in the technology community. That was not the only thing discussed there is another event I am helping someone out with in the works for the area. I am going to heavily immerse myself in helping that person plan this event. It’s funny I leave one area to start doing almost the same thing in another area. Anyway, check back on my blog and I’ll be posting more details in the upcoming months. Also, I will probably post some progress as it occurs. Right now I’ve decided I’m attending NY Silverlight, NY SPUG, NY Dev SPUG (when it starts), Princeton SPUG, and Central Jersey .Net. These are all pending topics and if I still have train money to attend all the events. It gets incredibly expensive, but I really enjoy attending these events. I see something really cool with Silverlight or SharePoint and something just clicks. Plus on the friend front it’s not huge, but I’m trying to force myself socially to gain a few of these in the area. I miss all the cool people I knew in Kansas City. Right now I still haven’t found anyone local I could just hang out with easily. I miss all my old friends. Everything is so spread out and different. Time will present me more opportunities. Things just don’t happen overnight.

Don’t Complain About SharePoint If You’ve Never Touched Open Source…

MOSSLover — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:15:11 GMT

I have a couple posts coming to this respect, but I had the displeasure of working with Apache, SVN, and Perl these past few weeks. First off I tried learning Perl when I was 16 years old and it never took. I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand half of what it does and why you would use it over any other scripting language. The most I ever used it prior to these past few weeks was AOL .eml forms back in the day (http://members.aol.com/jadedixon yeah I know I’m not proud of my 17 year old self). I feel like I’ve been sitting pretty in my C# and ASP .Net world. This project was like a refresher of what I could be doing right now had I never been introduced to the .Net and SharePoint world.

So first off I had do all these insane configurations. You complain that SharePoint takes forever to configure correctly…DONOT ever complain to me about SharePoint. Apache and Subversion are 10x more painful to install. I swear when I installed these two technologies I had no idea what I was doing. What is even better is that I had to statically set the IP for Apache, so that it would not conflict with IIS. IIS is basically the Apache of the Microsoft world so the two just don’t like each other. I also had to set the port number for Apache to some obscure port that was not 80 obviously the port conflicts due to IIS monopolizing it. Oh yeah and did I mention the guide is not straight forward so you have to go into Event Viewer and the Apache and SVN error log files and basically google each error message. Eventually I got past all that insanity after about 2 days of configuration and I had a base environment.

Now at this point you wonder how do I get Perl to work. For me I need to create an Authentication script for SVN that ties into a .Net Webservice that will tie into a Membership Provider. As I said before I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know a lick of Perl. So I started by researching how to use Perl with Apache and how to hit a webservice using Perl. I came across a couple of items that could help me throughout the process. First off you want to install Active Perl, which is Perl for windows. You have to put it in the usr/bin folder on your main drive. Then what you want to do is remove all the IP address static junk you added, but remember to save it for later so you can add it back. Type in “PPM” in run and you will get a list of all the mods available for Perl. I noticed that mod_perl is a must have for Apache and Perl scripting. It makes things run faster and has a whole library that you can access tailored specifically for working with Apache. You need to right click on every prerequisite. I also found a great webservice module called SOAP::Lite that helped me pull the data from the webservice later on. Remember to right click on this module and then when you think you downloaded all the modules no you did not. You have to tell it to run all the actions. This will actually download the modules. If you left on your static ips you cannot download these items because you cannot hit the internet. So now you think your done right?

No you’re not even close, because you now need to go into the Apache configuration files and add some lines of text to tell Apache to recognize mod_perl. You also need to download a .so file and put it in the Apache directories. If you download the wrong one and reference it or mess up your configuration files when you try and start the Apache 2 service it will not budge and send you an obscure error message. If you get some crazy error message you need to go into the logs directory and open the error text file. If you are lucky you might get a nice clean error message that means something. If not well good luck you are going to be shooting in the dark for a few days.

