Shedding Some Light

The Hennig Travel Curse (for those not familiar, Doug has a habit of getting delayed during his air travel) was in play today and we learned it can have far reaching effects. Doug and I were on the same flight by pure coincidence from Minneapolis to Orange County. Our flight was delayed by the controllers in Minneapolis as they attempted to route us around some of the nasty storms in the center of the country today. They realized it would take 2300 pounds of additional fuel when they calculated the new flight plan. So they decided to let us take the original flight plan. They think the route is dangerous until they calculate the costs {g}. Fortunately the delay was only 30 minutes. It was some of the worst turbulence I have experienced, but nothing to be concerned with. It did make it tough to code at times though.

When we arrived at the hotel we ran into Alan Griver in the lobby of the Marriott Anaheim. Alan flew in from Seattle today, but his plan had problems as they approached Portland and had to return to Seattle. Now this is the first time we have a hint of the Hennig Travel Curse impacting others, but we will start to keep some statistics to see if it was a fluke or the beginning of a trend.

The hotel is nice, the food at lunch was terrific, as was the company (Alan joined Doug and I for lunch). We talked about some of the recent events in the community, and some projects we are working on.

I am looking forward to a great week. I will try to blog as much as possible, but I am unsure how many sessions I will be attending outside of my own based on the workload I am experiencing. More to come…

The organizers of Southwest Fox have always supported FoxPro user groups over the years. All three of us have presented at user groups across North America and two of us are directly involved in the day-to-day operations of our local user groups.

So we sat down and tried to figure out a way for Southwest Fox to benefit the FoxPro user groups. Normally you see conferences like Southwest Fox offer attendees a discount off the registration. While this is nice for the attendees, it really does nothing for the user group, and is a pain to deal with administratively.

With this in mind, we came up with a new concept for user groups to make money by getting their members to attend Southwest Fox 2007. Basically, we will help the user groups by giving $25 back to the group for every member who attends our conference. We figure most user groups can use the cash to cover expenses of the organization, or can help cover the costs of travel for outside speakers (we know most groups cover these costs).

All the details are on the Southwest Fox Web site, check out the “User Group Discount” link in the site menu. I think we figured out a painless process to administrate this discount.

This is a really cool way for us to show our support and give back a little to the Fox Community.

Don’t belong to a Fox user group yet? What are you waiting for? Not one in your area? Drop me an email, or give me a call and I will be happy to talk about my experiences in helping set up the Detroit Area Fox User Group and running it for more than a decade.

…the envelope please…

When I talked to Bob about taking over Southwest Fox he told me a number of things that I should be worried about, and all the work that would was ahead of me. He did not warn me how difficult it would be to pick the sessions and the speakers for our event.

I knew it was not going to be easy since we determined the budget would allow for 14 speakers and last year there were 19 speakers. I also know we wanted to invite some “rookie” speakers to grow the speaker community. This is something we admired about Whil’s approach in the past with GLGDW and something I know Kevin did by default with his approach for FoxForward. This meant we could not invite a handful of speakers back from past Southwest Fox conferences, and I knew this would make the speaker selection the hardest part of being an organizer this year.

The submissions surpassed my high expectations. The quality of the abstracts and the ideas presented blew me away. I could have easily invited everyone if we were charging US$1200 per attendee, but we are not so we had to get picky. I remember my first email after seeing the list from Tamar: “Holy….” (ripping off the Volkswagen commercials {g}).

I spent one morning evaluating and rating the choices. Sorting the table, dumping it to Excel and seeing how the sessions rated. Then the hard work started. I had to begin the elimination process. Every session had some merit, but we only had room for 28 sessions because we are committed to giving most sessions twice (there will be some sessions in the Fundamentals track given only once). I think I had something like 38 highly rated sessions. Some people submitted 3 or 4 sessions I wanted, but as a speaker I know preparing and giving four new sessions is completely unreasonable even though we are giving the speakers nearly five months to prepare them. Each of us (Doug, Tamar, and myself) whittled the list down to speakers we absolutely wanted to invite with some alternates. At this point we did some virtual wrestling and debating during a 1.5 hour conference call. Amazingly the three of us had picked 85% of the same sessions and the other 15% were not brutal since the session submissions were so good.

All of this was accomplished on Friday April 13th as we had posted on the Southwest Fox Web site. Some people interpreted this as the deadline to announce – I apologize for that, we should have added another set of dates (notes for doing better next year). We made the picks and then Tamar (who is ultimately the person in charge of speakers) wrote individual invitations to the speakers we selected. We had to wait to hear their acceptances before we started to send out the “sorry – not accepted” emails. All of this takes time and we waited patiently for the speakers to accept. I am happy to say that all the speakers we initially invited did accept. Those who did not get invited this year could easily be invited next year. It is sort of like going to the fruit market and picking the best apples from the stack. Returning a couple of days later and the stack will still have great apples to select from. Most of the people we could not invite still expect to come to Southwest Fox because they really like the conference.

