I recently received a cold-call / cold-email from a member of the Angelbeat team. Before getting the contact, I had never heard of angelbeat and had no idea what they did. It turns out they sponsor technical conferences with leaders from the industry such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel doing presentations. I checked out the website and the content actually looked pretty good. They had people talking about up-to-date topics such as data deduplication, virtualization, and Windows 7.

The conference was pretty good. They had breakfast and lunch provided and just as the emcee said, about 50% of the content was relevant / good. The conference was probably a little more focused toward the backend technical people that frontend (eg. towards system integrators not business application developers), but it was still pretty good. I learned a lot about the push for data duplication and the integration the benefits it provides in the context of virtualization.

I was talking to my wife the other day and she recommended that I write another blog post. I haven't done so in a while and I couldn't really think about anything to write until I realized that there's been a major change in my life recently. I went from single to married!

We had been dating for just over 8 years, so it was about time! We had been living together for a few years now - end of college and after. I lived with Laura officially for the last 6 months of my college career, then moved up to Dallas while she finished her last semester. We lived in an apartment in Grapevine for almost 2 years before buying a house in Valley Ranch. Not a whole lot has really changed in our lives that most people would notice other than some expensive metal around each of our fingers (and a big rock on hers).

She'll probably keep her name as Moidel for the first few months as we have some things that would be easier under her name. We'll be travelling out of country for her sister's my sister-in-law's wedding and getting a new passport isn't the fastest process in the US. We still haven't decided exactly what we are going to do with all the bank accounts / credit as I've always looked at credit from a single person's point of view. Your credit history (including longest standing credit card / account) can impact your credit, so I want to make sure we don't just go closing accounts without thinking about how they impact her Fifo score.

The wedding was a blast and the honeymoon was even better! It was great to see all the family again and celebrate. The photographer was taking a ton of pictures, so I'll have to post a link to them whenever the photographer puts them up. If I remember, I'll try to put some pictures up on my website tonight. I put a lot of pictures up on facebook via my blackberry so check them out there if you are too anxious to wait for the ones from my digital camera.

I was chatting with a co-worker the other day about how we just got granite countertops installed over the weekend and how I was working on switching out all the plumbing fixtures at the same time. We started talking about the different view-points people have on buying homes - how some people look for move-in ready homes whereas others look for fixer-uppers - and I mentioned to him that we purchased our house because it was pretty much move in ready.We knew we needed some little things like window coverings and paint, but didn't expect any major changes.

It's funny how that all changes once you move in. We retiled the whole house - which involved ripping out old tile and laminate. We painted a number of the rooms and still have more to paint. We tore out the glass retainer on one of the showers in the master. We painted the whole outside of the house. We relayed sod out front. We installed a red-oak tree out front. We filled in planks on the fence to convert it back to a privacy fence (from a garden fence on one side) and restained the whole thing. We changed out almost all the lights (and fans), but still have a few left. We made a built-in, in-wall media cabinet, mounted the LCD, and started the rest of the home-theater. And the list keeps going!

The more I reflect on it though, these are all really cosmetic things. Laura watches a ton of HGTV, TLC, and other similar networks and on all those shows they always talk about making sure you love the layout and other "fixed" parts of the - not the paint on the walls, the carpet on the floor, or other cosmetic items. The floorplan of the house was somewhat a trade-off for both parties involved (Laura and I). I wanted a new, large, two-story home with large cielings. Laura wanted a more traditional home, with aged character, and was happy with one story.

We looked at a lot of homes with our first realtor, but never really clicked with her. After going out with our second realtor, the home we are in now was one of the first (if not the first) home we looked at. It has a great location - between both our offices, not too suburban but definitely not urban, good proximity to our friends, scenic canals, parks, aquatic center, etc. It's a two story with large open cielings, which I was interested in, but it's smaller than what I was looking for at 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. It really is a great layout though - with the master bedroom downstairs with a massive attached master bath suite. The floorplan fits our style perfectly and we've been adding our touches on everything to make it fit us just right!

I've been working with Sharepoint on and off for the past few years and it's quite a love hate relationship. It's empowered me to do a lot of cool projects, but it's limitations and the way Microsoft has to come up with a special name for every feature drives me nuts. It's a good product that is a foundation for building other applications on and while the model is different than many other content management systems it's surprisingly flexible in most cases. There are some weird caveats to that - certain things that simply cannot be customized or simply cannot be configured in the way you would expect, but overall I think it's been a good platform for developing on.

What are your thoughts on Sharepoint? How have you used it to develop other applications or used it's built-in features?