The other day my wife IM'ed me, "Your blog is broken or something." turns out, when you don't post in like 2 months, it has nothing to show.

It's been a busy few months; Tom and I wrapped up 360|Flex Europe, and immediately dove into 360|Flex San Jose 2008. After Milan, my wife and I spent an extra week in Italy, hitting Venice, Florence and Rome.

I got home, started a project with Esria, attended Software 2008, and now am finally enjoying being home.

My project is one challenge after another, but I'm learning a great deal, so it's almost worth it :)

Software 2008 was an experiment to see how I worked with a potential client (free trip to Vegas, can't complain) so that might bear fruit.

I was also in San Jose for a day last week, get this. Denver -> Vegas, vegas -> San Jose in the AM,  San Jose ->Vegas in the afternoon, Vegas -> Denver in the evening. That's some seriously frakked up travel. On top of that, i worked all night the night before on my project, so I didn't go to bed at all. w00t!

Aside of a trip to Japan, followed by another trip to San Jose (friend's wedding) my traveling is mostly done for a bit, I love to travel, but these past few months have been killer!

Tom and I have some interesting things on the horizon too, interesting enough for me to want to accelerate time a smidge to see what happens. I'm not jynxing anything by saying what's up, but I'll say this, we'll be at MAX in a bigger way than "attendee" or even "speaker" Should be really cool.

The other thing, well I don't even know how to make a hint about so you'll just have to wait, the same as me to find out. To quote that not very good Jim Carry movie, "How will it end?"

Without even knowing it, prior to our meeting, she bought a widescreen, HD capable TV.

Tom and I bought a PS3 for 360|Flex Atlanta, since he's already equipped for gaming, and Blue Ray, I got this one. Not counting when it's doing a tour  of duty as the official Rock Band/Guitar Hero station for 360|Flex, it's now our Blue Ray player. I doubt I'll ever own or play a PS3 game, since my gaming days ended when the Original NES died... Good times, good times.

I was pleasantly surprised (I was fully thinking that we'd be buying a new TV sooner than planned to handle HD content) when I upgraded the PS3's OS to support the BD/BlueTooth remote control, and it comes up with "HDMI Device Detected. Use it?"

"Oh hellz yeah!"

I watched a few minutes of Spider-Man 3 (came with the system), and then Transformers, and WOWZA! While I don't think the world changed, or that I'll never watch non 1080 content again, I will say that DAMN it does look great!

Packing can be so stressful. I always worry I'll run out of underwear!

I'm getting read to head to SFO for Adobe's Industry Leader and Creative Media Summit. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but sounds fun nonetheless.

It should be exciting, maybe rubbing elbows whomever Adobe thinks is an industry leader :)

My main hope is that it will afford Tom and I a chance to get 360Conferences' name out there a bit more, we're more than 360|Flex (big news on that coming soon, I hope), so we want people to know who we are.

If you're gonna be in attendance, drop a comment or an email and let me know, we can get drinks or something!

I'm really enjoying working on this thing, I really hope other conference organizers can take it and 1. make it better, and 2. make use of it for their events. If for no other reason, than to stop using so much paper.

I've been working on it a lot this week, while I figure out what I want to do next. I've incorporated Rich's UpdateManager so that deploying new versions of the session Survey will be WAY easier!

I've also updated the DB to support multiple events, so now in the configuration file you can specify the ID of the event (among other things) so reusing the app is much easier, with much less coding.

Speaking of config files, I've beefed it up a bit. It started out just holding the location of the backend server, and such. Now you can give your app a title, point to a specific DSN name in your backend, and tell the app where to look for updates.

You can also tell when you're online or off now. There's a little icon that changes from green to red depending on network connection. Network status really confused a lot of people who submitted several not realizing they were offline, and the app not providing proper feedback about saving online. It does that now too.

I'm pretty happy with it and am working with Sim to get it hosted, trac'ed, etc so folks can start submitting bugs, enhancements, etc I'm really hopeful that this app can help Greenify conferences, and improve the feedback we can provide to speakers. Using this tool, Tom and I gave our 360|Flex Atlanta speakers feedback in just about a week of the conference ending, w00t!

Stay tuned for the official announcement.

I'm looking for some ideas on what everyone would like to see in the Session Survey. Give me your ideas...

So I'm spending some of my down hours while I work on my next gig working on the session Survey App.

Our launch during the conference went ok, a few bugs, nothing too bad. Now it's time to clean up and enhance. I'm thinking we'll try to get it to a nice 1.0 place, and then put it up on RIAforge. I wanted to put a few more security measures, and user experience enhancements.

I also wanted to get anyone's input on what they'd like before it goes, Open Source.

I'm working on validating Attendee ID, so we can minimize crap data. Then I'll work on setting your ID into a shared Obj for persistence, maybe just us SQL Lite? I dunno.

I'm also going to improve the user feedback, when the app is working in "offline mode" maybe a cool status light or something? Also will make sure the save complete dialog shows up in both modes, not just 'online'

Besides those three things, what would ya'll want in a survey app for conferences?

