Do you remember last Tuesday? Cincinnati got something like four feet of rain in about 15 minutes. I dreaded the drive from downtown to Blue Ash, and as traffic crawled along 71 North I figured I’d just hit the lateral and head home up 75. There was no way I was going to make the meeting in time. Traffic seemed to ease up just a bit right at the lateral, so I decided to keep heading North on 71 thinking I’d give it a try. I figured no one would show up and I could at least offer some support by being one of the few folks who would battle both the traffic and the weather. Boy was I wrong. [...]

Okay, the part you really need to read is at the end of this post. I wanted to do a wrap up of the week and that is the intro material you’ll find first.

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Mmmmm mmmmmm good. I love the PMI meetings. At last week’s meeting they put out a dinner spread that puts most to shame and make their event an EVENT! I shared a table with a number of folks including PMs Tom Hoffmann, Cory Beimesche, and Juthika Pal from Cardinal; Kim Beckman from the Cincinnati Insurance Company, and P&G’s Brian Van Norman. We shared some engaging conversation about the fact that mainframes will never die, SOA and its promises (which reminded me of Chris Howard’s comments about the immaturity of the SOA in the enterprise lifecycle), and the growth of Cardinal. [...]

The podcast with Chris Howard was posted this week. Shane Young should be next. Many of you know Shane. If you would like Shane to address a particular topic please make a note of it in the comments and we’ll try to fit it in. Also, feel free to suggest some interesting people in the Cincinnati IT community that you would like to hear from in interview format.

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Okay, I’ve been at this two weeks and had a bit over 120 readers last Friday. I guess that means someone other than my mother is reading this. One goal here is to get high-quality, relevant, timely, and frequent information into your hands quickly. So if the stars align this week there will be new content around .NET, the PMI, some networking notes, and, quite possibly, the first guest posts here on CINJUG, the IIBA, and the Programmers’ Guild if the content is strong enough. Also, keep an eye around here towards the end of the week for this site’s first published podcast. If things go smoothly, and I don’t have to spend too much time on my day job, you’ll hear an interview with one of the most interesting local folks that you’ve never heard of. This person has a global influence on the technology decisions of some of the world’s largest financial institutions.

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Hey, next week is the most active week of the month in terms of the user group community in Cincinnati. One of the purposes of this space is to highlight the generally high-quality of the content and information transfer at the different user groups in order to drive attendance. I would estimate 98% of the Cincinnati developer/BA/PM community does not take advantage of some of these excellent, reliable, and low/no cost resources.

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