That title is very provocative, but hear me out.

In the old days (last year), if you couldn't go to a ColdFusion conference like CFUnited or cf.Objective(), you could watch the blogs during the opening keynote and see all of the new news about the upcoming ColdFusion. It was awesome! Well, this year's cf.Objective() was probably the first big ColdFusion conference where most of the bloggers are now using twitter (and not blogging as much). So I decided to watch twitter instead of the blogs. But guess what? Twitter does NOT support "live blogging" very well, especially if it's a technical conference. Why? 140 characters. You cannot type lots of demo code, or bullet points, or anything like that when you are limited by twitter's posting rules.

Now, there may be ways around this, but if there are none of the cf.Objective twitterers were using them. I learned very little of use from watching #cfobjective that morning. Just today, I finally found that Andy Matthews live blogged the event (I couldn't find this the day of cf.Objective, for some reason). Thanks Andy, that's awesome!

If you can't make it to CFUnited, don't worry. At least I'll be doing a real live blog from the keynote. :)

The CFUnited staff sent out some questions for speakers to answer, so here are my answers.

Have you spoken at CFUnited in the past? What would you tell someone who hasn't been to CFUnited before?

Yes, I spoke at CFUnited Last year. This will be my 5th CFUnited though, and every year I really enjoy it. My biggest advice would be to take advantage of the networking opportunities. There are always a lot of top notch community memebers around, both "celebrity" types as well as lesser known (but equally important) people you can network with.

Why should people attend your session?

If you ever put user fillable forms on your sites, you should attend my session. Spammers attack all online forms these days (even when it doesn't make sense), so preventing spam is very important for us developers. If you think Spam prevention just means slapping a CAPTCHA on the form, then you have a lot to learn. I hope to see you at my session.

Besides your topic, what other sessions are you looking forward to?

• Railo Open Source
• Geolocation with ColdFusion
• Thinking Outside of the CF Box
• Better Development Through Open Source

Where can people find you at CFUnited?

At my session, of course! :) I am planning on attending as many sessions as possible (I always do), but outside of that I will be at all of the breakfasts/lunches, and hanging out in the common areas between sessions. In the evening I will attend the planned events, but besides that I might be hanging out in my room. I'm thinking about bringing some games with me and inviting some friends to play games one night (board games, card games, etc.)

When you are not working what do you like to do in your free time?

I am a computer geek at heart, so in my free time I spend a lot of time on computers. I read a LOT of news/blogs. I also play some online games. When not on the computer, I like to spend time with my wife, and I like watching the Cubs as well as the Discovery Channel. I am also very religious and spend a lot of time doing church related stuff.

Stellr has just updated the CFUnited Website with a new feature. You can now add comments to the session topics, similar to commenting on a blog. So if you want a speaker to cover a question in his topic, or maybe you are wanting more details to see if you should attend a session, you can drop in a comment. My topic is called Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam, so drop by and leave me a comment if you wish. :)