I’m back.

I’ve been on the road on and off for well of 3 months. I started at the end of April at VSLive in San Francisco, followed by a short consulting stint in San Diego, then immediately off to Seattle for the Microsoft MVP summit. A couple of weeks later a short trip to Microsoft, followed by some more consulting in Seattle. In the meantime I was trying franticly to prepare for 8 new sessions that I’ve promised to give at 4 conferences in the spring. All the various conferences decided to pick DIFFERENT topics from my large list of things I’ve been wanting to talk about. I love to prepare for these things, but quite honestly getting that many sessions together in that short a timeframe was very nerve racking. The time I spent in between conferences was rather stressful this time around, which is unusal for me – I like to utilize my time at home to PLAY both at work and outside (priorities, priorities).

Next was the Conference to the Max SDGN conference in the Netherlands which was a really fun event with a bunch of really fun people. Both the speakers organizers and the attendees made this a super fun event. I never met so many fun new faces all at once. I took some time off to go to Berlin to visit my parents afterwards, which was fun but I was working way too much in a crunch trying to get my sessions done. Add to that that one of my clients had an emergency situation where something needed to get done before I returned and I was stuck inside a lot more than I wanted to be for my short vacation.

Next I decided to go to TechEd this year to help with the CoDe booth and to well, how could I say it – schmooze a little with the .Net crowd. Making new contacts in the .Net community has been slow and so this was more of a social decision than anything else. However, it was interesting to go because it was one of those rare conferences that I go to where I didn’t speak, so I got to go to a lot of sessions. Unfortunately this experience (of going to sessions) was a mixed bag because there were way too many bad sessions in the ones that I decided to go to.

I had a little more of a break before DevEssentials in Kansas City which as always is a cool conference to go to as well. KC always has a really nice community feel to it – it has something to do with the attendees being a lot of the same people each year so when you come back you sort of feel at home already! 4 more days back in Oregon and off to Montreal for 2 days of Web Connection Training followed by DevTeach with 6 different sessions (ok 2 of them were vendor sessions). DevTeach as always is an awesome conference – the conference is just an incredible value with the amount of sessions and the caliber of speakers that is invited to speak. Unfortunately because of my work load I didn’t get to see very many sessions, but the roster this year actually had tons of sessions I wanted to go see, but unfortunately interfered with my speaking schedule. Jean Rene seems to be hording the bad luck two years in a row now, with both years having serious problems with the hotels and the promotion of the conference. Other than dealing with those Canadian customs I would highly recommend this conference and I’m sure to be back next year!

Now it’s almost over. One more trip to Microsoft in Seattle next week and it’s all done, but at least the pressure is of now. No more preparing and it all came off very well. It’s interesting for me to look back and see how the session went for me and it’s funny that the new sessions I prepared so diligently for came off the best while the few sessions I’d done many times before felt a little more sloppy on my end. I guess the moral of the story for me is to not forget to prepare for existing sessions so much…

It’s windy today! The Columbia is a washed white and I’m ready to go. For once – it’s been like this apparently for 2 days. I got tired of the ‘Dude, where were you? It’s 3.0!’ voice and text messages. Today hopefully I can get my fill…

What the hell am I doing still sitting here????