Southwest Fox 2009

Unfortunately, for reasons outside of his control, César Chalom is unable to attend Southwest Fox 2009. In his stead, we are pleased to announce that Emerson Santon Reed has been selected as the 2009 Ceil Silver Ambassador. He will attend Southwest Fox 2009 and represent the Brazilian VFP community.

Emerson Santon ReedEmerson, a software developer from Americana - SP, Brazil, has worked with Visual FoxPro since 1999, and is an active member of the Brazilian VFP community. He presented a session at the Brazilian VFP conference in 2008. He is well known to the global VFP community for his ThemedControls project at VFPX. (VFPX, http://vfpx.codeplex.com, is the primary VFP community development site.) He also has a blog (http://weblogs.foxite.com/emersonreed) where you can find useful material on Visual FoxPro. We are very excited that Emerson can attend Southwest Fox 2009 and know that many attendees are looking forward to meeting him in person.

Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund

Many VFP developers around the world provide incredible contributions to the VFP community, such as working on VFPX projects, blogging about techniques and code to do cool things in VFP, or providing exemplary support in various VFP forums. However, for most of them, attending a conference such as Southwest Fox isn't feasible.

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund is intended to raise money from the VFP community to bring a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country.

The Fund is named in memory of Ceil Silver, a long-time member of the Visual FoxPro community, who passed away in January, 2009. Ceil served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor's Tips and Tricks column for many years and was the founder of the Westchester County FoxPro chapter of PADD, the Professional Association of Database Developers. She was also a contributing author to Special Edition Using Visual FoxPro 6. Ceil understood the value of attending professional conferences, and continued to attend them until her failing health prevented it.

We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. Contributions can be sent, by check to:

Geek Gatherings, LLC
Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund
42759 Flis Drive
Sterling Heights, MI 48314

We can also accept donations via PayPal.

100% of donated money will go to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny will be used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process will be donated. No one will be paid for their time. So if you want to donate to the fund, please send a check or we can arrange non-credit card PayPal transaction so we don't have unnecessary discount fees.

Also, let us know if you want your contribution to be public or not. If so, we will include your name in the list of contributors announced at this year's conference.

Tomorrow's Solutions, LLC