So now I finally got everything setup and I had to figure out the syntax. This part was tricky because there are not a ton of blog posts an forums or documentation on this open source stuff. Everyone was calling there stuff wrong and from what I understand hitting a .Net webservice can be buggy at times with Perl. So at this point I downloaded a Perl Editor called Perl Express and started shooting in the dark. I wrote the entire module and I added it to the configuration files as the Authentication Handler for SVN. I got all kinds of crazy errors that I stepped through with the error logs. Each one more obscure than the last message. It felt like I was shooting at something with a blind fold. Finally I got to a point where I thought everything worked, however it was not popping up a username and password dialog box. So finally after hitting another 800 websites and trying different things it popped up the username and password. I received no more error messages and I thought the script was working.

I was so dead wrong, because the parameters had the username and password, however they were not passing them into the webservice. I spent an entire week trying to figure out what was going on reading forums and blog posts. No one had any documentation. Last night I finally thing hey what about the namespace in my webservice. Some people say you can use tempuri and other people just don’t use it at all. I decided to change my namespace to the uri plus the folder up to the asmx file. Finally everything works, so namespace apparently cannot be the default or Soap::Lite will not pass in the parameters. If you do a debug and a trace it will print the XML out correctly and everything will act fine until you want to pass in parameters. It was cool when everything worked, but I hate the open source world. The documentation is horrendous. At least Microsoft gives us MSDN and the people posting blogs are at least somewhat better. Plus I missed my debugger. I was using Fiddler and Apache error log files. At least with .Net I can attach a debugger and step through code. Maybe there is a way to do it in Perl, but I just don’t see it being easy. It just felt like too much work for something so simple.

If you are reading this blog post please take this with you that you could be working with Perl or Python or even PHP rather than .Net. It could be 10x worse. If you are working with SharePoint and complaining I will yell at you if you even begin to tell me how horrible the developer experience is right now. It could be so much worse guys. Don’t complain. You have it good. We could be working with punch cards or open source. Our salaries could be so much worse. Appreciate what you have, because it could go away in a heart beat.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Perl,Apache 2,Subversion

Happy Birthday SharePoint Saturday!

MOSSLover — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:32:34 GMT

It was one year ago that SharePoint Saturday kicked off in Virginia Beach. Michael Lotter, Susan Lennon, and Kevin Israel thanks for creating one of the most successful events around the world. What started out as one or two events has multiplied into over a dozen events and then some. Thank you so much (especially Michael and Susan) for all that you have given to the rest of us. I wouldn't know most of you guys out there without them. It's been an awesome year. Keep up the good work.

Three Weeks…

MOSSLover — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:54:33 GMT

So I did it. I moved, I ran a SharePoint Saturday, and I attended a wedding. I can’t say everything went smoothly in the process, but I will say it all worked out for the best. I started out my stressful adventure a couple months ago with packing and changing everything over to the new address. Here is my account as best as I can describe it to you guys…

I woke up on Friday, December 11th at about 6 am after sleeping on the floor with my boyfriend. The mover’s came at about 7 am to pack the pod. The night before I moved all the boxes to the living room, so that the mover’s could get everything packed up. I also packed all the extra items into our cars. When the movers came one box ended up dropping, but the contents as I found out were not destroyed. One box cracked from stress and we taped it together. In the end we had to shift some items in our vehicles and we lost the 4 chairs that Leah, Jason, and I sanded down and re-painted. It was really sad, but I at least got to keep the table. After this whole ordeal Johnny and I took a nap on the floor, which was horrible and then Brian Laird came to pick me up. It was time to see Jeff Julian and a few other guys for a going away lunch. We had lunch and Brian and I went to run a ton of errands, such as creating the welcome letter for the event and the online surveys. We ended up at the hotel around 6 or 7 and I saw Lee Brandt. We unpacked everything from Brian’s vehicle and the speaker dinner started for SharePoint Saturday. It was a really great dinner, but I really cannot remember half of it. I was exhausted. A little later we ended up hitting Kinko’s, Brian, Karthik, and I to print out a ton of material for the event. That night we stuffed all the folders as best we could (250 or so folders). They looked awesome, unfortunately we all got to bed around midnight. I left Johnny sleep late.

