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I send out a newsletter on Friday and Monday detailing local networking events. In last weeks edition I announced a contest I was running through January 4, 2010. You can see the full details on the contest page.

Essentially I ask people to follow me on twitter, tweet a specific tweet, become a fan of The Queue Incorporated on Facebook and finally sign up for my Get Clients Now! Teleseminar newsletter. Each of those things counts as an entry.

So what are the prizes?

• Grand Prize – A free seat in my next Get Clients Now! Teleseminar on Jan 11, 2010.
• Runner up – 50% off a seat in my Jan 11 teleseminar
• Weekly – A copy of the book that distilled marketing for me, Get Clients Now! by CJ Hayden.

Last week’s winner was: Dale Little. She should have the book by tomorrow or the next day so she’ll have something to read over the holidays.

I’ll be giving away three more copies of the book, so enter now.

Get Clients Now!™ is a trademark of Wings for Business LLC, and is used under license. www.getclientsnow.com

So vendor fair is roughly equivalent to craft fair. Oh well, it supported the seniors at the school my wife teaches at, so it’s not all lost. I really like the postcards we made up and I got to geek out with a photographer about her business.

Editing some video tomorrow, we’ve slipped on BDDCasts and I want to have a few ready to go in the future.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• 30 Free Online Tools to Test Your Website – Interesting list that will probably come in handy.

I went to my first FreeNI meeting today. It’s a much more relaxed and open alternative to the cult of BNI type meetings. No dress code, no homework, no forced referrals, no fees (just lunch, which you pay for on your own check).

Today was a casual gathering of 8 folks (supposed to be 20-30 regularly but it is the week before school).

Not sure how much business I’ll get from this. Custom software development / consulting isn’t as easy to provide a referral to as say a realtor or accountant (I’m probably wrong on both counts, but it’s my analogy). However, it gets me out of the house once a week, forces me to interact with humans that don’t translate my gibbersh in O(N) so it’s here to stay for the future. This week and next are priming the pump for a Get Clients Now! cycle that’s starting with a virtual group around mid-month.

The only formality of the FreeNI meeting was about 15 minutes in, the first 15 minutes is just networking, signing in and ordering lunch. The meeting got kicked off and there was a round robin elevator pitch about what you did, or how others in the group could help you. Some things were:

• I sell printer cartridges cheaper than you get them now, brand or OEM. So if you have someone, or you yourself, goes through lots of cartridges I can help.
• Chilean wine distributor, nuff said, I guess
• Realtor: Be my referral agent for $500 (fee for class to get licensed) then get $250 + 25% on the first 2 referrals and 25% afterwards. So you eventually get the licensed reimbursed.

I didn’t have anything like that prepared, I’ll have to think of what to say. I was toying with the idea of “solving problems through software” or something. It needs to be tangible. I might just tell them about My Kids Party HQ which should come in handy with everyone starting school again. I need to push some marketing efforts into that.

General consensus is: BNI overpriced, too rigid, not quality referrals. Chamber of Commerce not great. So what else is there, other than word of mouth from existing clients?

It’s interesting. Finding freelance work is a full time job, doing the work is hopefully a full time job, family is a full time job. That’s a lot of jobs. Speaking of, if you’re looking for some help with ruby on rails, let me know.

I’ve seen a lot of questions and requests for how people are using cucumber for BDD and what files they’re spec-ing with rspec. With a slant on real life examples, and examples that are on Github.

There’s nothing magical about the URLAgg code, nothing proprietary, it was just scratching an itch for me. So I spent some time this morning ripping out some private configuration information, fighting deployments, and finally have URLAgg up on Github here: http://github.com/jschoolcraft/urlagg/tree/master

There will be more to this story later, but for the time being I’ve spent enough time today trying to release this code.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, fork away or get in touch.

URLAgg is on fire, relatively speaking from a development standpoint. New this release: a sidebar with three main sections:

• Magic Tags: like magic numbers, but for tags, these mean something different to URLAgg than every other tag.
• All tracked tags: your tags, so you can navigate through them even when you don’t have an unread links.
• URLAgger trackings: These are recently links that someone on URLAgg started tracking (it might even be you). Just one more discoverability bit.

A couple weeks ago I picked up two WRT54GS’ to replace my aging DI-624. I wanted to install dd-wrt on both of them and set up a wireless bridge to my XBox 360. I’m finally getting around to installing dd-wrt and have run into a few snags and wanted to post how I got it to work using my Macbook Pro as the base of operations.

