Another PodCamp Ohio has come and gone! The second annual PodCamp Ohio went extremely well. Confirmed attendance was exactly 200, and factoring in some other missing swag and nametags, I estmate attendance was somewehre between 210-220.

We had some new sponsors as well as some repeat sponsors this year. TechSmith, Blip.tv, Doctor Anonymous, Spaceblue and Blubrry sponsored both last year and this year. Circle of Seven productions, Avitae Energy Water, AssistCoach.com and The OSU Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) are new sponsors.

Doug from CSTW was a great host for PodCamp Ohio this year. Doug and his assistant Judy bent over backwards to make sure PodCamp Ohio 2 worked perfectly at their facility. And did the space work or what! We had more than enough rooms to our disposal as well as plenty of projectors, wireless Internet access, desks, chairs and parking! Thanks so much Doug and Judy!

We had Qdoba fur lunch again, and this time all the food went! Last year I remember finding a lot of quacamole left over that we ended up having to throw out. I’m glad to report all the quacamole along with everythign else was gone. By clean up time, we just had extra chicken, cheese, chips and shells to dispose of. Don’t worry, we didn’t throw the remaining food in the trash.

After party was a lot of fun! The food wasn’t so hot and the bar we picked was out of stock of most of their draft beers but after dinner we made the trek down High Street and visited Jenis Ice Cream. Interesting ice cream, as all the flavors are very exotic. It is definitely worth checking out if you’re ever in the Columbus Short North/Arena District.

On Sunday I met up with Chris and Kim for lunch at BC Roosters. It was great to have one more meetup before winding myself down from the weekend. When you help organize an event like this, there is defintely a day or two of withdraw afteward. It is like a combinatoin of let down that it is over, relief it is over and pride that the job was accomplished.

Whats Next?

I’m pretty confident we will have PodCamp Ohio 3 at the same location as this year. As long as Doug will have us back then it’s a done deal. I would also like to see us create a non-profit organization to manage future PodCamp Ohio events. Last year I had two cases and this year one other opportunity that we missed all becuase we don’t have a non profit tax id. It makes sense to make a non-profit, we certianly don’t make any money from the event plus it is educational. There are a few organizers and volunteers this year who expressed interest so in a month or so once all the PodCamp Ohio 2009 dust settles we’ll start backup the monthly meetings and see what we can get setup.

For operations that take a long time, you’ll want to notifiy users that something is happening, and perhaps prevent them from interacting with the application during that time. One method is to make a semi-opaque rectangle covering the whole control, with a loading message of some kind.  But I wanted to just disable the controls and change the cursor to the Wait cursor.  I tried setting IsEnabled=false and Cursor=”Wait” on my User Control, to no avail. It looks like you cannot change the cursor on disabled controls; it will just remain the Arrow cursor. And you can only set IsEnabled on controls, not containers such as Grids, which contain numerous controls. My solution was to wrap the grid in a Content Control and set IsEnabled=false there. Then set the cursor property to the parent User Control (the opposite wouldn’t work, since the Disabled would propagate down). This way you’ll need to set two different properties, but you won’t  have an extra rectangle or canvas in your page.

It’s been so long since we’ve made a post about Melanie! So I figured I would for Father’s day. She is doing great! She rolled over a couple times at the end of April (front to back), but hadn’t again until June 3rd or so (and then it was back to front only!). Today I heard that she rolled over front to back too. She rolls over onto her stomach during the middle of the night and starts getting upset, like she’s annoyed. So hopefully she’ll learn to flip back over. She’s becoming very active, scooting around (rotating) to find her toys. She does a pretty good pushup, and pushes her butt up too. She loves to stand up (we hold her) and to sit up (does a pretty good job unsupported, but falls forward or backwards eventually). Most of the time she sleeps through the night (but gets up around 5 or 5:30 to eat). She eats about 5 times a day, 6 to 8 ounces each time. She’s also tried pears, applesauce, and bananas. Sometimes she eats a pretty good portion of the solid food, but I don’t offer them regularly. She doesn’t have any teeth yet, but she is drooling and putting things in her mouth! Here’s some recent pics:

Ty watching over Melanie

Melanie sitting up

Angelo has been suggesting we get a Wii Fit for a while now, and I finally gave in and he went out and bought one on Sunday. I was recording a show on Fit TV, which I could watch for free, so I didn’t think we needed a $250 game system just to work out. But, as he pointed out, the Wii Fit has a personal trainer to give you tips and encouragement, and helps you monitor progress towards your goal. I thought you’d be able to specify target areas and it would suggest a series of exercises to perform in your workout. But I guess that’s one of the features in Wii Fit Plus. I was skeptical that the Wii Fit could really target certain areas, since it can only use the balance board (what you stand on) and the Wii controller to determine how well you’re doing the exercise. For example, it wouldn’t know how well you do sit-ups (the only exercise close to it is JackKnife), and you could cheat on a lot of the exercises. What I didn’t realize is the emphasis it puts on balance. There’s many yoga poses and balance exercises to help improve your posture and make sure you don’t put too much strain on your back or hips when you walk. Since I sit all day at work, and have a habit of crossing my legs while sitting, I need to work on my posture and balance. So I’m excited to exercise every day now, and chart my progress! I think I’m already hooked. Those total fitness workouts on TV won’t be taking up space on our DVR any more (I hadn’t been watching them anyway)!