I just got back from my Weekend With Experts in Philadelphia, and I have to say that it's probably one of the best, new small seminars out there. It's two days of intense brain overload from people who have been working in these technologies for longer than I've been alive.

Some of the speakers were Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky, two AJAX experts that have been using AJAX since well before it was "AJAX". They've been following the development of XMLHttpRequest since 1998 and they killed my hype buzz fast (which is a good thing). They knew exactly what it could do and what it couldn't and even showed off a cool new advance from Macromedia called Flex. I was very much against using Flash for your rich internet applications, but I can definitly see it's use now. I don't plan on building full on websites with it, because it's just not designed for that, but there are enough way cool things about it to put it in my arsenal. I'll probably be playing around with OpenLaszlo soon.

Sang Shin from Sun gave a great talk on Web Application Security Threats. A lot of it I already knew, but this was way more in depth than I had ever gotten with it before and he showed a ton of great open source tools that I hadn't seen before. I might get a list up here soon for all the other web heads out there.

Ajit Sagar (I can't remember what company he was from)(It's InfoSys) gave a great overview of Service Oriented Architecture. This is a big buzz word that some of my co-workers have been throwing around the office lately and now I realize how full of shit they all are. SOA is a big project that requires really studying the whole company and how it works and throwing up a few web services does not create an SOA. Ajit has been setting these up at companies for years and he knew every pitfall and detail of implementing SOAs and I can only hope that I absorbed a tiny fraction of his knowledge about the subject.

Joe Celko is an SQL guru. He had an SQL tips and tricks session that blew my mind. He's got a few books out that I am going to have to check out now. I've always been an SQL newbie, but this really peaked my interest. And his despise of Oracle was riveting.

I really can't believe how valuable this was. The talks were about 5 times more informative than any talk at OSCON. I love OSCON for the people, but there's something to be said for being in a small group of about 15 people and having a technology genius there at your disposal. Most of the talks broke down into hour long discussions that were amazingly informative, way more so than if 50 people sat there and watched someone flipping through their powerpoint at a frame a second.

Check out the program and if the sessions look good to you, go to the next weekend. Our group was only about 20 people and most of them were local, so you will get up close and personal with these people. There's no marketing going on and the speakers are there to teach and not to evangalize. If you can get the $319 rate, it is so worth it. I really hope that it changes enough over time that I can go again. It's an awesome format for learning and I hope that more people try doing this with other technologies.

I hope the next version of Ubuntu is called the Ornery Ostrich.

That would rock.

There's a new pizza shop near my house called A-May-Zing Pizza. It's a weird name, but what we tried of the food was pretty good.

We first heard about it because we got a menu in the mail with a letter pleading with us to try their pizza. It was interesting to me that a small company like this would actively send out a mailing. This alone made me want to give them a chance. They also said in the letter that they were not like all the other grease filled pizza joints out there and sought quality over greasy, sugary foods. They also said they'd give us a pizza for $8.00, and that didn't hurt either.

We went down there to see what it was like and I was surprised at how they had it laid out. They had some tables and chairs, but most of the room was taken over by arcade games and big, comfy couches that sat in front of a big screen TV. They didn't have any of it on at the time, but I could see it as a pretty cool place to hang out and have a get together once they were fully set up. If they'd plug in some Wi-Fi, I might even hang out there more.

Now the food. They have a pretty fleshed out menu, which is nice to see. We got a sausage pizza, breadsticks and a dozen teriyaki wings. The wings were really good. They didn't skimp on the sauce and the wings weren't overly fatty, like some places can be. I would say they were comparable to BW3's wings and I look forward to trying some of the other flavors at AMZg Pizza. The breadsticks were really good too, at least as really good as breadsticks get. They also gave us a large amount of pizza dipping sauce for the breadsticks, and I always appreciate that.

And finally the pizza. The crust was a little flat, even as far as Papa John's is concerned. I like a low profile pizza myself, but if you like Pizza Hut's big thick crusts, you'll be disappointed. It doesn't help that the picture of the pizza on AMZg Pizza's homepage is so misleading fluffy. Maybe we went on a bad day. The sausage chucks were big and there were a lot on the pizza. You'll also be disappointed if you like drowning in oil. This was a very dry pizza, something that I liked a lot. Pizza Hut is the king of greasy pizza and I always get sick after eating those. AMZg Pizza's didn't make me want to wash my hands after every slice, even though there was plenty of cheese and sausage on every slice. Apparently, better ingredients does equal better pizza.

My verdict: I will go here again. Papa John's is still my favorite pizza place, but I'm always willing to help out a small shop trying to make their mark. If the food's good and the price is right, I'm happy to be your new customer.

Next visit, I'm trying the subs. I love pizza shop subs and I hope that these are just as good. Tuesday is a buy one sub get one half off day.

Last note, and it's about the web site. The address and phone number are listed at the top of the front page. But they're in an image! Google Maps and Google Local will NOT be able to figure out where you are if you put your address in an image at the top of your page. No wonder you never show up when I search for local restaurants. I also can't copy and paste your address into Google Maps to map where you are (not that you're hard to find from where I live). I'll do you a favor though and post your address here so that it can get crawled from somewhere.

A-May-Zing Pizza
3333 Manchester Rd.
Akron, OH 44319
330-644-4900

UPDATE: A-May-Zing Pizza is no more!! It seems that they've closed up shop and headed home. Makes you wonder why they finally called it quits. After thinking about the location they were at, a large space with pinball machines and a big screen TV, I wonder if they just over streched themselves without thinking about the need to create a customer base. I'm reading Start Small, Finish Big right now (very interesting book) and I wonder if A-May-Zing didn't start out small enough and concentrate on putting out good product instead of amazing location. They did have a good product, so I have to think that it was lack of business acumen that put them under.

Damn shame. Their subs were wonderful.