Saturday, December 12th started with Susan and Gary Lennon giving me a ride to the event. This day was a blur, but from what I can remember a couple crazy things happened. KnowledgeLake was police escorted to the wherehouse at the community college, so that they could find all there banners and such for there booth. A few sponsors showed up late, but everyone in the end got there stamps. From what I can understand everyone was happy with the venue. Next time the electronic stuff might work better if a kiosk was available. The wireless access guy was downstairs instead of upstairs so a few people got lost. All in all we ended the day at Talk of the Town having dinner together. At night we all played dreidel in Joy Earles room which was a ton of fun.

Sunday, December 13th was my last day in Kansas City for a while. We started our adventure at Jerusalem Cafe with Johnny, Eric Harlan, Joy Earles, and Cathy Dew. We got the Flaming Cheese and I got to eat the Vegetarian Platter for the last time. Then we went over to the Boulevard Brewery for a tour. I brought Cathy to the airport afterwards and headed to St. Louis. I saw my friend Jaimie that night.

Monday, December 14th was great, because I got to eat a Simon Kohn’s and Meskeram. It was the perfect send off for St. Louis. I bought a ton of beer at Schlafly for the guys in Jersey and some for Leah and Jason. We had our last night of drinking before I headed to the east coast.

Tuesday, December 15th was a day of driving. We got into Columbus around 6 or 7. I vaguely remember this day. It was pretty uneventful.

Wednesday, December 16th was pretty stressful. I got into Columbus, MD around 2 pm or so. I stopped at a McDonald’s by my aunt’s house. I decided it would be a good idea to call the apartment complex. They had no idea we were coming. This is when the pain started to set in. After hours of talking to these guys Johnny worked it out so we got a 2 bedroom. We did not get the 2 bedroom that we wanted, so we had to change a few things the next day was going to be hectic. We had to get up at 4 am.

Thursday, December 17th was a quick drive and we were at the apartment complex. I had to wait with Gambit in the car for a few hours. It was cold outside so I tried to keep the car heated as much as I could. When the lady showed up she said I needed a money order. My bank was not located in this area. The closest branch was somewhere in the midwest. I had to frantically drive around trying to get money. Finally after moving some money from one place to another and getting money out of this and that account I had the money order. We were able to pick up the keys and tour the apartment. After a few hours of waiting for the Pod to show up and the clock hitting almost noon I called up the company. There was a problem with the machinery, so they could not come until 1:30. Luckily I was able to catch the guys I work with who helped me out. When they arrived around 1:20 the ABF pod guy arrived after I chased the truck (literally ran after it). Everything was unpacked and then we went out to buy all the things we needed.

In the coming days insurance was changed, licenses were bought, and furniture was purchased. In a few weeks we might actually get settled in.

Friday, December 18th was hectic, because we were balancing the drive to Philly and getting stuff done. Luckily, we got to Philly, but it took us 3 hours because of pending snow and traffic. I saw some of my cousins and ate some awesome food. We got home and decided to stay in Saturday due to snow.

Saturday, December 19th was a ton of unpacking and staying inside. Unfortunately, we had no food and it was pretty bad outside. We got a lot unpacked and assembled. It was the first day it was beginning to feel like a real place to live.

Sunday, December 19th was the day of my cousin’s wedding. We made it to the hotel in record time. Pictures were taken and the festivities were had. I was confused with half of what went on because this was my very first Jewish wedding I can remember. It was cool to see all the little rituals. I don’t really know the guy all that well but I think my cousin will be happy. That night I brought my dad back with me to my apartment so that he could help us lift the tv. The tv was a little crooked but things ended up ok overall. I went back to Philly and got to hang out with my grandmother for a little bit.

