Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

Today was the day! Podcamp Nashville 2010, downtown Nashville at the Cadillac Ranch. As always with the Nashville camps, overall it was great experience. The sessions were quality with speakers like Mitch Canter and Kate Gallagher. It was great to meet some new friends and catch up with some old ones.
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Dear reader,

“Failing doesn’t bother me as much as failing to act does.”
– Cal Evans

It’s not a unique thought, others have written about it as well. However, this simple thought was driven home to me recently.

I got a call one day in December from a good friend of mine. He started talking about an exciting opportunity he had and that he was considering myself or one other person to help him with it. I knew deep down inside that if I did it, it would push me way out of my comfort zone. I also knew that if I did it, the project would have had a much higher ROI for my friend because I was best suited to help him promote it. Foolishly however, I passed on the opportunity giving a lame excuse because I was just too afraid to act. I failed. I failed my friend but more importantly, I failed myself.

I passed on an opportunity when I could have simply stepped up and stepped out of my comfort zone. Yes, there is a possibility I could have failed miserably. However I will never know if I could have done the job or not. I don’t regret many actions in my life, I do regret a lot of my in-actions, like this one.

As I sit here in the new year and write this, it’s not to whine or complain about a missed opportunity. I’ve learned from my mistake and moved on. This blog post is just a reminder to myself to seize opportunities that push me out of my comfort zone. Yes, I will fail at some of them. However, I’d rather be known as the guy who failed than the guy who didn’t try.

Until Next Time,

I <3 |<
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Dear Reader,

That is how I started a blog post to my Ibuildings friends yesterday announcing that I will be leaving the company in December. It has been a great time for me – and I hope for them as well – but my time there is drawing to a close.
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Dear Reader,

In late September and early October, I will be part of the CodeWorks 09 tour. During CodeWorks I will be giving two new talks, “Design Patterns” and “5 Things”. I won’t, however, have the opportunity to give one of my favorite talks, “Open Teams:What Corporate IT Can Learn from Open Source Projects“. (If you’ve not read the blog post or reviewed the slides from the presentation, feel free to follow the link and see what it’s all about.)
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Dear Reader,

I am embarking on a new journey that scares the crap out of me. Those that know me know that I always have a lot of ideas floating around in my head. My problem has never been lack of ideas, my problem has always been execution. I’m an awesome idea man but I really suck at making them happen. Honestly, in all my years, I’ve only successfully executed one business idea. (and it worked pretty dang good)

So today I’m jumping out of my comfort zone and I’m going to drag you along for the ride. Just so you know, this blog post and the others that follow it are not about pimping my idea, they are about the struggles I face trying to make the idea into a reality. If you are not into watching someone inflict pain on themselves, this series is probably not going to be of interest to you. However, if you are an entrepreneur, or like me a “wanna be”, follow along and by all means, comment!

“Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution.”

One of my friends I’ve never met, Kyle Chowning posted on his blog back in February a post titled “Quit Being Stingy & Give Your Ideas Away“. In it he talked about Seth Godwin’s “Six Month MBA program. One of the off-shoots of that program was that the participants posted 999 idea that they had for new businesses. The concept was simple, if you like one of the ideas, take it and do it. You don’t make money from ideas, you make money from making ideas into a business.

Kyle took that to heart and has a page on his blog dedicated to his “Free Ideas“. I may have to start me a page like that, but that’s a project for another day. After rolling this around in my head for a month it really started to sink in, nobody cares how great your ideas are, people want to see you do something.

No, seriously—that’s all it takes.

Back in December a friend of mine that I have met, Keith Casey, wrote for the PHP Advent Calendar 2008. His post was titled “Getting Started the Right Way“. It really started me thinking, if it’s so easy to get a project started, why haven’t I been able to do it. I’ve read his post more than 10 times now to reinforce the message, find the first step, one that you can do yourself, without help from anyone else, and do it.

I looking at my history of ideas, doing is not my problem, it’s figuring out what to do.