Quick version:

• download latest firmware for your router here. (Mine happened to be 7.2.05
• download vxworkskillerGSv7.*.bin and dd-wrt.*.bin from the install directions from the dd-wrt wiki
• download MacTFTP Client
• follow the directions at the bottom of the install directions
• hit send on TFTP and plug in the router instead of using the terminal
• start ping in terminal after send completes

bask in the glory

techie1 on #dd-wrt was a big help and got me over a few sticking points.

I just found out that I have been rewarded an MVP for ASP/ASP.NET.  It’s an honor to be part of such an awesome group and the .NET Community.

We need to wrap up the evaluations so we can select a few winners and let the speakers see their feedback.

Evaluations are being done through CodeCampEvals.com.  I’d like to thank David Silverlight for the resource and dealing with me (it can be a chore). 

David runs Community Credit, they give stupid prizes to smart people.  Basically you register at the site and log activities you’ve done throughout the month (went to a UG meeting, went to code camp, spoke at something, blogged about something, etc).  Every activity has a point value (attending a CodeCamp is worth 5,000 points).  At the end of the month they tally up the top point earners and give away prizes, like this Projector Keyboard.

Back to the topic at hand, NoVa CodeCamp 2007.02 evaluations.  Header over to CodeCampEvals.com and select NoVa CodeCamp 2007.02.  You have a list of questions that we’d like feedback on for CodeCamp in general and for each of the sessions you attended.  Your feedback is very important to the speakers, it helps them adjust for their next presentation.

So why would you want to do this?  Beyond your altruistic nature, you mean?  Because we’re giving away prizes to two randomly selected feed-backers(?)…

1. Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce by Brian Noyes.
2. livelessons: Developing applications with WWF by Brian Noyes.

You have through the weekend to finish the evaluations as I’m going to close them down Monday (12/5) morning and select the winners.

The next version of the NoVa Code Camp, 2007.02, happens Saturday November 17th, 2007 from 8a-6p at the Microsoft Office in Reston, VA.  We need speakers.

The tentative tracks for 2007.02 are (this is where your ideas need to be shoe-horned into, sort-of):

• UI – ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, WinForms are all great candidates on this track.  This is probably even a good place for discussions of MVP, MVC, integration testing as it pertains to the UI, etc.
• .NEXT – .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 are so yesterday’s technology.  Here you might find sessions on .NET 3.0 and everything surrounding VS 2008 (maybe even info on source code for the framework libraries being released.)
• DATA – Show me an application without data and I’ll show you… well nothing, I might give you a cookie though.  Find it all here, Linq, ORM, SQL 2005 and 2008, ADO.NET, maybe even a bit of XML.
• Office, etc. – It’s almost as if you can’t avoid seeing a job solicitation for someone that does Share Point, you could find out about it here, and lots of other interesting Office pieces like VSTO.
• Lightning Talks – This is an idea that’s gained popularity in the last few years, they called them Grok Talks at Tech Ed (apparently).  They’re very quick, 5-10 minutes, about something you’re crazy passionate about that we just have to know.

Those are just some loose ideas about what might make for interesting presentations.  WE WANT ALL YOUR IDEAS.  Head over to NoVa Code Camp and fill out the speaker document on this page.

It’s time to start talking about another code camp in Northern Virginia, 2007.02.  We’re still in the formative stages, registration isn’t set up yet, but we need to have a conversation about what you want to see at this code camp.

Preliminary details: Nov 17, 2007 at the Microsoft office in Reston, VA.

What kind of topics do you want to see this time around?  One of my biggest questions is which framework are you developing on most of the time?  Now?  Six months from now?  I’ve got a client that’s still using ASP.NET 1.1 and SQL Server 2000; I don’t think discussions on VS 2008 and SQL Server 2008 would be very useful for developers in that situation.  However, if you’re planning to upgrade in the next 6 months it’s probably useful to know if you should skip 2005 and go straight to the 2008, especially if you’re including Ajax or any of the W*F components.

So here is what I need from you (please respond in comments):

1. What framework and tools are you using now or do you see yourself using in six months?
2. If you could write your own schedule and find the best speakers to present on those topics what sessions would you want to attend?
3. Are you interested in seeing or participating in “lightning talks”?  Lightning talks are very short, 5-10 minutes, and would be done in rapid succession.  I’d hope to get 8-12 done in an hour, maybe during the lunch break.

Watch http://novacodecamp.org and this blog for updates.