Of all the days in that 2 week period I think it felt rushed and I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I should have enjoyed it. I loved all the stuff, but I would have loved to space it out a little more. I think next time (if I ever do it again) when I run a SharePoint Saturday I need to space it out away from any major events. I’m glad everything turned out ok, but I was insane to do all that stuff in the same 2 week period. I think I’m still recovering from all the events. I probably won’t fully recover for another 2 months.

Technorati Tags: SPS KC,Crazy Times

Perspective…

MOSSLover — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:28:27 GMT

Every time around this year we have about 800 blog posts on how great or how horrible or what happened in the year or the decade. The decade is closing and I will say this that it was one of my favorites. I graduated from high school, college, and I started my first real job. I was active in LGBT rights clubs, Interfaith Clubs, .Net User Groups, SharePoint User Groups. I lead the planning of 2 successful SharePoint Saturday events.

I attended these events:

MOSS Camp St. Louis (2008 and 2009)
Tulsa School of Dev (2008)
Tulsa Techfest
SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach, KC (2x), NY, Boston, Charlotte, Ozarks, Tulsa, Chicago, DC (2x)
SP Tech Con San Francisco
Hartford Code Camp
Raleigh Code Camp
SharePoint Conference

I visited these user groups:

Jacksonville Office Geeks
KC Office Geeks
KC .Net User Group
Omaha .Net User Group
Omaha SharePoint User Group
St. Louis .Net User Group
San Antonio SharePoint User Group
Heartland Developer’s User Group SharePoint SIG

I guess what really sticks out for me over some of the other people out there is that I became an adult in this decade. I was 17 years old when the last decade ended with a pipe dream that I would one day get a college degree and leave St. Louis. The icing on the cake is that I left St. Louis. I live at least 900 miles away from home and about 1 hour and 20 minutes away from New York City. If there are actually college students or high school students reading this blog the best I can tell you is keep persisting. Keep going. You can do it. I did it. It doesn’t matter if you live in the tiniest town in the world. Just go out there take a risk take a chance and you’ll end up with what you want eventually. All I can say is be patient and don’t give up. Keep this in mind when you pass onto the next the decade. It might take you a whole 10 years maybe less maybe more, but you’ll get there. Happy new year everyone!

Technorati Tags: New Year's,Decade,Perspective

Major Conference Cherry Popped…

MOSSLover — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:20:15 GMT

So you are going to an event with 7,000 people that have similar interests to learn about a product that you have a vague idea about…I was excited prior to the event and nervous. I had a very bad week before the event. Every piece of technology that I brought with me to St. Louis broke. I had little sleep trying to get my code done and my technology to the point I started out with that Monday. Finally by Friday I was beat and hung out with my friends…On Saturday I went to Coders and everything after that was a huge blur…I think I boarded a plane to Vegas. I’m pretty sure I saw Susan Lennon and a bunch of other people, but honestly I feel like every social gene in my body has been used up for a while. I talked to sponsors, old friends, new friends, random people came up to me and said “So you are MOSSLover”…I got a lot of shwag and then it was over. I realized it’s awesome to attend the major conferences, but I love Code Camps and SharePoint Saturdays or smaller conferences better. I get to meet people and spend time with them. I did have a good time, but it felt like I barely had a minute to spend to myself. I didn’t drink, because if I had started drinking alcohol for one second I would have missed something cool. I attended all but 3 sessions. I woke up every single day and attended the first session of each day. I’m still trying to process what I think about 2010, because it’s just insanely amazing and too much. How cool is it that I no longer need a hojillion sticks of ram in my computer? Isn’t it nice to load up the interface and have a nice Ajaxified prettiness? Isn’t it nice to finally hear about WCF being the standard for webservices?

