Last year, the entire gang at Engage Software took off two days at work and headed South to Tulsa to attend the annual Tulsa TechFest event. We all had a good time learning from many industry experts and met like-minded people around the country. I learned a few things and so did many of my colleagues.

This year, Engage Software came back with the entire track of DotNetNuke. If you’re a DotNetNuke fan, be sure to come out to meet and learn a few more things or just plain exchanging ideas to help improving the community.

If you’re new to DotNetNuke and would like to learn more about it, this is a great opportunity to attend a free conference (or paying $2 per day to donate to charity). Our training courses at Engage often starts at $599 per day so this is a great bargain.

For those of you don’t know who MinhPhuong is, let me just tell you a little bit. MinhPhuong is my oldest sister's name and also the name of a logistics business which she owns for a little over 13 years. The company has some big name clients such as Samsung, Pepsi Co., Canon, NEC Tokin, DuPont and so on.

MinhPhuong Co. employs about 300 employees to date and my sister has no involvement in the hiring process unless it’s a management position.

Samsung has been one of MinhPhuong’s great clients over the years. Last week, Samsung has a shipment (243 TVs) that needs to be exported to South Africa and asked MinhPhuong to help transport the shipment to Cat Lai Port (in southern Vietnam). Unfortunately, the driver took off with the shipment valued a little over US$160,000 and sold each TV in several markets around the city for a less than US$200.00.

Vanda and I went to the Festival of Nations over the weekend with some friends. It was my first time to attend this type of activity that has been going on in St. Louis for a while. What a cool experience that you got to see more than 30 countries got together for a great event.

The main purpose of the festival is to “bring Americans of all backgrounds together - native and naturalized citizens alike - to share the ties with our past and take pride in the richness of diverse cultures in our community”. You can find great foods that you’ve never tasted before. There are various cuisines from many cultures or countries that I have never heard of before. But it was a great experience to try new things.

Besides all the cuisines you can taste with reasonable price, there are many arts and crafts selling at the event. There music, dancing, singing from such rich and diverse cultures at one place, it’s definitely an event not to miss if you’re living in St. Louis.

I’ve been busy with work for the past few months and then off on a vacation to visit family all the way in the Pacific Rim area; therefore; I haven’t had any chance to update the information regarding OpenForce ’08 in Las Vegas. Well, here it is.

DevConnections updated their web site with detail information about the speakers and sessions. You can view the list of speakers this year here and the keynote sessions here. This might help in preparing for the trip in advance and see what you would like to learn in this conference.

One thing I notice is that there’s no easy access to the OpenForce microsite, you have to navigate to it using the entire URL (http://devconnections/openforce). It’s not easy for people to find.