We took a day trip to OKC last Saturday just to get out of the house for a day. We went to the Ominplex during the day and to Remington Park at night. If you haven’t been before the Omniplex is primarily an interactive science museum. They have an aviation and photography section too. Katrina had a blast there playing with all the different exhibits. Her favorite was the shadow wall. It flashes a strobe light against screen that then glows for the next few seconds except where your shadow was. We spent about four hours there before they closed and kicked us out.

They also had a planetarium that normally cost extra but they were including in the museum admission the day we went. It was pretty neat, but I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I’d be. It was really just a static image of the night sky with an announcer pointing out constellations. I noticed they hadn’t gotten around to taking Pluto out of their model solar system outside the planetarium yet.

After the Omniplex we drove half way across town to eat dinner at our usual place (Fazoli’s), and then back to go Remington Park which is immediately next door to the Omniplex. I’d never been to a horse race before so wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but considering I spend about half my time at work on a horse racing website I figured I’d at least check it out. It was pretty entertaining. I wouldn’t want to go every night, but we might go back once or twice a year.

I was really impressed that it didn’t cost anything at all to go, both admission and parking were free. They even had free pop. I was also impressed that they had open seeting just a few feet away from the track and we were able to stand right at the finish line. It started raining after the first race ran so we went inside to watch the rest of them. They have second floor indoor seating that overlooks the track.

Between it being dark out, sitting about 50 yards from the track and the horses running pretty fast most of my pictures turned out blurry (going to have to get yet another new lense). Here’s a few that turned out. Kind of…

Katrina got me a new lens for my camera for Father’s Day. I absolutely love it! It’s a 70-300mm lense made for taking close up photos. It has almost 4 times the “zoom” of my current 28-80mm lens. The main reason I wanted it no so much for the zoom, but to be able to take pictures at poorly lit events. At both Jeanette’s concert and the rodeo we went to a lot of the pictures turned out blurry. That’s because when you zoom in, you’re not taking in as much light so the shutter needs to say open longer. When you’re taking a picture of something that’s moving, this causes pictures to turn out blurry. This is a wider lense that can take in more light and take the same picture in less than half the time. I haven’t been to any other indoor events to try it out yet, but I did play with it some last weekend. Here’s two pics I got.

Yesterday my dad watched Katrina so we go a day to go out. One of the places we went to was Safaris Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary in Broken Arrow. For anyone who hasn’t been yet I highly recommend it. They let you interact with the animals quite a bit and it’s much more entertaining than a normal zoo.

They started out with mostly big cats but have expanded quite a bit over the last few years to include wolves, bears, monkeys, lemurs, birds, reptiles and several other animals. They let you feed just about all of them and you can hold several of them (not the cats).

It’s fairly cheap, $6 a person for admission plus the cost of any food you want to feed them. We got a 12 pack of chicken legs for $10 and a bag of animal crackers for $1. So all together $23 for a 2 hour guided tour for the both of us.

We had been once before and it was a lot smaller back then, but they let you get into the outer cage and feed the tigers with tongs instead of with a 10 foot pole. I guess someone finally lost a hand or something and they had to quit. Before they’d let you hold the food way up high and make the cats jump for them whic is still quite intimidating even with the fence.

Here’s the pictures.

We went to the Xtreme Bulls rodeo last night. I’m sure everyone knows we’re not really the rodeo type, but Winnercomm produced this show and I was able to get free tickets. I’d never been to a rodeo before so my expectations weren’t all that high. I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised.

First off there wasn’t even a hint of cow manure in the air so that made it much easier to stay in the arena for two and a half hours. We weren’t nearly as out of place as I expected, there were quite a few people not wearing cowboy boots and belt buckles so large you could serve Thanksgiving dinner on them. I was also really suprised at the music selection. Didn’t hear a single Garth Brooks or Alan Jackson song, but did here AC/DC, Queen and Metallica.

This was a major national competition, not your standard local rodeo, but the arena wasn’t very full. I’d imagine everyone else had the same assumptions we did. I also didn’t hear any advertisements for it other than working at Winnercomm, then again I don’t exactly listen to KVOO. The tickets also seemed fairly expensive to me. The seats we were in go for $50 a pop.

I got lots of really good action shots of the bull riding, unfortuantely they all turned out blurry. I guess the lighting was too low to take the shot before the bulls moved with the default action setting. I could have set it to manual mode and easily captured the shots, but I didn’t think it was necessary until I got home and saw the pictures I had. He’s a couple of shots though.

They had some pretty interesting ‘seventh inning stretch’ events too. They had a Caterpillar type machine come smooth out the dirt and do some wheelies and spins and stuff. And they had the cowboy monkey. Dress up a monkey, strap him to any animal and set them loose and it’s bound to get a good laugh or two. Those who know him might notice Tim Morgan at the bottom of this picture. We ran into him and Jennie there, along with Jason and Megan Dillard. Jason also works at Winnercomm in the camera room, so he had got the free tickets too. Here’s the rest of the photos.

I got my morning started right today. I took the trash out right as the trashman was leaving this morning, but he stopped for me and I got to throw it in the back of the truck myself. Come on, don’t act like you never wanted to! LOL

We’ve been wanting to get a new camera for a while, but really couldn’t justify spending the money when we had a perfectly fine digital camera already. You know the saying “Be carefull what you wish for”? Well our old camera got to where it wouldn’t shut off and would completely drain the batteries within a few hours of putting them in, so we got a new one.

