Kym Kovan wrote:
What I do remember well is the Spectra course with Ben Forta sitting in, that was fun :-)
The first CF thing I went to was the launch of CF 2 at Darling Harbour, which was also Nick McNaughton's first gig as Allaire Asia/Pacific. I was at Andersen Consulting working for Westpac at the time, and CF was on the cards for the Westpac Internet banking site (Westpac did use CF for a little while but on a later project). It was funny because Nick had arranged free passes to Segaworld for all attendees, and I know of several friends of developers who developed a sudden "interest" in web development that lasted for about 40 minutes. I can remember Jeremy and Nick racing each other at Segaworld and Jeremy looking wryly amused :-)
Shortly afterwards we arranged to have John Desborough, the author of QUE's "Using ColdFusion 2.0" give three days of training back at the North Sydney office. He ran out of stuff to talk about after the first day and spent the rest of the time telling us stories about junkets with oil executives in Texas.
I remember being only so-so impressed with CF at the time - coming from C and VB it was hard to love a language that only had includes as a way to reuse code (I remember at a later date hearing of custom tags coming out and thinking that was what had been needed). We eventually went with ASP, but we had to go to Microsoft's office in Epping and sit there while they burned a CD of IIS 1.0 and ASP - this was from the gold master candidate :-)
I didn't encounter CF again until 1999 when I was at ZIVO working as technical lead on the BHP Steel project and we went to a Spectra presentation by Charles Teague - we were really excited. Charles and Libby (then product manager for Spectra) came over to ZIVO for coffee, and as it turned out a pre-qualifying job interview - Allaire/Macromedia later hired Lucas Sherwood (Firmware), Pete Farland (who went on to co-author Flash Remoting) and me, all people Charles and Libby met on that tour.
The Spectra training was great - it started with an act of incredible instructional courage when Geoff started delivering the course to Charles Teague with Ben Forta heckling from the back :-) Charles eventually took over, more out of impatience with the course material, and we all continued the training with Charles up front, I think the only time he taught the Spectra course. I discovered that Ben Forta was a big Hitch-hikers fan at lunch, and met Kym, Fiona and I think Justin at Ben's talk at the CFUG that night on WAP (reminds me of a slogan the RocketBooters thought up recently "iMode - Colour WAP" :-).
Ah... good times. And by the way, I have THE LAST CF5 quick-reference tshirt to give away as a door prize at the Sydney anniversary meeting, so you better RSVP soon.
Cheers, Robin http://www.rocketboots.com.au Professional Services for Macromedia Development Teams --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