Ok, so if ideas are cheap and plentiful but action is rare and valuable, I’m going to take the first step. I’ve started a new venture. (No, I’m not leaving Ibuildings till they toss me out) This is not a “part time” venture either though; it’s a serious endeavor to build something that adds value to the lives of others as well as myself.

I can’t talk about the venture without mentioning the name and it’s stupid not to give a link if I do that. The new project is called Box Lunch Training, there is a logo over on the left sidebar. The idea is simple, provide team based training for PHP development teams. The execution is turning out to be a bit more difficult. :)

My First Step

My first step was to write a business plan. Being a “cowboy coder” I usually skip the planning phase of any coding project and just start coding, so writing a business plan kinda went against the grain for me. However, I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to see the next steps. So I wrote my business plan.

Writing it naturally let me to my next step, actually creating a product. Since the training is episodic, I wrote the first two episodes. Originally, my thought was that after an episode, I would know what it will take to write others. Writing the first episode was eye-opening, writing the second was so much more difficult that it almost convinced me the idea wasn’t viable. However, after I finished it and assessed everything, I think I’m back on track.

I have to adjust my expectations a bit; writing training isn’t as easy as sitting down and writing an opinionated blog post. (For some reason, people want training to be accurate) :) So there is a LOT of research that goes into an episode. I was prepared for research but not to the extent I am doing.

The upside is I’m researching PHP so it’s fun. :)

My Next Step

I think my next step will be to get 2 more episodes under my belt. The lovely and talented Kathy is working on building out a web site for the project and we are shooting for a July 1 launch. I want to keep about 4 episodes in the can at all times in case of emergencies. That is a lesson I learned from podcasting, never wait until the week the episode is due to create it.

Future steps

As I see them at the moment these are the things I need to do.

• Build out website
• Start contacting likely affiliates
• Finish the first four episodes
• Refine and prioritize the list of topics. (I’ve got a list of about 60 episode topics that I need to prioritize.)
• Find a way to sell the idea to businesses. This is really my weak point, I can code, manage and build but for the life of me, I can’t sell. I’m really hoping that I can attract a few top-notch affiliate sites and outsource the selling to them. (I’m open to other ideas if you have them)

More to come

This blog post and the others that will follow are more for my sake than anything else. I do encourage you to comment if you’ve got something to say that will help. Mainly though, I just need a place to gather my thoughts.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

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Dear Reader,

For the first time in my married life, I find myself separated from the lovely and talented Kathy on Valentine’s Day. This is an odd experience for me as I consider Valentines Day to be the third most holy day on the calendar. A lot of people ask me about that comment, why and exactly what I mean by it.

Like most modern holidays, Valentine’s Day has been overrun by crass commercialism. Many think that it was a holiday invented by the Greeting card industry but wikipedia tells a different story. Regardless of it’s origins, Valentine’s day has come to be a day of expressing your love for someone else.

In the US, our driven lifestyle means that a lot of important things get dropped by the wayside. I know I am guilty of ignoring a lot of important friendships and relationships in my life. (I really am a horrible friend) So when we set aside a day just to honor the one relationship in our lives that is, or should be, the most important then yes, I think we should take it very seriously.

Given the distance between us at the moment and the current economic situation, I did not get the lovely and talented Kathy a gift this year. Instead I wrote her the first of what I hope to be many poems to come this year.

So this year, besides a cheesy poem, my gift to Kathy are these promises.

• I promise that I will spend today thinking about our relationship.I will think about the mistakes I’ve made and find ways to not make them any more. I think about the things (or maybe thing) I did right this year and try to do more things like that.
• I promise to find a way to make you smile each day.
• I promise to find ways to make you fall in love with me all over each and every day.

