Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

It has been a while in the making but finally I can announce that Mark Drew Consulting will be up and running as from the 9th of March.

Mark Drew Consulting is a little firm based in London specializing in CFML development, ColdFusion and Railo administration and deployment, process, development tools, ajax, frameworks as well as training and support. If you have any needs why not come and talk to us, we are friendly, and have cookies.

The new website should be going live before the 9th so you can have a look at some of the offerings and if you are interested you can always email me or use the contact form!

It has been a long time coming and I am sad to be leaving the guys at Design UK, if you have design, ecommerce, emarketing or content management projects you should definitely go talk to them! The smartest people I have worked with in my career and the most fun.

There are a number of projects I am looking forward to taking off the ground, some that I want to devote more time too and other ideas and developments that I really look forward to sharing with you all in the near future!

I have been so excited about this for the last few weeks, I can tell you that the future is bright!

This is a bit of a personal posting, but Joe Rinehart's wife Dale was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) just after Christmas. You may have heard about it and if not, you can read more about it on his blog.

I have met Joe a few times and apart from being the brains behind Model-Glue, the framework that I use daily he is also an awesome person who I would love to help, and I presume (because I am like that) that if you are a member of the CF community you would too! Head over to http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ to show your support. Do it. We are a small enough community that we should be supporting the stars in it.

So finally, after the whole being ill and Christmas holidays hiatus, I finally managed to edit the CFDocs podcast from December (Follow the link above to get more details on the episode).

One of the things that has been concerning me was how to record the damn thing! I have a Yamaha 8:2 Mixer but still the mic's that we got for the first podcast turned out to be unpowered so we couldn't use them. This left me with a problem... how to record four people (and the audience) and keep the quality at *some* acceptable level.

What we did was put two MacBooks (one Pro, one not) and record the whole session down using Audacity and the built in Microphones. This worked well, and to get the synching of the two tracks at edit time I simply banged my finger sharply on the desk (to the hilarity of other people present) to get a nice spike that I could see in the track.

After editing both tracks, removing the "erms" and "arrs" and "so..." as well as some idle chatter I rendered down the recording and moved it into GarageBand to make the actual podcast and mix in the music track.

I would love to hear people's opinions if it worked or not, as well as any suggestions on (cheap!) setups to hopefully improve the sound quality. Remembering of course that there are usually four people speaking as well as maybe questions from the audience.

Otherwise, just enjoy the podcast!

On Friday night, Adam had an accident and broke is arm and leg as he was hit by a car in Regent Street, London. I accompanied him to the hospital in the ambulance that night and got it all sorted. It was simply an accident and even though the driver was just under the alcohol limit, the police are not taking action (as far as I know).

He is currently in a hospital in London where he has already had surgery on his leg and will be having surgery on his arm (maybe) later today. Hopefully he will be out in a week or two.

Even through this, he has managed to  Twitter and update his status. So he is doing OK, if a little out of it due to the pain killers.

I am sure we all are sending him our support.

Are you at CFUnited in Washington DC today? Do you have a (visible) Tattoo that you can show the world (without getting arrested)? Fancy being part of a photo? I am trying to get people in the community for a group photo showing our ink! If you are up for this, meet me at the front of the Integral stand after the Demo Derby today and I shall see if we can all get in on a massive group ink shot!

Oh yes! Thank you Apple, now iTunes UK has a bunch of films for you to buy or rent! This means I am now going to have to a) Buy more storage b) Get a second job to afford all the films I am going to buy! New films like Cloverfield seem to be about £10.99 to buy whereas older films seem to be about £6.99. You can also rent a number of films for about £2.49 and up depending on the age of the film. The restriction of rental films seems to be that you can rent it for 30 days and watch it as many times in a 48 hour period (reminds me of being in a hotel to be honest). That *that* great, considering that lovefilm (or NetFlix if you are in the US) let you have the DVD as long as you like. Maybe a subscription model needs to be introduced, rather than the old style "Blockbuster £3 a film per night" model. Anyway, I think its awesome news... and a great way for my wages to disappear in a fit of entertainment.

At cfObjective? Got a Tash? Want to win a Flex 2 Book? Then head over and post your photo over at TashR! Or if you dont have a 'tash, head over there anyway and vote for your favourite! C'mon, dont make me look like a dutch porn star all by myself!

I know this isnt related to any technology, but I am chuffed, I got a new tattoo on saturday (and other mishaps involving tequila, strangely enough, AFTER I got the tattoo). Check it! I should mention that I got this done by Charlie at Kids Love Ink, which is an awesome place in of itself!

I am showing mine, how would you show yours? Or maybe your dedication to your chosen bit of technology? Answers on a postcard (or tattoo'd on your flesh)...

I mean they love it so much they even provide robust debugging information for everyone to dig what has been happening. This is thanks to Scott at the cf-talk list :) CRASH!