Thanks to my “scoop” on the CFUnited venue and date change I was awarded this special badge by the folks at Teratech. I apparently blogged about it prior to them even blogging about it.

So does this make me gay and hyper? hmmmm no

I’m serious… I couldn’t make this stuff up!

Ok so now that I am not furiously pounding out the entry on my Crackberry I can give a few details.

Everyone that is registered got an email saying that they are moving the conference to the Washington D.C. convention center. I have been to a couple of conference there and it is N-I-C-E! Lots of places to eat and stay around there that are all within walking distance. There is also a metro station there so it will be very accessible.

The problem is that because they are moving it downtown the previous dates conflict with a blackout time for the hotels around there. So short story long they are moving it one week earlier to June 18th-June 21st. I am REALLY glad I didn’t buy my plane ticket… I mean seriously I was on Southwest.com at the purchase screen and thought “hmm I’ll do this later”… whew!

Now that it is moved up a week it frees my wife up to be able to go. I think I may rent a nice new van and drive the fam up there to visit the grandparents and cousins who all live in the area. Make a little vacation out of it.

So there is the skinny on it. Yeah I’m excited!

Just got a call from Ms Sabu at TeraTech saying that the dates for cfunited have moved to June 18-21. I am at lunch so more to come later… Hey its Pei Wei so it can’t wait!

I just submitted my registration for CFUnited. woohooo! I am staying at a friends place in DC… Bought a pass off a guy who can’t go for $500 and will be booking my flight soon. Doing it on the cheap baby!

This is my first ever conference and I am stoked!

So last night I went to the Flex 3/AIR Prerelease event with Ben Forta here in Nashville. It is always a pleasure to see Mr. Forta talk… as is anyone with a great British accent. He talked about the new features in Flex 3 and some of the plugin stuff for PS/Fw/Ai look really sweet. The ability to easily skin Flex apps is very enticing to me.

I think the AIR stuff is what excites me the most. I have always wanted to be able to create desktop apps but never wanted to learn a “Real” programming language to make this happen. The ability to work in Flex and HTML/CSS and have it become a desktop app is sweeter then sweet.

All in all it was a great turnout for Nashville… about 80-90 people… and it is nice to see the Flex community start to grow. This is the year that I really will start to get into Flex and learn it!

Thanks go out to:

Matthew Wallace with 615Flex for putting on the event and having the foresight to get REAL beer.

Aaron West with Nashville ColdFusion User Group for co-sponsoring and for providing the space through Dealerskins.

The Dealearskins Guys for supplying Shuffles for giveaways (Aaron West, Andy Matthews, Cutter Blades) and Especially for Andy for thinking up of the meeting venue.

Dave Ramsey’s crew for furnishing the pizza and subs and the obligatory Total Money Makeover Books

And of course Adobe for sending Ben and providing giveways and refreshments… oh and wonderful products for us to come around and geek about!

Pictures to come… I forgot my digicam so I have emailed Brett Davis to see if he can email me some of his.

wow!

From Foxnews.com (which I don’t read because I hate FoxNews… it was emailed to me)

Angry Employee Deletes All of Company’s Data

Call it a tale of revenge gone wrong.

When Marie Lupe Cooley, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss’s phone number listed — she assumed she was about to be fired.

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

It didn’t take Steven Hutchins, owner of the architectural firm that bears his name, much time to figure out who’d done it — Cooley was the only other person who had full access to the files.

Police arrested Cooley Monday evening and charged her with causing greater than $1,000 damage to computer files, a felony. She was bailed out the following afternoon.
Related

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

Source

I just got an email from Dale Fraser that a tutorial I did has just been published at LearnCF.com.

Go check it out

THIS!

Yes after 9 years as a palm user I have succumb to progress and have purchased a Blackberry. Now I just have to wait for it to get here!

One of my long-time friends Richard Blakeley… I say friends because I have met him before and have been watching his life unfold via LiveJournal for about 7 years now… has gotten himself into some “trouble”. He has worked at Gawker for a couple of years now as their video-boi and does hilarious videos and photoshopping for them.

Well this year at CES they decided to pull a prank with a tv-b-gone on the exibition floor and then all blogging mayhem let loose.

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Needless to say this was way overblown and the real thing is that bloggers feel like they have to defend just because they want to have respect and crap like that. The funny thing is that Gizmodo was there as press, not bloggers so really it was the press acting up… not a blogger.

I first heard about this when reading John Chow’s blog post about it. When I saw 3 words “Gizmodo, Prank, Video” I immediately thought BLAKELEY. This is what he does… stupid dumb but artfully hilarious videos like this. He has been doing it for years and why would he change now? It drove traffic like crazy and traffic means $$ in this sport. So it worked.

He was on rocketboom the other day explaining himself and I think it is a great interview. I love the terrorist scarf, I have a red one. Funny side story on that… Blakeley mentioned he got a terrorist scarf at urban outfitters in NY and my sister happened to work at UO at the time in NY and I asked he if they still sell them. She said yeah and then about 2 weeks later I receive a red one in the mail. She took it as I really wanted one and she bought it for me :-) Sweet but I have never worn it once.

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/rb_08_jan_17

Links:

Gizmodo: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Read more here:
New York Times: Over the Line at C.E.S.
BoingBoing: TV-Be-Gone mischief at CES
CNet: Bloggers behaving badly: Gizmodo messes with CES flat screens
CrunchGear: On Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging
Beltwayblogroll: Grow Up, Gizmodo Goofballs
Mobility Site: Gizmodo: What were they thinking?
Gear Diary: Total and Utter Crap: Gizmodo’s Stupid CES Prank on Motorola and Us Bloggers
ZDNet: How to temporarily “kill your television”-and everyone else’s, too
ZDNet: Gizmodogate: Get a sense of humor folks
Tech.co.uk: TechBloggers disrupt CES but prank backfires
Austin 360: Gadget site rattles trade show with TV prank
ZDNet: Gizmodo prank trashes CES presentations
Fake Steve Jobs: Gizmodo admits blasting out TV screens at CES
Scripting: The debate about the worth of podcasting
MacDailyNews: Video: Gizmodo turning off TVs - lots of TVs - at CES
CNet - CEA’s take on CES Gizmodo prank: Banned!

Sorry for all the non-cf posts today… I just didn’t feel like writing about CF… I will try better tomorrow! :-)

So some of you may remember this post where my brothers made the local news. Well come to find out my second youngest brother Monte is actually pretty good. This past week My parents and him ventured out to Vegas for a kicking event sponsored by Nike. It was a showcase type thing where they rate the kickers and give them reviews and stuff. There are also D1a coaches there taking a look at the field. Well come to find out that out of 75 kickers he placed 7th with a 5 out of 5 rating… this is huge! You see at this special camp EVERYONE of the Top 12 have gone on to Division 1 schools… yeah this means he will probably get a full ride to a D1 school and have a good chance of going pro after that.

Sad that he would be the first Merrick to go to college right out of High School and only the second after my oldest brother to graduate. Only too my parents 5 kids to get to that :-)

proof! http://www.chrissailerkicking.com/index.php?act=GetContent&cid=39&selyr=2009&fmLNK=10&pp=1