I love you Kathy.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
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Dear Reader,

I’m really curious about the origins of the Seven Things Meme. Anybody know where it started? Anyhow, I’ve been tagged by my friend Matthew Weier O’Phinney so I’ll play along. (It forces me to blog, something I’ve not done a lot of in the past 6 months)

• My super power is thinking up titles for things
  Everybody has a super power, some of us just have to look harder than others to find them. Luckily for me, mine manifested itself early in life, I am good at making up titles. It doesn’t matter what needs a title, I can look at something or hear an idea and come up with a title for it. (examples would be this blog you are reading, or this one, or this one) Unfortunately for me, it’s not a power I can control. They either come to me, or they don’t. So if you are ever stuck coming up with a title for something, ping me.
• I wrote my own PHP framework.
  Ok, so who hasn’t? The only difference is that I wrote a PHP framework back in 2001. Apparently, SourceForge doesn’t clean out it’s closets often because it’s still there. The name of the project is a good example of how my super power doesn’t always work. (Matthew, you are not allowed to laugh at my code, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel)
• I didn’t have to take English 101 because I wrote a perfect paper
  This one will come as a surprise to anyone who followed DevZone closely. I can’t spell and I regularly butcher the English language. Names are my specialty. Give me a name and I’ll show you at least 3 alternate spellings. However, when I started college at the University of South Alabama, my first class was English 101. The first day, the assignment was to write a paper on what you did that summer. I turned mine in and the next day I was informed that I had passed the class because there were no grammatical or spelling errors in the paper. No one was more surprised than my mother, an English teacher. :)
• I want a tattoo
  I’ve wanted a tattoo for some time to complete my mid-life crisis. Kathy even designed me one but she won’t finish it up. Her design centers around “Property of Kathy” written in Tengwar.) (Do me a favor, drop @kateva a note on twitter and encourage her to finish it.)
• I used to produce live concert videos
  I wore a lot of hats before I donned the battered Fedora and started writing about PHP. A few years ago, that hat was a beret because I was in “the biz”. I produced over 40 live concert videos. Most of them were for Southern Gospel groups but I did a couple of contemporary Christian groups and even two comedy videos. I’ve moved on now and while I love programming computers, I can honestly say that producing videos are some of the most fun and yet the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.
• I met The Lovely and Talented Kathy while we were both working at Walt Disney World
  The year I graduated high school, Walt Disney World opened EPCOT Center. That summer, they went on a hiring spree to staff up for the fall opening. It was during this spree that I sneaked in, with the help of a couple of nice ladies who went to church with my grandparents. I was hired into “Cash Control”, basically, the bank for all of the stores in the park. (For those that care, it’s in “the tunnel” directly beneath the Carousel.) On my first day in Cash Control, I met The Lovely and Talented Kathy and knew I was going to marry her. Unfortunately, she didn’t quite see it that way. (I was a mere child of 18 at the time and she was…well a year or two older than me) One night, after we closed the park and then closed Bennigin’s, her car wouldn’t start. With a straight face and more than one Banana Banshee in her, she looked at me and said “Hey, my car won’t start, will you ride home under the hood and hold the distributor cap on?” The sad thing is that I was so smitten with her that I would have done it. That’s ok, she eventually came around…or I wore her down, I’m not sure.
• I got my job at Zend quite by accident
  Back when I was at Jupiter Hosting, I actually had time to write some code. I didn’t get to write a lot, but between meetings and other management crap, my team would take pity on me and give me a small project to chew on. One of the projects I wrote (I forget which one) I thought was pretty good. There was this company named Zend that had a code repository (it’s gone now) and I wanted to submit the project to it. I submitted the project and waited…and waited…and waited. After about 2 days of hearing nothing, I started emailing people asking what was up. I ended up talking to Jayons Minard who told me no one was managing the repository anymore, so I volunteered. I ended up managing it for about 4 months while I was working at a small start-up back in Nashville.

  When the start-up went tits-up, I started doing contract work until I found something I liked. One of the contracts I started working on was this new site that Zend was building and Jayson was in charge of, DevZone. One thing led to another and after about 3 months of working on contract for Zend, and constantly asking Jayson if there were any positions open at Zend, I got an email from him. He said that Mark de Visser, his boss, would be in Nashville the next week for a Red Hat conference and wanted to interview me. I had a great interview with him and had an offer letter in my email in box when I got back home.
  
