Digital Ninja

It's the dawn of a brand new day. Here in Atlanta with peers and colleagues to finally get my chance to expand my sphere of knowledge on some things I've been lacking on. I would say a small portion of the content is not immediately relatable to my world, another portion could eagerly be applied to enhance my world, and then another segment is pretty much comprised of some things I've identified as "the road to travel" - and what's funny is that some recent talks about upcoming projects may have had that road arrive even sooner than expected.

What's truly cherishing about this for me - and you'd know this if you follow this blog at all - is that I'm going to have a rare chance to be a small fish in a big pond of ColdFusion experts. I expect to be coming up with questions that delve into deeper aspects of these raging curiosities I have. I must fill the empty spaces which I haven't been able to satiate via "expensive mentor-less epiphanies". This is going to be awesome.

And of course, the best part, and that I don't expect to be waving my wacky gospel and tamborine when I return to the "ranch". This stuff will be evident and appreciated by more than one peer, I'm sure. More to come.

Today I, and three other of my co-workers, registered for CFUnited Express Atlanta! I'm pretty excited about going, since it's the only conference I can afford to hit this year. I guess any conference money is a good thing. (insert obligatory "woe is me, the economy" remark)

My focus will be just as much on vying for face time with the presenters and geniuses at the conference as it will be the presentations themselves.ﾠ So much to learn, so little time.

Lately I find myself documenting everything - I mean EVERYTHING. We're about to start a new hire at the office so I'm documenting my pants off there. I'm hitting another development run real hard for my freelance client, so I'm filing issues into Project Tracker like it's going out of style. In all this commotion I find myself looking at some of the recent offerings life has in the way of screen capture. I'll list just a few of them.

Firefox Based

I found these two nifty add-ons to Firefox that look to be worth trying out. I haven't installed them yet, though, because I have a lot of things going on in my Firefox tabs right now. So that will have to wait. :)

• Capture Fox
• ScreenGrab

ﾠ

Web Browser Based

This one really gets me. I've had my head in the sand for a little while, and here I come up for air and web pages are now performing video screen capturing! While it's true I'm usually just in the market for a still shot capture, this one blew me away and urged me to spread the word.

Go check out Screen Toaster. You can record your primary display to an AVI or SWF and even annotate it in real time or add audio after the fact. I feel some serious "Tutorials By Adam" coming along soon. Did I mention this is a free service/tool?

Another recent newcomer - and made in CF I believe, by Todd Sharp - is Slide Six. This is also browser based but is also friendly and open to imports from all manner of sources, meaning I can repurpose my existing media and assets. I'll have to dive into this one to do a full evaluation. Screen Toaster sounds like it has less production over head, but Slide Six appears to slam the toaster into the floor with feature richness. Also free!

More to come...

I'm still evaluating all of this. In a way, this blog post is for myself so I can remember my research. There's only so much use and organization I can get out of my Delicious book marks!

BTW - if you comment, please be patient with my response. I still haven't gotten around to adding in my smtp authentication into the MangoBlog's notification piece, so I have to check back here. Sorry!