On Tuesday I flew down to Washington D.C. to speak at the CapArea.NET User Group. It's such an easy group to get to since it means a 1/2 hour drive to the airport and a 1 hour and 15 minute direct flight. Top it off by being picked up by the Duthie Car Service which delivered me directly to the meeting and it's a very easy trip!
Every December, the CapArea group does a fund raiser with their raffles, selling the tickets for $2 each rather than just giving one to each person in the group. The charity was Teardrops to Rainbows which helps out kids (and their families) who are in the hospital for a long time battling cancer. They had 4 companies who had each committed to matching whatever was raised at the meeting. The meeting raised $600 which will equate to $3000 by the time the companies match that. Nice job, Scott and everyone.
Naturally, I did a presentation on Entity Framework. I started with a few slides and then spent the rest of the time in Visual Studio which was fun. Lots of great questions.
I also got to finally meet Jose Luis Manners in person for the first time. Too bad that I said something that made him laugh at the moment the camera was clicked but I'm not sharing what that was.
I stayed (once again) with Andrew Duthie (who morphed from Andrew the Cab Driver to Andrew the Barista) and his family. And because I was staying an extra day and night to speak at the NOVA Girl Geek Dinner, we all went into D.C. to the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian on Wednesday. It's such fun to watch little kids eyes get VERY big when they see this stuff although poor Joseph (5 yrs old) was a little daunted by the sheer size of the dinosaurs in that exhibit.
That night I went to Falls Church to speak at the second meeting of NOVA Geek Girls run by SQL chick, Jessica Moss.
I love doing these for many reasons, but one of those reason is that the audience is technically diverse. It's not all Microsoft technology people. There were a bunch of gals from the Linux Chicks (I can't find a link). They were very cool young women with attitude and I totally dug talking to them.
The hour and 20 minutes went by quickly as we discussed all types of things around the them of being a chick in the world of IT.
I have to finish doing all of this Christmas/Holiday stuff (cards, etc) and will get my demos up on to my web site shortly.