  It was probably the weirdest journey to a job that I’ve ever traveled, but it was worth it. :)

Ok, there are my Seven Things. Now for my Seven People. I think this part may be harder than the seven things.

• The Lovely and Talented Kathy – She will have to post her entry here because she’s yet to join the blogger nation.
• Mark de Visser – The best boss I ever had and the man who taught me the value of a community to an open source project.
• Louis Davidson – My long time friend whom I talk to maybe once a year but think about every day.
• Joe Stagner – Because if more people at Microsoft were like him, it would be a much cooler place.
• Allen Fuller – Who if he doesn’t already know Keith Casey, probably should.
• Sebastian Bergman – the official photographer of the PHP community.
• Christian Flickinger – Spooooooooooooon!

And now, the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
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Dear Reader,

I am constantly overwhelmed by the generosity of the PHP community. Whether it’s someone giving an anonymous scholarship to a developer at php|works, all the volunteers who donate their time to the PHP Advent Calendar, or as in this most recent case, the PHP Belgium User Group dropping off a nice little package for me.

Having been in London for two long days, when I finally did drag myself into the office this morning, I was still a bit groggy. (I am old enough so that partying and late-night flights take their toll) When I set my gear down though I noticed that I had a gift on my desk.

I’m told by Mike that these are bottles of a liqueur similar to rum, one of my favorite drinks.

Thank you Mike and the entire PHP Belgium user Group. I can’t tell you how humbled I am by your generosity. I hope in the year to come that I can repay the favor.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Wow, what a day today was!

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post so unless you are friend or family, you may just want to read the next summary and skip the rest.

For those in a hurry

For those who have not heard, yes, I will soon be leaving Zend and moving to Ibuildings. Yes, that means I am also leaving Nashville, TN-US for Utrecht, Netherlands. No, the lovely and talented Kathy will not be going with me immediately but will be joining me after my son graduates high school. Yes we are both very excited about it.

Why

The first question most people ask me is why? I mean a lot of people asked me that. As I’ve said to just about anyone who would listen, I have a great job! Zend is a great company to work for, they provide for their people, and I have absolutely no complaints about my time at Zend. This will come as a surprise to a few Zenders as all they have ever seen me do is complain. I’ve been allowed to create my role at Zend and that is a rare thing at any company.

I was originally hired at Zend to be an editor for DevZone and I was just supposed to write articles and code. (those of you who have seen my spelling and grammar gaffes can stop laughing now) Over the course of 2.5 years, Mark de Visser, with the backing of Andi, Harold and the rest of this awesome company, put up with my antics. They paid me to work with the PHP community. I got to travel to conferences, hang out in IRC, they even let me be the Master of Ceremonies of ZendCon. This truly is a dream job. It is so great that in the 2.5 years, I’ve turned down most offers to interview and the few serious offers that came my way. This was were I felt at home.

So back to the question, why leave a dream job at a great company? The only answer I have is “opportunity“. Most of you have never read my article “Nerd Herding” (and I don’t recommend you bother now) but in it I talk about the fact that for developers, interesting projects are just as important as a good salary. While I still love what I do at Zend, the opportunity offered to me by Ibuildings was just too great to pass up. So that is why, after over a month of thinking about it and discussing it with the lovely and talented Kathy, we decided that this was a chance I couldn’t pass up.

/me <3 PHPC

One of the great things about my job, both at Zend and at Ibuildings is that I get paid to work with the PHP community. I told someone this at ZendCon but it bears repeating here.

PHP is my fifth programming language, that means I’ve been a part of 5 programming communities. None of those communities have come close to being as vibrant, fun and welcoming as the PHP community. PHP developers should not take this community for granted, it is something special.

