And that's it. The whole lot is now organised. I decided to pay that little bit extra and go with British Airways (for extra comfort) over Continential who would have been around £80 cheaper. Now I'm just expecting a letter from my bank manager concerning why I'm now skint!

And so step two is done - I'm now booked into the conference hotel for CFUNITED, which will definately make it easier to find my bed when I'm blind drunk. I've also got a spare bed and floor space if anyone is needing somewhere to stay (subject to buying me beer of course). Now I just need to sort my flights from Glasgow to D.C. I enjoy being broke, really I do.

Well, I decided to throw caution to the wind and buy a ticket for CFUNITED. Of course, I still need to find the money for a hotel and a plane ticket to get my backside from Scotland to D.C. Oh yeah, I'll also need to see about getting the time off work. I'm paying for all this myself (awww diddums) so if anyone has a floor to sleep on to save me cash, or is up for room sharing let me know @ andy [at] creative-restraint [dot] co [dot] uk How I look forward to being skint for the rest of the year.

Well I've finally managed to get all the photos from Scotch on the Rocks together and get them up on the website. It's taken a while to do so, mainly as I've been in a sort of void since the event finished. Suddenly I have all this free time on my hands (as well as feeling a sense of loss) yet I can't motiviate myself to do anything. Anyway. A big thanks to Alexandru and Bogdan from InterAKT for these photos. You can find them at www.scottishcfug.com/go/scotch/ along with a bunch of links to various blog postings about the event. You'll also find some of the presentations available for download. I'll also soon be adding a "The Story Behind Scotch" article, which should hopefully give an idea as to the hows and whys, etc. With any luck it'll also help other User Group Managers who don't have local events to start up their own. Finally, a big thanks to everyone who attended, everyone who presented and everyone who sponsored the event. We'll see you all again next year!

What with giving two presentations myself, and organising this that and whatever, I never managed to catch every talk at Scotch. However, from those I did catch and from the feedback received on the others we definately got it right with the topics covered. A reminder of what was talked about:

• Printing and Reporting
• Dreamweaver support for ColdFusion 7
• Little Things of CFMX7
• UML 101
• Multiple Instances and Clustering
• Developing Rich Clients with Flex
• Rich Forms for the Masses
• Verity
• ColdFusion and Flash Integration
• SMS/IM

From the visitor feedback, Printing and Reporting was the real winner followed closely by the SMS/IM features. This was, to be honest, expected. The guys from InterAKT impressed with just what they have, and can do with Dreamweaver and the work they've done with the new CFMX7 extensions. Smaller things such as validation in the new Rich forms, and via and isValid(), as well as the Admin API proved to be of interest to folks as did the Flash/CF integration. It seems like the general message behind my Multiple Instances talk got through, even though JRun decided to take a hairy fit! Verity seemed to be another big hit with those in attendance, though unfortunately I missed that one as I had to see off a few folks who were leaving early. A lot of folks were also extremely impressed by the non-CF7 talks; UML and Flex, and that bodes well for next year. So, a big thank you to our speakers; Tim Buntel (Macromedia), Steven Webster (iteration::two), Alexandru Costin (InterAKT), Vlad Vassiliev (Firstserv), Andi Hindle (Macromedia), Duncan Jack (Scottish JRun User Group) and Philipp Cielen (Frankfurt CFUG). I'll be posting the presentations when I can.

Scotch on the Rocks proved to be an almighty boozefest as well as a great conference, even if I do say so myself. Wednesday night saw us drink heavily on 2 for 1 pint offers somewhere on George Street - the Opal Lounge maybe - where bizarelly I even got asked for I.D. I'm 27 as well. There was a good crowd out including Tim Buntel, Steven Webster, Alexandru Costin and Bogdan Ripa, Philipp Ceilen, Duncan Jack, James Spence, Stephen Moretti, Nik Richardson, Neil Burrows, Nicol McKenna, and myself. Apologies to anyone I missed :) Anyway, because of the amount of beer we sank, Thursday, the opening day, was a real killer for myself and for Nik Richardson of the UKCFUG. Fortunately he got to slip away for a couple of hours kip whilst I had to keep things running and give two presentations. Big thanks to Neil and Nicol who helped with the goodie bags on the Thursday morning; as did Alexandru and Bogdan from InterAKT. Macromedia's Andi Hindle then phoned on the Wednesday night to see if he could move his talk form the Thursday to the Friday and in a drunken state I said yes. So I ended up having to move my own talk, meaning giving two presentations with an extremely bad hangover *sigh* Fortunately, the first pint after Thursdays agenda was finished proved to be an instant cure and after saying that I would be in bed by 10pm as compared to 2am that morning ... well, I finally fell asleep around 3am. You just can't hold a drunken Scotsman down! Quite a few others joined us on the Thursday night, including the drunken louts that would be Kev McCabe and Alex Forrester, both of whom had travelled from the London area. Amazingly, Friday's hangover didn't materialise and the day went almost to plan. Other than Steven Webster's talk taking around 6 hours ... OK OK it wasn't that bad. We did end up an hour behind and lost a few people for the final talk by Tim on SMS/IM but aside from that we successfully managed to raffle off the iPod, which is amazing considering the complete and utter idiotic raffle process I had on the go for the day before. Seriously, ask anyone about it as I'm too ashamed to describe how stupid I am lol. After some dinner a bunch of us - see photographs - hit the Three Sisters pub where we stayed all night drinking like it was the end of the world. We had 6 countries; Scotland, England, Ireland, America, Germany and Romania, represented as we laid waste to the bar and everything it could throw at us. Dancing and singing - my voice still isn't fully back - we did a mass karaoke to everything from the Proclaimers to the Monkees. Alexandru's photos give a quick idea of what went down, but there is a ton more and I'll probably post these once the guys send them over. As Alexandru blogged, we thought the photos were lost but fortunately Philipp had Bogdan's camera though what the hell happened to my phone display I'll never know. Though most likely I sat on it. I'll see if I can get O2 to replace it free of charge but I don't fancy my chances. Anyway, that's the quick rundown of the drunken fun that went on. A big thanks to all those who made the night outs special. Especially those who flew in from elsewhere. More event related stuff to come.!