If you're an attendee, let me know what you think of the app, no holds barred. I know it's rough, shoot! Tom and I worked on it off and on just the last week or two leading up to the Conference. You know the saying about the mechanic having the crappiest car.

I'm excited to get it buttoned up enough to put up on RIAforge, it'll be my first OS project... yippy! I'm really hoping others will jump in to help improve conferences of any type.  Part of the release will include the DB design, you'll need to create your own SQL lite DB for offline mode, with your own data, sorry, can't give out our attendee info.

Sadly I won't be there to celebrate!

Tom and I tried to figure out how to be in New York tomorrow (my birthday by the way) but it just couldn't be done. between consulting, and my birthday, and 360|Flex Atlanta a little over a week away, it just wasn't in the stars.

Tom and I are rather fanatical about running our business "the Cluetrain way" so the chance to get together with Doc and a bunch of other visionaries was hard to miss. We've heard that they'll be having a similar event or events out west so we'll be makin' sure we're there!

What's really a bummer, Jake McKee is one of those visionaries. Jake wrote blogfusion, which is what I was running johnwilker.com, red-omega, and my wife's blogs on.

If you're around New York tomorrow, register!

The API contest is up and running, you ain't even got to be there to win, though, we'd sure like to meet you if you do win!

The contest site is pretty straight forward; build a cool app, upload or link to it, explain it, tell us what API you used.

It's that simple! Next week, we'll roll out the voting portion of the app, let everyone vote on the app(s) they like. We'll announce the winners at 360|Flex Atlanta.

There's all sorts of cool prizes, and categories, take a look here. Plus all those cool sponsors are running their own contests, so you can enter your app in more than one, none of that "one entry per household crap." LOL.

We've got no limitations on our contests, but the sponsors do, so make sure if you plan to enter their contests too, check the rules.

I know, and while I'm not gonna say, I will say that being at 360|Flex Atlanta will be a really good place to find out.

Sure there are rumors; Apple will release a new PDA, Yahoo will be bought by Wal-Mart (no not really, but wouldn't surprise me), etc. but I have it on pretty good authority, that Adobe will have some super big news for us all, and it'll be right around 360|Flex Atlanta REDACTED.

As if the kick ass speakers and really great sponsors weren't enough. As if the 1gb USB flash drive we're using instead of lame ass CD's wasn't enough. Now missing 360|Flex Atlanta could mean you'll miss out on being part of some really big news. How much would that suck?!

See ya there!

Tom is more anti patent than I am, but as more and more whack ass patent trolls surface, I'm quickly rethinking my position to be patently (pun not intended) anti Patent. I think the idea behind patents is a good and noble one, however the patent office seems to be more and more nothing but an enabler for patent trolls. I mean really "A device that plays music"? That's a valid patent? What about “method and system for playing games on a network.”? Really?

My biggest complaint about the patent process is the support of vaporware. I fully believe that any patent not accompanied by a WORKING prototype be thrown out. If you can't build it, you can't patent it.

That last one I cited, is fully real, and fully threatening the likes of CNET, DIGG, Ebaums, etc. Thankfully the EFF has stepped up (courtesy of Mashable) to defend this case as part of their patent busting initiative.

I still thinking protecting IP is important, but I think without serious over haul, the patent office, may be the single biggest contributor to a stifling of innovation. Searching the patent database is like looking for a unicorn in a horse pasture, and since most of the troll patents are so vague, you might not even see them, until you're hit with a lawsuit.

It's time to re-up my EFF membership, I'm thinking it'll be a bit bigger this year to help further this patent busting, show these trolls where the door is.

If this patent non-sense irritates you even a fraction as much as it irritates me, think about joining the EFF, or re-donating if you've donated already.

Then head over to the 360|Flex blog, where Tom and I just announced the submission site for our API contest. I won't prattle on about the guidelines, and such, read the post for those. I will say that we're hoping the API contest becomes a recurring theme at 360|Flex, taking a small handful of cool community API's and providing a stage for developers to build stunning, kick ass apps. The inspiration for the contest was all Chuckstar, I'm sure it had nothing to do with Ribbit being one of our API sponsors :)

I like the contest idea a lot. This time we were a little rushed, Nick from the Michigan Flex User Group stepped up and helped us out a bunch, by building the app for us. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to give a little more time for app building, but hey! we're not looking for a CMS or anything ;)

head over to the site, and take a look, the contest options are many, should be an option for anyone looking for something to fill some spare cycles with.

I'm a huge Joel Spolsky fan, and after watching Project Aardvark, I started looking at Copilot.

Since my mom won't buy a Mac, and my sister can't afford one, I've had to help solve the typical PEBKAC malware troubles that plague windoze users of their calibre. CoPilot, rocks, the mac client let's me take control of their machines, and do what I can from CO to WA. Can't beat that.

The fact that the guys came up with it in a summer, was just too cool.

Now... it's free on weekends!

Can't wait to see Copilot 3.0