I must be the only person who'd never heard of this before. Jared Richardson mentioned it in his keynote tonight at NFJS Boston and I see it was quite the topic of conversation in 2004/5. Clearly I wasn't paying attention . . .

Oh well, as Ben Nadel will attest, I've been carrying round one of these since before I even knew it was hip. Last year after a NY ColdFusion group we were having japanese food with that months speaker - Peter Freitag, we started talking about some topic - probably OO or DSLs, and I whipped out my 3x5 notecards and pen (I don't have the clip - call me a minimalist) - I think Ben believes I carry them everywhere just in case I get a chance to sketch out some notes on patterns or code generation!

The silver cloud in the current economic downturn is that some amazing developers are going to come onto the market as the companies they work for cut costs.

I couldn't believe that Brian Rinaldi got laid off from UM today.

Brian is an awesome CF and Flex developer, very well known and regarded in the community. I have heard he has already received a number of emails regarding consulting or employment, but if you're looking for a top developer for a project or to fill a position, this could be a really good time to get some top talent . . .

I'm pretty much of the perspective that privacy (at least for the digerati) was effectively abolished about five years ago and I'm cool with that. I assume there's nothing I do that won't be published and attributed to me, but while doing a quick Google on a new date (hey, what can I say, I had a computer, a full name and needed an excuse to blow off work for five minutes) I came across a search engine that actually made me a little uncomfortable with the quantity and quality of information provided . . .

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You'll be glad to know that rather than unleashing my usual torrent of blog postings after one of my regular transatlantic flights I spent the time finishing up an article for the next issue of Flex Authority on Test Driven Development using Fluint and cleaning up some code samples I still owed Judith for my Data Mapper article in the last issue of Fusion Authority. Apologies to the people who've been waiting for the sample data mapper code. I've now sent it to Judith and it should be up early next week if not before.

It's great to be back in New York, and now that I'm officially an "extraordinary alien" :-) I can actually start to build a more permanent life which will be good. Some changes in my personal situation mean I'll be apartment hunting over the holidays, but I'm looking forwards to getting a place in Manhattan again and 2009 is shaping up to be an excellent year.

Happy Holidays!

We may need to do a small flash project starting next week sometime. It's a flash movie that loads a handful of xml files and displays their (fairly straightforward - title, description and image URL) content on the page. It needs a built in animation and the ability to auto-rotate through the content items when not interacted with. All of the content needs to be "nominally 508 compliant" (i.e. we need to show that we can access and navigate the content reasonably using jaws - optimizing the UX for screen readers isn't required).

We're looking for a freelancer who might be interested in the project. We're fixed bidding, so we'd need the same. If you're interested in finding out more, drop me a line with a little bit about yourself and I'll get you the spec to bid on. Just send an email to lists at pbell dot com.

If you're at all interested about approaches to implementing validation in OO apps, I'd thoroughly recommending signing up for the ValidateThis Google Group that Bob Silverberg set up for discussions of his validation framework.

Whether or not you're using the framework, the discussion around approaches to object validations is well worth checking out/contributing to.

[UPDATE] Just to update everyone, we spoke with Linda the other day. She has reimbursed us for the cable we purchased and also for the shipping on the original order which I think was very fair. I am still disappointed about the original experience, but am happy with the way she has resolved the situation - thanks Linda![/UPDATE]

I've bought from eCost a number of times, but after the problems with the latest purchase, I think I'll give them a miss next time . . .

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For anyone who doesn't know, Andy Allan is the main force (along with Big Kev, Stephen Moretti, Jatin and Leanne) behind the Scotch on the Rocks ColdFusion conferences in the UK. On Saturday he finally married Leanne, ensuring her support for future conferences :-) . . .

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Thanks to the many great people in the ColdFusion and code gen communities who helped out, I have now been officially classified as an extraordinary alien. Believe it or not, this is actually a *good* thing :-)

I still have to go back to London in December to get the visa and then wait a couple of weeks to get the passport back, but I'll be back in NYC in November to catch up with some clients and then January of next year I'll be able to start making travel plans that don't have to take visa limitations into account :-)

Thanks everyone for all of your help.

Well, I just had a look at my stats and it appears that I've made over 1,000 posts in about two and a half years. More than a post a day. Makes me feel better about how lazy I've been at blogging over the last month!