It is to this awesome group of mixed nuts that we call the PHP community, that I give a big hug and say thank you. Thank you for all the tweets, blog posts, IMs and irc well wishes today. Thank you for your friendship. Thanks you for welcoming me in even when you didn’t have to. You guys and gals are teh awesome and I wish I could call each of you by name and say thank you. (if I tried, we’d be here a while an even then, I know I’d leave someone out so I’m not going to try) It has been a blast working with you while at Zend and I look forward to working with you at Ibuildings!

Looking Forward

I’ve talked a lot about Zend in this post but I can’t close without saying a big hello to my new Ibuildings family. Thank you for welcoming me in such a warm fashion. I’ve never had this much attention paid to me coming to a new company. Honestly, it humbles me to think that I’m moving to a new company and country and yet I already have good friends in both. I am looking forward to working with each of you!

I am positive that Zend will be hiring someone to take over DevZone and my other duties. I know that phpc will embrace them as you did me. (because again, you guys and gals rock!) DevZone has become a regular daily stop of a lot of PHP developers and I am sure it will only get better.

As for me? well, I’m not going anywhere. (figuratively speaking) I’ll still be hanging around on Skype, IRC and IM. If you need to contact me, my contact info is always on my EPK. I encourage you to ping me if I can help you.

It’s been an awesome 2.5 years at Zend and I look forward to a number of awesome years at Ibuildings!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

For the first time in five years, the lovely and talented Kathy and I took a much needed vacation. This time, we decided to drag along our two best friends, Rick and Kim.

As with our last vacation, we decided to cruise, at least for part of it. Unlike last time though, we chose to cruise to Mexico instead of Alaska. To Thursday afternoon, after a nice flight, we boarded the Royal Caribbean ship, “Enchantment of the Seas” in Ft. Lauderdale and set sail. The boat was nice but not as nice as the “Radiance of the Seas” that we sailed on in Alaska. Still it was a nice boat and we soon found our sea legs and started relaxing.

The first meme of the trip came during dinner the first evening. Rick opened the butter dish to find that the gr in “grassland butter” was obscured leaving only “assland butter”. Those of you who know us know that it went downhill quickly from there.

Key West was our first port of call. We visited the Hemmingway house, did all the touristy things and then headed back to the ship because it was hot! The Hemmingway house was awesome, we had a great tour guide named Loren who made the tour very interesting.

That evening was the formal dining night on the ship so we all got dressed up and pretended we were adults for the evening. When it’s all said and done, I think we clean up pretty good. :)

The next port of call was Cozumel. For our excursion there we chose to see the Mayan ruins. Well, we thought that was the point of the excursion, it turned out to be an hour at the ruins, and a few sales pitches along the way. It was fun and entertaining though.

Since Cozumel is on an island, we had to take a ferry to the mainland to see the ruins. The ride over was a bit hairy because we sat inside, the water was real choppy and the guy one isle over lost his lunch. Luckily, they had passed out plastic baggies just for that purpose. The ride back was much better, we sat on the back deck and enjoyed the sun and spray. By the time we got back though, we were salt crusted. :)

The next day was our only full day at sea. we mainly just wandered around and did a lot of nothing. We did play TV Tune Trivia and if Rick and Kim had bothered to show up on-time we would have actually won. We were one point away from winning and they knew the first tune. Alas, they opted to take a nap and got carried away.

That evening was probably the most fun evening of the cruise. We saw the “farewell” show in the theater, played the scavenger hunt game on the opposite end of the ship and then went back to the theater for some late-night comedy. Our bartender from dinner just happened to show up at each location to make sure that we were “enjoying ourselves”. We kinda “over enjoyed” ourselves that night.

