CFUnited Blog

A District Live Music Guide

"Attention CFUnited Attendees: A District Live Music Guide" by Matt Weiss.

If you have any questions for Matt, feel free to contact him at [email protected]. He is one of TeraTech's Marketing Interns and comes to us with a background in promotions with DC clubs, musicians, and bands. We've had some attendees inquire about what to do in DC when it comes to live music.

Original Posted at http://mdcfug.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/20/Attention-CFUnited-Attendees-A-District-Live-Music-Guide

If you're in town for the conference and looking for some good live music, there's heaps of places to check out. The easiest to find are jazz clubs or punk clubs, the two things DC historically does best. I'll give you a quick summary of the DC scene.

The U St/African American Memorial/Cordozo metro stop is walking distance to a bunch of great venues, including Black Cat, a gritty punk venue (www.blackcatdc.com) which the week of the conference will have Dan Deacon on Wednesday, Grupo Fantasma and a Big 80's dance party on Saturday, and Cloak/Dagger on Sunday. That metro stop is also RIGHT near the world famous 930 club (www.930.com) which sadly only has two shows listed right now for that weekend, those being Abba on wednesday and thursday, and Fish on Sunday. That metro stop is right near the Velvet Lounge, a small punkish lounge, also, which always has great local music (www.velvetloungedc.com) as is the DC9 if you like really ratty really small dives. Also, U stree is famous for it's excellent Jazz Clubs. You can easily walk up and down just to find a place to sit up and sip, listening to good tunes. Bohemian Caverns is DC's largest jazz club and has had the biggest names in jazz play there (Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.) so that's definitely a safe bet (www.bohemiancaverns.com). The other jazz bars on U street are Twins Jazz (www.twinsjazz.com) U-Topia (www.utopiandc.com) and a host of others. Little farther down is Saint Ex Cafe, which is pretty small, and amazes me that they can fit even a drumset in there,

Adams Morgan area is not exactly next to a metro stop, but there are enough bars and clubs on the 3 or so blocks that incorporate it that it is easy to spend the whole night there. In Adams Morgan, Asylum has live bands with no cover on Fridays (www.asylumdc.com), and Club Heaven (located right above Club Hell) has the city's best 80's dance party every Thursday.

H Street, the so-called Atlas District, is just recently blowing up in NorthEast. The Rock and Roll Hotel (not actually a hotel) (www.rockandrollhoteldc.com) is a quaint little place which hosts nationally famous indie rock acts and homegrown heroes. The actual "venue" part of it is small, so make sure you get there early to see any of the bands, and don't forget to check out the upstairs bar with poster relics all over the walls and flying guitars above your head. Shows playing during the conference haven't been posted yet. Also on H Street is The Red and Black (www.redandblackbar.com) which is a small place which holds local artists in a New Orleans style setting.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, there's tons of places to go in the city without spending a lot of money. This should get you started.

CFUnited interview: John Farrar, author of ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial

We are here with John Farrar, author of "ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial"

John, you just completed your new book "ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial". What inspired you to write it?

John: We wanted a book that covered the topic for both beginners and those who are moving up to the new language. We didn't want to cover all the topics because that would take multiple books. Rather we choose to focus on building a good foundation for new CFML developers and then showing how to code with several of the key new features of ColdFusion 8 by Adobe. This is more of a bootcamp book is a great way to summarize it's contents and our goals.

What can readers expect to find in this book?

John: This book will teach about basic variables, understanding scope and persistence, CFCs, custom tags, the great new AJAX features, search tools, PDF including forms and the new presentation abilities. We also approach not just how the built in features can be used but how real world programmers are connecting to sites like Flickr and other social technologies. Today the strength of a platform is how easy it networks with other sites and solutions. ColdFusion is a deluxe choice when it comes to integration. This book looks at integration techniques over and over.

What does this mean for the ColdFusion community?

John: This is a more compact intense coverage of the topic. Expect it to give a developer what he needs to know to be useful as a new CFML coder. It will also help learn many of the key features of CF8. Lastly expect to be able to start reaching outside CFML using custom tags and CFCs to make coding day by day simpler and better using these packaging concepts to reuse rather than rewriting the same code over and over.

Do you plan to write more books in the future?

John: Yes, we have already talked about digging deeper into some advance topics with the publisher. We were not even done with the book and the publisher was so excited they were asking us about what direction to go next and offering some suggestions that are needed for our community.

Can attendees look forward to purchasing this book at CFUnited?

John: We are all pulling to get the book out for the conference. We don't have an official yes at this time but it is looking very good!

Saturday Schedule additions - attendee request

We received this comment from an attendee recently who offered to let us share the comment on our blog:

"Greetings, Perhaps this is selfish on my part or skewed on my particular skill level and training desires, but it seems that every class on the schedule for Thursday 8:15-9:15 is something that I would love to attend (especially now with Ray's Fan Favorite announced.). Because I can only pick one on the scheduler and I know you are/were looking at classes signed up for to assign the Saturday spots (assuming they haven't all already been assigned), I just wanted to throw in my cent and a half that they would all be great spots on the Saturday schedule.- I'm hoping other people feel the same and maybe some of them will find their way on the Saturday schedule before the conference begins. Regardless, I know I'll be checking out the presentations for afterwards when they are available online. I'm very much looking forward to the conference, last year's was great! Thanks, Curtis

After some thought, we decide - Sure!! we can add some of those topics to the Saturday schedule.

Saturday additions:
Joe Gautreau "The Power of CSS - CSS Layouts vs. Tabled Layouts" is from 8:30AM - 9:30AM

Kurt Wiersma "Leveraging Popular ColdFusion Frameworks To Make Better Applications" is from 9:45AM - 10:45AM

John Farrar "jQuery/CF Integration" is from 1:30PM - 2:30PM

Hal Helms and Clark Valberg "Prototyping for Smarties" is from 1:30PM - 2:30PM

John Paul Ashenfelter "Testing CF Applications" is from 1:30PM - 2:30PM