Scotch on the Rocks ... what can I say. From the feedback, both verbally and from the questionnaire's, the conference went down a storm and fairly smoothly ... except for a few rotten hangovers on the Thursday, one of which belonged to me. We had a last minute shuffle of the agenda with Andi Hindle's Rich Forms talk moving to the Friday and my own Multiple Instances talk jumping to the Thursday; meaning that I now had to talk twice with a stinking hangover. Now let me state right here and now that never ever give a presentation when hungover. Additionally, if you are organising a conference like this whereby you're dealing with everything from the venue to the speakers to sponsors, catering, goodie bags, etc then do not put yourself down as a speaker. That's the single biggest thing I can say. You simply cannot put the necessary resources into your talks when you quite literally have everything else on your back too. That aside, things went really well and I hope the informal nature of the event proved to be a winner. I'll follow up with a number of posts about some of the talks, the fantastic bunch of people that attended the event, and not to forget some utterly drunken night outs. Wednesday ... Thursday ... Friday. Especially Friday :) As I said, more to follow!

Scotch on the Rocks is this Thursday and Friday and as I'll be out and about tomorrow making sure everything, and everyone has arrived in Edinburgh this will most likely be the last time I blog pre-event. It's like a mini-CF-fest; tomorrow will see the arrivial of Macromedia's Tim Buntel, InterAKT's Alexandru Costin and Bogdan Ripa, Philipp Cielen from the Frankfurt/Germany CFUG, and Niklas Richardson of the UKCFUG in London. Steven Webster of iteration::two will undoubtedly be demanding beer from me and depending on when Macromedia's Andi Hindle arrives, he'll probably head straight for the Whisky Heritage Centre!!! Throw in our local UG managers of Duncan Jack (Scottish JRun), James Spence (Scottish Flash) and myself, and not to forget Stephen Moretti who used to run the Northern CFUG here in the UK and you've got a beer-fest! Come to think of it, I wonder if everyone is actually attending/speaking purely for the alcohol??? :) Anyway, if you're out and about in Edinburgh tomorrow we'll probably be drinking in the George Street area from around 8pm. Let's just hope we all make it to the venue on Thursday morning! I know that's a fair bit of name dropping etc but this is the first ever CF event in Scotland and I'm damn excited by it all!

Typically, after a few weeks of excellent hot sunny weather, the good old Scottish weather is back... And just in time for Scotch on the Rocks. Since Saturday we've had thunderstorms, hail the size of golf balls and consistant showers. And these showers are expected to last right through to the end of the week. So, for all those folks coming to Edinburgh for the event, make sure you've got your umbrellas with you :)

With everything set in stone, and the event brochure away to the printers it's typical that something had to change. Fortunately, change is sometimes good and in this case we've blagged a last minute speaker for Scotch on the Rocks. Philipp Cielen is the founder of cielen.com, an agency specializing in consulting, training and solutions using cutting-edge Macromedia technology since 1998. Philipp is co-author of "Flash MX Professional" published by Galileo Design and "ColdFusion MX" published by Addison-Wesley and writing for several German IT technology magazines. A leader in the ColdFusion community, Philipp is also an accomplished Macromedia Flash developer. He manages the ColdFusion user-group Frankfurt/Germany and is a Macromedia Certified ColdFusion Developer as well as a certified Flash Developer and Designer. Philipp will be talking about Flash front ends for ColdFusion applications. He'll also be buying beer! Hurrah!