First, I want to thank Jason for letting me have the floor at yesterday’s Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting.  

Since I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have enough content for the entire meeting, Jason asked Jay Wren to cover some of the time.  When the meeting started, Jason introduced us both, and being the comedian he is, showed off some of James Avery’s Photoshop work.   For those that don’t follow me or James on twitter, it was an image of the band Ratt with my head attached to one of the band members.  I still owe him for that one.

Jay gave a 20-30 minute talk on ADO.NET (with a little NUnit thrown in).  Jay is a super-smart guy so if you get a chance to see him speak, you won’t be disappointed.  As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to do my first user group talk on Castle ActiveRecord.  I think it went pretty well and based on the feedback I got from Jason, Jay and Josh, I’ll probably pitch the talk to other user groups and do it again.   My biggest difficulty was feeling like I was tied to the desk since I really didn’t have any way to switch slides without hitting a key on the keyboard.  If I do another presentation I’ll definitely look at getting some kind of presentation mouse so I can get up and move around a bit.

Turnout for the meeting was pretty low, but Jason attributed that to it being February, so I’ll take his word for it.  

After the meeting, Jason, Jay, Josh and I grabbed some drinks and BS’d for a couple hours.  The topics were all over the place…everything from alt.net to CodingHorror’s 80/20 rule to the development community in general.  Good times.  Lots of good stuff came out of those 2 hours (at least for me).  I’ll probably be blogging about some of it soon.