It’s a Nikon 50 digital SLR and is MUCH nicer than our old camera. It’ll take a while to learn all the features, but it has much better resolution and clarity, and gives me much more control over how to take the pictures. It’s especially usefull for taking pictures in poorly lit rooms when you can’t use a flash.

I’m now a full time employee at Winnercomm.
Phew! 🙂  Being a contractor made me nervous, because you feel
like you are disposable.  It was suppose to be a four month
contract to hire, but they hired me on direct after three months.
They told me they were going to after two months so I wasn’t too
concerned but it’s still a relief.  I got the salary I was looking
for, and best of all insurance again.  We were on COBRA from BOK
still and it was pretty expensive.  It’ll also be nice getting
holidays and vacation time again.  I get two weeks off a year,
plus the whole company is closed the week between Christmas and New
Years (with pay), so really three weeks.  I’m still liking it so
far.  It has some stressful moments but it stays exciting and
different.  Currently I’m working on applications for http://www.ntra.com/, http://www.turffacts.com/ and https://www.usatmembership.com/ .

My first real book was finally released a few days ago.  It’s a
multi-author book written by myself and seven other guys
about ADO.NET 2.0 (database access for the non .NET programmers).  I met
most of the other authors at the MVP summit in Redmond, WA in May of
2004.  We began writing this book a few months later in the
summer of 2004
against early alpha versions of .NET 2.0 and finished writing the
majority of it in January of 2005.

This wasn’t the first book I’ve worked on; I wrote 30 of the “recipes” for the ASP.NET Developer’s Cookbook,
and wrote an e-book on GDI+ for CSharp Today.
I really feel this one is different though, because it’s
significantly more content than I wrote for the other two, I’ve
always had a lot of respect for the Wrox Professional series and
it’s
been a goal of mine to write for them for a number of years now.

I have to admit though, now that I’ve done it, I don’t think I’ll do it
again.
I enjoyed writing it, and have enjoyed working with the other authors
and the people at Wiley/Wrox, but it was a significant amount of work,
much
more than I expected.  I don’t feel the money I’m going to earn from it
is worth the time I put into it.  Not just with this book, I believe
that’s
the case for any technical book.  I don’t regret working on it at all
though; money wasn’t really the motivating factor.

I left BOK this week and started my new job.  It was a very difficult decision to make.  I somewhat hated to leave BOK because they’ve been pretty good to me over the last six years and I really didn’t have anything against them.  I felt it was a necessary move to make though because I really didn’t see any room to grow at BOK other than management positions, and that’s not what I enjoy or am particularly good at.

I had been looking around for about two months before finally deciding on where to go.  I had originally decided to go to Anyware Wireless, working as the Senior Developer on their Reform product.  I was excited about going there because I felt I had the core knowledge needed to do the job, but also would get to learn a lot about developing mobile apps.  Plus, it would be nice working for an actual software company instead of developing apps that are only used internally.  I put in my notice with BOK and accepted the offer from Anyware; however I had already submitted my resume to a few other companies and contacted RHT about setting up some other interviews so I went to them.

About a week later, I received another offer from Winnercomm and BOK also made me a very decent counter offer, so for several days I had no idea where I was going to be working in a week.  It was a couple of very agonizing days of comparing offers and benefits, tracking down more information, debating with Jeanette and praying.  Finally Jeanette gave me some advice that made the decision much easier.

I have been pursuing two different career goals.  On one hand, I would like to continue programming and writing books.  Eventually, I’d like to work for a major software company as a Head Developer.  This is probably the “safer” option and one I believe is pretty easily obtainable.  However, I’m pretty sure it would require moving to another state, and would still require working a normal 8-5 job somewhere and I’d eventually get bored of it.  On the other
hand, I’ve been trying to make money off of websites I run for about five years now.  Over the past year and a half I’ve been finally having some success at it and learning what it takes.  I still have a lot to learn in this area, but I do enjoy it and assuming I can succeed at it I could work part time, pretty much whatever hours I want and from pretty much anywhere.  I do enjoy this type of work much more but it’s much more risky than the other option.  Jeanette’s advice convinced me to follow what I really want to do and not settle for second best because it’s safer, so that’s what I’m going to do.  After making the decision it’s starting to look a lot more practical than I previously thought.  Assuming the sites continue to grow at the rate they have been, we should be able to make enough off them to support us in about three years.  That’s the goal at least.

That decision made the decision on which job to take much easier.  I chose Winnercomm.  Winnercomm designs, develops and hosts high profile sites for several clients, mainly in the sporting industry.  I think by going there it’ll really help me with my own websites by getting me in the habit of quickly developing websites.  I think I can also benefit by being exposed to the designers and account reps. there who know how to make websites that sell.  I’m hoping that eventually I’ll be exposed to some search engine optimization experience.  We’ll see.

So anyway, I started at Winnercomm on Wednesday and I think I like it.  The jury is still out though.  On Wednesday and Thursday I was a little concerned because I wasn’t really given an assignment yet other than to get familiar with the sites I’ll be working on.  This combined with being sick this week made the days go by really slowly.  On Friday, I finally got some assignments and was able to get into the groove though.  I’m working on the sites for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association and for the U.S. Figure Skating Association currently.  I really like the fast pace of being able to receive a project, do it and deploy it the same day.  At BOK projects always took weeks, months or sometimes years to get deployed.  It also seems to be a real laid-back environment and everyone seems nice.  I think I’m going to like it.  Of course my ultimate goal is still to work for myself.