That was it for the cruise. I don’t have pictures for the dive portion yet so I’ll save that for another day. No cruise is complete without towel animals though so here are the pictures of ours.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Regular readers know that I am ecstatically married to wife 1.24, the lovely and talented Kathy. (She is the inspiration for all the love poems at  Cyrano’s Apprentice…and even one of the Burma Shave poems there!) "the lovely and talented Kathy" is a phrase that I started using a year or so ago and always link it back to her web site. Originally, there was no particular reason other than I thought it was cute.  However, of late I’ve been reading a lot about SEO. (trying to find anything that makes me think it’s anything other than horse crap) and for fun, I started sprinkling it liberally throughout my posts to see if I could "Google bomb" the term. Now Google is supposed to watch for this kind of thing and stop it. They do a pretty good job of that but every now and then they slip up, as they have today!

Here is a screen shot proving that, for at least a brief second, I p0wned the phrase "the lovely and talented Kathy".  The very first link is her web site!

Just so you don’t think it’s only because I enclosed it in quotes, here’s the same phrase without quotes.

It’s probably gone by the time I get this post up, it happened once before but I didn’t get a screen shot and it only lasted like an hour.

Anyhow, Happy Mothers Day my angel! I can’t think of a more geeky present to give you than a #1 ranking on Google. :)

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:30 CT, I will be the guest on Small Business Trends Radio. You can listen live or download the episode for later listening.

I’ll be discussion all things WordPress.

It should be a rocking good time and I’d love to see both of my readers tune in. So drop by and give us a listen.

=C=

A good chunk of this blog post was posted over at DevZone. However, this one contains more personal observations and general nuttiness.

I’ve just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by my good friends Ibuildings and my new friends Sogeti.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a beautiful city and I always love when I get to travel there. The weather was beautiful and I was lucky enough to have a couple of hours to myself. Last time I was there I was so jet lagged that I got a whopping 30 minutes in the Van Gogh museum. This time I got there in the morning and spent about 2.5 hours wandering and admiring his art.

Also, there was a street fair happening in one of the city squares (I believe it’s called Waterloosplain but I am probably wrong.) It was really fun, not because it was big or because I paid 3EU to rinde rides, it was fun because all the music was old 70’s tunes that had been re-mixed into techno dance tunes. One part of the fair was this wheel on the long arm of a pendulum that would swing back and forth as the wheel rotated. People sat in the wheel. This thin had to come within 20 feed of the Madam Tussauds building and at it’s apogee lined up with the big glass window on the 4th (?) from of Madam Tussauds.

Dinner With Friends

Monday evening Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings stopped by the hotel and picked my up for dinner.
Ivo and I joined Stefan Koopmanschap, Michelangelo van Dam and Remi Woler for dinner and drinks (and one fine Cuban Cigar provided by Michelangelo, dude, seriously, you rock!) It was great catching up with old friends and as one would expect from that group, the conversation never strayed far from PHP. We ate and drank way to late. Remi blogged about dinner here and posted a picture that Stefan took.

Pey-Ah-Pey

Tuesday morning, the day of the conference, came way too early after a late night with friends. Lucky for me, the conference was in the afternoon and evening. Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings, drove me out into the beautiful Holland countryside to a great hotel where the conference was being held. There I met 70+ people, both management and developers, all gathered to talk about PHP.

To be honest, I did not pay attention to any of the sessions; in my defense, they were all in Dutch. I did, however, manage to catch a few of the phrases like “Zend Platform” and “Zend Studio” and eventually figured out that “Pey-Ah-Pey” meant PHP. My cue to start paying attention was when the host for the day started speaking in English. At that point, I was pretty sure it was for my benefit only.

My Presentation

Presenting my session was fun, ok it was fun for me; I hope it was fun for the audience. The slides can be found on SlideShare, it’s my slideshow called Gardeners, Not Gate Keepers but honestly, there are only 14 of them including the vanity slide and if you weren’t there for the conference, they won’t make much sense. I talked about the fact that thanks to things like RIAs, Mashups, APIs and cool tools like IBM’s Mashup Hub (built on “Zend Framework“:http://framework.zend.com) and WS02’s Mashup Server, our roles in IT were changing. We no longer need to be the Gate keepers to the infrastructure but we need to be gardeners of the application. We need to provide the tools for our users and let them participate in the building of the application. (In retrospect, Groundskeepers might have been a better analogy) Anyhow, I tortured the analogy for 45 minutes before it was all over. As I told the audience, my presentation wasn’t a “Do this or else” type of presentation but more of an “Here’s an idea I have, see if you can use some of it where you are” presentation.

| View | Upload your own

The audience was great for the session and afterwards I was asked several good questions and had some great discussions about the session and PHP in general while eating dinner.

