Just a quick reminder to anyone in the Tennessee, Alabama, or Kentucky area… the Nashville stop on the 2009 Adobe ColdFusion User Group tour is tonight.  So, stop what you are doing make plans to attend the event and head over to the NCFUG site to RSVP for the event. Everyone that RSVPs (and shows up of course) will be entered into the drawings for a Adobe CS4 Master Collection, Flex Builder, Your choice of $2100 of Adobe software, a TimBuk2 laptop bag, Amazon gift cards, and more! Plus, each person that shows up will get stickers, a ColdFusion tour shirt and (yes there’s more) an audio CD copy of Dave Ramsey’s High Performance Achievement! Wow, how could you not come?

I hope to see you there! More info and RSVP details are here.

Thursday, February 26 (6:00pm food/drink, 6:30pm presentation)

Cloud Computing Series: Amazon S3 and ColdFusion – A Match Made in (Storage) Heaven

J.J. Merrick starts our cloud computing series with a talk on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Solution).
S3 is a Web Service that allows you to store files that are served both publicly or through an
authentication system. J.J. will look at how to build a CFC (ColdFusion Component) to interact with
the service and how to use it in your everyday programming.

Meeting information:
http://tinyurl.com/cn62t4

RSVP for this meeting:
http://tinyurl.com/ddhozn

Just posted the Connect recording to last nights NCFUG meeting. You can get it at:

http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/p44126041/

REMINDER: Terrence Ryan is going to talk on Squidhead tonight at the Nashville ColdFusion User Group. We will be broadcasting it live via connect so join us tonight at 6:30 CST.

WHAT:
Squidhead – Scaffolds for MSSQL-based Applications

Terrence Ryan present on Squidhead. Squidhead creates scaffolds for MS SQL based applications using stored procedures. Terrence just announced that He will be joining Adobe’s ColdFusion evangelism team headed up by Ben Forta with an emphasis on the educational market.

WHEN:
Thursday, January 29 at 6:30pm CDT (food/drink at 6:00pm CDT)

WHERE:
Produce Alliance
One Vantage Way
Suite C-200
Nashville, TN 37228

NOTE: When you get there follow the signs upstairs to the Produce Alliance Offices

ACROBAT CONNECT INFORMATION:
This meeting will be broadcast via Acrobat Connect. Click the link
below to join the meeting.

http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/ncfug/

GIVEAWAYS:
Adobe Schwag
Free licenses to Blogo – Blog software for the Mac

SPONSOR:
Produce Alliance (producealliance.com)
eChurchOnline (echurchonline.com)

** All attendees must RSVP by going to our website at http://tinyurl.com/8yvejv **

http://ncfug.com/ (http://tinyurl.com/8yvejv)

Every year I try to do a Tech New Year Resolutions. These are the things that I want to do in my professional life.

Learn Flex 3
This was a goal for last year but didn’t seem to pan out. Now that AIR and Flex are getting a lot of momentum it is a good time to go ahead and start learning them. I have some great ideas for AIR apps and need to get to learning flex. I won a Flex 3 getting started book at the Nashville ColdFusion User Group Christmas Party so that has got me started over the vacation.

Learn Action Script 3
This kind of goes hand in hand with the Flex 3 but I really want to get a grasp on AS3 so my Flex apps can be really dynamic. I picked up one of the Action Script 3 Classroom in a Book at the Christmas party so I will be using that

Learn how to create Wordpress Templates
Wordpress is such an awesome publishing platform that I want to really dive in to the templating and create custom templates.

Blog More
I posted almost 122 posts this year which is pretty good given that I haven’t blogged much the last part of the year. My goal is 150 this year so we shall see what we have. I also picked up a free copy of Blogo courtesy of BrainJuice so that will hopefully inspire me.

So what are your tech New Year resolutions?

Thanks to everyone that came out to the NCFUG/615Flex Christmas Party. we had a great turnout given the nasty weather. Though everyone seemed to show up about 30 minutes late it was like a large wave! Congrats to Andy Matthews and Eric Cobb for both winning the $2100 worth of software from Adobe; Shawn Oden, Scott
Dowling, and Albert? for winning the Flex Builder 3 Standard licenses; and to Jim Rising for winning the awesomely cool custom Flip MinoHD video camera (design courtesy of 615Flex Co-Manager Boaz Reynolds)

We had a great time and look forward to more joint stuff in the future!

I know this is pretty overplayed but I wouldn’t feel like I properly promoted myself if I didn’t post this here. I have a presentation that I give on jQuery and I have been nominated to do it for CFUNITED 09 and need your vote! I am pretty much an underdog since I am going up against Ray Camden but oh well.

Go here: http://cfunited.com/go/survey/166

and look for “Introduction to jQuery for the ColdFusion Developer” by J.J. Merrick

I have a bunch of servers over at The Planet down in Texas and they are a great bunch of techies. One of their DBA’s just posted a very interesting tidbit that I didn’t know about as far as using EXPLAIN with MySQL to get an explaination as to what is happening in a query.

You can check it out here:

http://blog.theplanet.com/2008/11/13/mysql-explain-yourself/

ColdFusion Blogger and fellow Nashvillian Steve “Cutter” Blades just announced that Learning Ext JS that he co-authored is now available from Amazon.com. If you have done anything or want to do anything with ExtJS then you need to get this book!