Here is for round 2…I remember 2007 I was reading people’s blog entries…I remember thinking I wish I was as happy about my job like so and so. I know I’ve said this before, but I love what I do. Ever since I got involved with the community, despite partial times of insanity. It felt really nice to fit in somewhere when I have never in my life felt like I fit in anywhere. Thanks for that everyone. I really appreciate it. And so the insanity continues time for more SharePoint Saturday Kansas City planning and move planning. Maybe sometime next year I can breath a little more. See you all later…

If Music Be the Food of Love, then Play On…

MOSSLover — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:47:30 GMT

No this is not SharePoint or Silverlight related at all. Tomorrow is 09/09/09 and the Beatles, one of my favorite bands of all time aside from Green Day and Three Dog Night, are releasing there albums in digital format entirely remastered plus as a bonus Harmonix is releasing a special version of Rockband. I can probably throw away $60 for the game, but not so much the money for the remastered tracks. Growing up my dad was born in the 50’s, so his music was primary the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Turtles mixed in with Vietnam War Protest Music. We never really listened to a whole ton of 80s pop or hair bands, so I missed out on one era and gained the music of his era. I didn’t even know that Green Day existed until middle school/high school. My first non-60s era tape was Ace of Base the Sign at Age of 13. In the car on road trips wherever we went we sang such songs as “I am the Walrus” and “Love Me Do”. So when the anthology came out I was stoked, but we couldn’t afford the box sets. So I had to watch tv and listen to the radio for the specials. When my family went to New York City for the first time when I was in my teens we saw the spot where John Lennon died. It was one of the sadder moments in life. I hated it when I found out George Harrison had died. I have to say though John Lennon is one of my favorite Beatles, but not for the reasons everyone would think. I have the “Imagine” album and “Past Masters Volume 1” and I have to say his passion for Yoko were what sold me. My absolute favorite song of his is from “Imagine” called “Oh Yoko”. It’s one of my IPhone Ringtones. Some people bash the album, but I like it because of the emotions it invokes. Although, I have to say some of my favorite Beatles Only songs are “Here Comes the Sun”, “Norweigan Wood”, “When I’m 64”, and “I’ve Just Seen a Face”. No these are not the only Beatles songs I love just about everyone as much as I love Green Day. If you guys want to post your favorite Beatles albums and songs go right ahead. It’s a day of celebration. The boys from Liverpool are back.

Technorati Tags: Beatles,Personal

devLink Slides and Recap

MOSSLover — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:49:13 GMT

For those of you looking for the slides for my presentation at devLink here is the link: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/Webpart%20Development.pptx. Here is the code samples: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/CodeSamples.

So most of you guys know I’m more of an alternative/rock type person. I don’t enjoy country music much. It’s just not my thing that I will go and seek out. I don’t fully hate most of it. In fact Johnny Cash is a huge exception to the matter. We went to a bar called Tootsie’s, but it really wasn’t my thing per se. Mainly due to the huge amount of people and the loud country music. I did enjoy the experience, because it was really different than what I normally end up doing. I actually got to hang out with live human beings rather than my computer and a hotel room or electronic avatars. I got to get to know Cathy Dew and see Dan Usher once more. I met a really cool guy from Indiana named Kevin who works with SharePoint (did you ever get your SSP issue resolved?). I saw Rob Foster for maybe the second time ever. I spent some time with him when he came to New Jersey last year when I first started with B&R he’s a really neat guy. Pretty laid back. Eric Shupps, the SharePoint Cowboy, is another person I got to spend some more time with. He actually took his hat off, which was kind of cool. No we did not exchange hats. Over my dead body will anyone other than myself wear my Cardinal’s hat…Anyway, despite looking like I was stressed and having a bad time I really had a good time. The best I can have for this particular time of the year. Next time though I am buying ear plugs or at least some type of country music to alternative rock convertor. If anyone is thinking about attending the conference next year go to devLink if you can swing it. It’s a cheaper conference that feels almost like a major conference. There was some good content definitely. That concludes my last speaking engagement for this year other than the Virtual UG this week…I am done with events and SPS, except for planning. I will most definitely attend some events next year, but SPS KC and moving is going to consume every waking month for the next few months. Anyway I hope that you guys have a good weekend and I will catch you another time.

Technorati Tags: devLink,Silverlight,SharePoint