One question asked in the evening session was:

“Why would I want to allow users to build mashups inside my application? Won’t I just be creating a mess of single use applications that I then have to mantain?”

My answer to this is, yes, of course you will. However, no more so than you are doing now. It’s really a mindset change. By (as someone put it on twitter today) supplying them with the rakes and showing them how to use them, we are encouraging users to help take control and responsibility for the application. You have to see the whole show to really grasp it because I am certinly not advocating allowing anyone and everyone to start tinkering with code.

This is my current presentation and I’m available for Business Seminars, users groups, kids parties and weddings, so drop me a line if you’d like to talk about me coming to your meeting.

Following dinner, we changed audiences and went at it again. At this point I need to say a big thank you to my friends at Ibuildings for bringing me a RedBull. I’m pretty sure I would not have made it through the second session with out it. (As it was, I managed to shave 10 minutes off my best time with it.) The evening’s audience was almost all developers, the majority of them from Sorgeti and Ibuildings but there were a few from other companies that snuck in for the fun. Peter C. Verhage and Robert van der Linde from Ibuildings and Sogeti respectively both reprised their sessions as did I. I’ll have to say, I had a lot more fun in the evening talking only to developers.

Conclusion

All in all, it was a great, but all-too-short conference. With only 1/2 a day and a hand full of breaks, there was no way I could meet everyone. The people I did meet were all great and I hope to run into them online to continue the friendships that were formed. I would like to say a special thanks again to both Ibuildings and Sogeti for putting forth the effort to put on a conference like this. As PHP’s popularity grows, it’s good for managers to know that companies like Ibuildings, Sogeti, and of course Zend, are there to help them.

So, as my tradition, as the sun was slowly making it’s way across the sky, I mounted my mighty steed of steel donned the battered fedora and headed off to the next conference. (Actually headed back home to recuperate before my road trip to php|tek…but that’s another story!)

Dear Reader,

Some of you who have been following me for a while know that a few years ago I wrote a series of stories for my mother titled “My Life as a Child”. I described these stories as “Autobiographical Fiction”.

In an effort to bring some order to my website I have decided that these stories would be better off being archived on their own site.

If you have ever wanted to know what it was like growing up as Cal, this site is for you. I present to you the entire archive of “My Life as a Child” archived at autobiographicalfiction.com.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Not that I drink a lot but when I do, I’m usually drinking with my wife, the lovely and talented Kathy. While I like a good cosmopolitan when drinking, Kathy is not a big fan of them. Back in the day, when we were working at Disney and dating, her favorite drink was the Banana Banshee. I thought I would go find a good recipe for that so i could make them for her. To my great surprise, there weren’t any good ones out there. So I’ve taken pieces from several of them, added a bit of my own and come up with one that she would like. It’s taken a couple of weeks of experimenting but I think I’ve finally found a recipe that works.

Banana Banshee

• 1 Jigger of Vodka
• 1 Jigger of Banana alcohol (I use 99 Bananas)
• 1 Jigger of Cream de Cacao (white)
• 4 Jiggers of Half and Half
• 1 frozen banana

Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. I find it’s best if if slice up the banana first as it reduces the blending time and the drink stays colder. The banana gives it a great texture and cools it off so you don’t need to add any crushed ice. Don’t blend it too long or it will warm up, just enough to make it smooth and on a low speed.

This makes 2 servings, which is great because the lovely and talented Kathy usually polishes off the first one in short order. Making them 2 at a time saves me tine in the long run.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=