Last year I attended a really fantastic event in Austin called MakerFaire.  Me and Jenni camped in our new REI tent, and spent two days playing around with electronics, crafts, games and robots.

At one booth we created a stop motion video using found objects, which was recently posted at Anda Mandala.

I'm attending the MSDN Developer Conference at the Westin Galleria on Monday, Jan. 26, which is sort of a mini-pdc covering topics in the areas of Azure Services Platform for Cloud Computing, Client and Presentation, and Tools, Languages and Framework.

My top sessions choices are:

• ASP.NET and JQuery
• Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Services
• A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
• ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Hopefully one of my colleagues can attend Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and share the experience because I have an interest in learning silverlight after my brief, poor experience developing an mp3 music player in flash for Jessica Clemmon's site.

I decided to sign up to volunteer for a good cause as a developer for the The We Are Microsoft - Charity Challenge Weekend.

"This 3-day event matches developers with charities to develop applications for those charities. At the end of the 3 days, all of the participants will vote and the winners will be proclaimed champion coders., to help local charities with some website work."

There are some excellent people in Dallas who are organizing this event, where art is auctioned off for charity.

Several of my friends are amongst the 150 or so artists who will be working in shifts to complete their contributions.

Its an awesome way to support a good cause.

Last night we went to see a fashion art installation called BASE at Corinth Park.

They had some wire sculptures by Scott Horn, and recreation of the "high five" (where hwy 635 and 75 meet, in Dallas).

I'm sort of regreting missing QuakeCON, which took place last weekend.  I'm not a hard-core gamer or anything.  Actually, recently I haven't been playing very many games, except on my DS.  But back in the day, I did clock my fair share of hours playing DOOM, Half-Life and UT.  I think attending the con would have been a cool throwback for me, plus I'd have been interested in seeing some of the vendors and contests.  I wonder what they would have thought if I'd have rolled in with my macbook pro?

The Velvet Kittens Burlesque Dance Troupe are working on a new Website in Wordpress, with help from the lovely and talented Ms. Rose Dahling, who also does all their flyers.

The girls will be dancing twice monthly at Café Rembrandt in Dallas.

My friend the illustrator and photographer Tania Kaufmann is showing her work at the Magnolia Theatre on May 29, 2008.

She recently collaborated with writer P.J. Kryfko on a short story called Amorphous and did the title for David Hopkins' multi-illustrator-contributation comic book Mine All Mine.

Last weekend I was at the Dallas Tech Fest in Addison.  Overall it was great experience, with a good line-up of speakers, and the best part is that it was free! 

I attended a session on Google Android, the new software stack for mobile devices. The session included overview of Google's goal, along with it's partners in the Open Handset Alliance, is to build the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.  There were also demonstrations of map integration and opengl using java and eclipse.  What I find interesting is that Android platform uses a tool to convert the Java bytecode into DEX, which runs in the register-based Dalvik virtual machine.  So, I'm thinking that there is potential to leavrage c# and the .net framework, here provided that a IL-to-DEX linker could be built.

I also saw Richard Campbell's presentation on scaling ASP.NET Web applications.  This guy is a great speaker, and the topic is timely as the number of users continue to grow on the websites I work on.  Concurently, I'm also reading Scaling Internet Architectures.

Joseph Hill of Novell gave a talk on Mono, the open-source platforms for .NET.  The presentation was about half question-and-answer, which generated some interesting discussions about the direction of the project, timelines, pitfalls and successes of building an open architecture.  The moonlight stuff sounds promising.

My friends held an engagement party for me and Jenni, complete with a Japanese theme and custom fortune cookies.

I proposed at the Japan Pavillion in Epcot Center, Florida.