This was a tough process that I am glad is complete.

I am really geeked about our session tracks, the offerings for sessions in the tracks, and the great people you will hear present the sessions. Here is the line up of speakers for Southwest Fox 2007 (sound of envelop ripping…):

Marcia Akins
Rick Borup
Toni Feltman
Tamar Granor
Kevin Goff
Doug Hennig
Whil Hentzen
Michael Hogan
Andy Kramek
Cathy Pountney
Steve Sawyer
Rick Schummer
Alan Stevens
Rick Strahl
Christof Wollenhaupt

Definitely a couple of surprises, eh?

I am not going to spoil the rollout of the session topics yet. We also have started to frame out the keynote, which will be kept under wraps until the night it is given, but you can trust me, it is not to be missed. So many surprises and so many things in the works, and probably more that we have not thought up yet.

Doug is hard at work on the Web site and we are hoping to roll this out Monday or Tuesday in time for the opening of registration on Tuesday. You will see all the sessions, the abstracts, and more of the compelling reasons we hope will entice you to join us in Mesa in October.

Last week Rainer Becker contacted me to let me know the German DevCon 2007 preparations are under way. This will be the 14th time this conference is put on by Rainer and his team. The conference will be November 8-10, 2007. In fact, Rainer announced the next eight German DevCons at the end of the conference last year. This schedule (through the year 2014) is posted on the Fox Wiki’s Upcoming Events page.

Speakers and sessions will be announced at a later date. I have attended the last two and you can read my thoughts on the conference by looking at the numerous blog posts I made during the conferences (see posts in November 2005 and November 2006 in the links to the right on my blog page). Top gun conference, top gun facility, and over the top food make this one of the best conferences around.

I see the Web site for the often heralded Praha DevCon held Jun 19-21, 2007 in the Czech Republic has been updated while I was not paying attention. This will be the tenth Praha DevCon. I still recall the conference shirts for the 2000 conference that played on the Y2K theme and noted it was the 1900 conference.

Speakers and sessions look real good. North American speakers include long-time VFP gurus Marcia Akins, Steven Black, Alan Griver, and Andy Kramek. European speakers include Ivan Arnold, Uwe Habermann, Martin Haluza, Rudolf Jalovecký, Venelina Jordanova, Michael Juřek, Milan Kosina, Norbert Kustra, Jaromír Stacha, and Jan Vit.

It looks like a fantastic gathering for Fox developers. Everyone I have talked to who has attended this conference in the past have nothing but great things to say about it and the city of Prague. I talked to Igor Vit (the conference organizer) about the conference while we were doing some site seeing before the MVP summit and can hardly believe they can put this on for the price they are charging. 85 Euro for early-bird and 105 Euro for regular registration. At the current exchange rates you are paying US$115. Simply amazing.

If you look at the attendee counts for the different fox conferences, you will see the Prague DevCon is the best attended conference year after year. This not only shows how great the conference is, but how popular Visual FoxPro is in the Czech Republic.

One day I am hoping to get to Prague, but the timing of this year’s offering conflicts with my daughter’s graduation from high school.

Based on some feedback from some folks who want to promote Southwest Fox on their Web sites we had some new banners created that are narrower than the original one.

Original:

New slightly narrower:

New portrait format:

Thanks again to Dave Aring for his excellent effort and rapid turnaround.

If you are interested in helping us promote Southwest Fox, head over to the SWFox conference Web site and click on the Promote Conference link on the left side menu. And thanks to everyone who is helping spread the word!

Kevin reminded me that there are only two weeks until the deadline of April 15th to turn in your topic(s) for FoxForward 2007 presentations. So don’t procrastinate and pile the session topics Kevin’s way.

In particular he is looking for a two session overview on “Learning VFP“. I doubt you will even scratch the surface in the 3.5 hours, but you will be doing the community a service by guiding a path for those who are looking to get into VFP.

I gotta get back to evaluating all the Southwest Fox sessions submitted. I was telling Doug and Tamar that we have a near impossible task of narrowing down the sessions we can accept for the conference. All part of the fun of putting on a conference. I hope Kevin has as much fun as we are.

Marketing, marketing, marketing.

The organizers of Southwest Fox are gradually cranking up the marketing machine and are asking for your help to spread the word. We are looking for past attendee testimonials to post on the Southwest Fox site, and for those with a Fox related Web site to link to our site. Help spread the word!

Check out our banner developed for us by fellow Fox’er Dave Aring…

More details on how you can help, along with directions to create a link using our new banner graphic are available on the Southwest Conference Promote Conference page.

Speaker submissions look great and registration starts May 1st.

Thanks in advance for helping us out!