Things have been really busy here at SouthOfShasta.com-land for me, hence the lack of blog posts lately. One of the things I've been busy with is preparing for some upcoming presentations. I'll be speaking at the Sacramento CFUG and at the Bay Area CFUG in the coming weeks, giving my "Introduction to CFCs" and "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" talks respectively. Here's the details...

"Introduction to ColdFusion Components 2.0^*"
(This is the same talk I gave at Bacfug in April.)

Tuesday July 8th
at Sacramento ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Clear Capital building
1410 Rocky Ridge Road - Suite 180
Roseville, CA

(^* The "2.0" is just to differentiate this from when I gave the same talk at Saccfug several months ago. They asked for me to repeat it for new members; this time we'll have the newer code samples that I shared with the Bacfug folks.)

"Intermediate Uses of ColdFusion Components"

Wednesday July 16th
at Bay Area ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Adobe building
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94103

Any questions, just ask! :)

-nolan

I have a request/suggestion for the various User Group Managers out there: I'd like the software raffles to be "weighted" based on participation. My reasoning for this is below, and it may come across a bit like a rant because, well, it is. :)

[More]

This week's Friday Playlist will be slightly different than my usual "last 15 songs on iTunes". This week's "New Music Tuesday" was pretty rad...tho i was slammed on Tuesday...so for me it became a "New Music Wednesday", as that's when I was finally able to hit my local record store and go a little nuts. It's been quite a while since I've gone on a CD buying binge. Here's what I snagged...

1. The B-52s "Funplex"
2. Flight of the Conchords
3. The Replacements "Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash", reissue
4. The Replacements "Stink", reissue
5. The Replacements "Let It Be", reissue
6. The Replacements "Hootenanny", reissue
7. Eddie Veder "Into the Wild - Soundtrack"
8. REM "Accelerate"
9. In Flames "Sense of Purpose"
10. Paramore "Riot!"
11. Tinfed "Designated Rivals" (not new, but somehow I never picked this one up when it was released)

I wasn't going to post another Friday Playlist, since I haven't blogged much "real content" this week. However I just added that other post about "to framework or not to framework". So with that, I leave you...The Friday Playlist!

(Artist -- Song Title -- Album)

1. King Missile -- Dinosaurs -- The Way To Salvation
2. Pearl Jam -- Low Light -- Yield
3. The Reputation -- Bone Tired -- To Force A Fate
4. Slayer -- Angel of Death -- Decade of Aggression
5. The Postal Service -- Recycled Air -- Give Up
6. Supertramp -- Child Of Vision -- Breakfast In America
7. Anton Barbeau and The Joy Boys -- Ella -- The Horse's Tongue
8. 7 Seconds -- Put These Words To Music -- New Wind
9. The Mountain Goats -- Michael Myers Resplendent -- Heretic Pride
10. Eels -- Novocaine For The Soul (remix) -- Useless Trinkets
11. 7 Seconds -- Strength -- Walk Together Rock Together
12. Billy Bragg -- She's Got A New Spell (demo) -- Workers Playtime (Bonus Disc)
13. Def Leppard -- Photograph -- Pyromania
14. Deathray -- Sometimes -- (mp3-only download from their website)
15. They Might Be Giants -- Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes -- Then (Disc 1)

Happy Friday! Is anyone else going to watch Wrestlemania on Sunday? Will anyone else admit it in a public forum? :)

-nolan

I haven't done a good mindless playlist-post in a while, and it's Friday, so here we go. :)

Recent playlist:

(Artist -- Song Title -- Album)

1. Green Day -- Private Ale -- Kerplunk
2. Dead Milkmen -- V.F.W. -- Big Lizard in my Back Yard
3. Chance 22 -- Hollow -- "Godmoney" soundtrack
4. The Cure -- How Beautiful You Are -- Join The Dots: B-Sides & Rarities (disc 2)
5. Billy Bragg -- Little Time Bomb (demo) -- Workers Playtime (bonus disc)
6. 7 Seconds -- Baby Games -- Alt.Music.Hardcore
7. The Cure -- Wrong Number (acoustic version) -- Acoustic Hits
8. Del Amitri -- Mother Nature's Writing -- Some Other Sucker's Parade
9. Metallica -- The Shortest Straw -- And Justice For All
10. Bobby Jordan -- Get Here Tonight -- "Last Day of Summer Sessions" compilation

Those of you that were at the Sacramento CFUG meeting on Tuesday, did any of you...

a) eat that sandwhich that the IT recruiter dropped off?
and
b) did you feel ok afterward?

I came down with a nasty case of food poisoning later that evening. My suspects include some leftover pizza I had for lunch, and the aforementioned sandwhich that the recruiter brought.

