You don’t so much return from Las Vegas as you recover from Las Vegas.

Right now, I am recovering from my Las Vegas trip. Recovering from Vegas Nose caused by the extremely dry air and massive second hand smoke inhalation. Recovering from the sensory onslaught they call casinos. Recovering from the fake kitschiness and manafactured excitement as people sit like zombies feeding machines their life savings.

Yet despite all that, I still love the place. Maybe because despite the bad things, Vegas is really the Disneyland for adults with a slight bad streak inside that yearns to get out once in a while to indugle in a vice or three.

I especially love the Mix conference there. As Jeff Atwood writes (and I agree)…

MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft conference after attending the ’06 and ’07 iterations…

What I love about Mix is that it …

  • is relatively small and intimate, at around 2,000 attendees.
  • seamlessly merges software engineering and design.
  • includes a lot of non-Microsoft folks, even those that are traditionally hostile to Microsoft, so there’s plenty of perspective.

Some highlights from Mix include seeing old friends again such as Jon, Steve, and Miguel. Also enjoyed having time to hang with my coworkers in a non work setting after having imbibed much alcohol. And of course meeting a lot of people I know through the intarweb such as Kevin Dente, Steven Smith, and Dave Laribee among others I’m forgetting at the moment.

I also played Poker for the first time at a casino and I had a blast, leaving with some winnings despite losing four close showdowns, a couple of them in which my pocket Kings were beaten by pocket Aces. Who’d a thunk it?!

The past couple of weeks have been a rough time for me and my family. I missed a few days of work due to a bad fever, and my wife then suffered through the same fever the following week. Fortunately Cody hasn’t seemed to have caught the fever.

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In a week, we will finally move into our new home. While our temporary housing has been nice, we’ve been here a long while and it’s just hard to feel settled when we are not in our own home. Once we move into our house and make it our own, I think we’ll finally feel settled into this place and find our rhythm here. Who knows, maybe I’ll have more time for my extracurricular activities I used to do.

Speaking of extracurricular, I have joined two soccer leagues now, the GSSL (Greater Seattle Soccer League) and the MSSL (Microsoft Soccer League). Unfortunately, my foot is injured due to a hard tackle so I didn’t have a good showing in my first MSSL game today.

In the past month, I’ve given several talks, some that went well and one that went…how should I put it…very badly. Hopefully I will be asked to speak again. At least my TechReady (an internal talk) went well with 240 attendees, but probably because Scott Hanselman carried the both of us. ;) That boy can talk!

If you’ve read this far expecting technical content, my apologies, it’s a Saturday. We just had an updated preview of MVC released and I will be writing about that in some upcoming posts. In the meanwhile, the sun just came up outside for once and my mood is lifted after a dark few weeks. Things are starting to look up for me in this town. Hope things are well with you as well.