Last week’s presentation was a very impressive demo of using WordPress as a CMS by Philippe Alexis of no diamonds web services. Philippe and his team have really pushed the envelope of what you can do in WordPress. Anyway, you can see my videos of the event below. Apologies for the low screen resolution — I recommend you pull up the Easton Hockey website and follow along if you try to watch these.

Alternate: Part 1 : Part 2

This year’s was a very different kind of event, but I actually picked up some good information and had a good time. Stopped in at the Dice career fair and made the rounds of the 10 or so companies represented. Phoenix technologies was actually looking for a system administrator, and is located in the right part of the Bay Area. Amazon and Rackspace are hiring, but in Seattle and Texas, respectively. Talked to an FBI Analyst for a minute and pictured myself as the hero of one of those fast paced crime dramas – NOT.

Best talk of the day was Gavin Roy’s presentation on scaling web applications. You can see his slides here. If you can make it tomorrow (8/13/2009) at the Moscone Center check it out. I’m not going to make the long drive tomorrow myself, but there are some talks I’d really like to see (Laura Chappell doing her protocol analysis thing, and another one on troubleshooting). If you go, let me know what you liked.

You can see my contact page here. I think the minimalistic styling fits right in with my design, though it could obviously be tweaked endlessly with style sheets. What do you think? Please leave a comment, or send me an email on the new contact page.

For my Network and Security Engineer work I can just use LinkedIn. But I can’t really be a web designer without a web site, ya know?

I should credit Small Potato and the wpdesigner blog for this very helpful tutorial on creating a WordPress theme from scratch. My theme borrows heavily from the example web site — I just changed the color scheme, the masthead, and came up with the little robot graphic.