Maybe that's why he wasn't able to stay for the entire meeting! He had to make a fast getaway! ;)

One of my main projects did a pretty big 180 last week. After demoing some functionality for a potential customer, the customer informed us that they'd prefer a command line tool over a web app (for use within various scripts and batch files they're running).

So for the next few months, I'll be switching gears and diving back into C++ work. It's been a while since I've worked on anything substantial in C++. This will definitely be a challenge for me over the next few months, getting (back) up to speed on the Boost library, and various other goodies.

Fortunately I have a few ColdFusion projects still in the works to help balance things out, and keep me sane. :)

When I started my professional career, one of my first bosses was a woman named Laura. She helped me move from doing phone tech support, into the Development department and gave me my first shot programming video games in their "kids entertainment" division. Laura and a couple of my team members became some of my first mentors, and were extremely helpful in me furthering my career. Over the years, I've made other associates that were also extremely helpful to me, or were just all around nice folks with whom I wanted to remain in contact.

Each year in December, I used to send holiday cards, much like a lot of people do. A few years ago I switched from cards to "holiday mix CDs" -- I compile a CD of songs that came out during that calendar year, print up covers and send them off to my "Christmas card list", including these associates from previous employment (as well as some family members and fellow music junkie friends of mine).

At first, I did it just because a) I'm a huge music nut and b) these were more fun than sending traditional cards, while still having a "personal touch" to them. Over the years I've realized that it's having another benefit as well: people REMEMBER these CDs! Pretty much year round, when I run into a business associate at a trade show, meeting, bar, whatever, I'll often hear "hey, thanks again for that mix CD!"...sometimes as far after the holidays as May or June! It's apparently more memorable than I had realized when first making them. Let's face it: nobody says "thanks for that holiday card" in May or June! :)

Several times now, it's had another benefit: these associates call me for consulting work! In fact it happened this morning: an old contact of mine that I haven't sync'd up with in ages (but remains on my "holiday mix CD list") shot me an email saying he needs a ColdFusion contractor for an upcoming project. One 5-minute phone call later, and I got the contract. :)

I'm convinced that these CDs help keep me on the list of "possible contacts" for work, even with folks like this, that I haven't been able to touch bases with in a number of months (in this morning's case, it has been well over a year. ack!). I've gotten several offers for work from people on my "holiday CD list". One such offer turned into an amazing opportunity at a dotcom for, nearly two years of gainful employment.

It's too late for this holiday season, but for next year, my advice to the contractors out there is: send something to your business associates that a) includes your contact info and b) keeps you memorable.

--n

So...I switched sides and bought a Macbook Pro. :)

My trusty-but-slightly-underpowered Dell Inspiron still does the job, but network connectivity has been weird with it lately. Plus the Mac came with Garage Band, and given my self-imposed-resolution to release SOMEthing w/ the band this year, I figure that'll be a huge plus too.

So far I'm even more impressed with VMWare Fusion than with VMWare Server (which I use on another Dev box). I suppose that should be expected, given that VMWare Fusion is $80 while VMWare Server is free. Windows XP Pro installed in just a few minutes! Somehow it seemed to install faster on this machine than on a native Windows box. Very surprising! Additionally, VMWare Fusion was kind enough to auto-install VMWare Tools on the guest OS, set my display settings to a useful combination, and it set up a network connection, all behind the scenes! Each of those items usually needs to be set manually when I'm using VMWare Server. This was definitely a step up in terms of usability.

Yesterday I took advantage of the sale at Macheist.com, and now have a few useful utilities to install as well.

Hopefully this will be the LAST hardware upgrade I have to make for a while! Since I had to spend money, I'm glad it was ended on such an exciting-geeky-note, and not replacing a failed hard drive or some such thing. :)

I've been in a very nostalgic mood lately. Listening to a lot of older music (Husker Du, old Slayer, old Green Day, Tom Waits...I even saw Doug E Fresh in concert on Thursday night), reading a ton about Apple II computers (and semi-considering buying an older box, maybe a Mac LC w/ the IIe card, or finding a 486 so I can play some of these 5.25" game discs that I still have laying around). Maybe I'm about to have a mid-life crisis! :)

Last week I cleaned some stuff out of my grandfather's tool shed storage unit, which included a big box of older programming magazines -- issues of Dr Dobbs, C++ Journal, Game Developer Magazine, and so on. Mostly these were from '98 or '99; while a ton of the content is obsolete now, I did find the occasional article that still holds some weight (i.e. things related to pure C++ language features, algorithms, etc). I'm thinking of tearing out the still relevant articles and putting them in a binder for later reference (the pack rat in me just can't throw things out!).

However I'm also curious what other folks are doing. Do you just chuck old dev mags after a certain time period? Scan the articles and dump them into SQL? Build a shrine to your previous coding efforts? :)

Please contribute any ideas you have, even if it's just to tell me I'm too much of a pack rat. :)

--n