This month we are having a PET FOOD DRIVE for the NASHVILLE HUMANE SOCIETY! So many pets are finding themselves in need because their families are facing hard economic times. Please make a donation of an un-expired and unopened dog or cat food. You can help make a difference in their lives.

It’s getting pretty hot out there! Come in, cool off, and mingle with the Nashville Interactive Community. Great food, great conversation - don’t miss it!

RSVP for the Mixer at http://mixer.centresource.com/.

Nashville’s Top 30 Under 30 recognizes the city’s most active young philanthropists while benefiting the CFF. Honorees were nominated by co-workers, friends and family for their charitable and professional endeavors. The top 30 honorees were then selected by the Top 30 Under 30 selection committee during the month of June.

“This honoree class has once again shown that Nashville is full of young professionals that care about their city. We hope the community will help the CFF congratulate and honor them by supporting the Top 30 Under 30 celebration in September,” said Top 30 Under 30 co-chair Anne Elizabeth McIntosh.

Nashville’s Top 30 Under 30 will be on Sept. 11, 2010, at Public Square Park downtown. Tickets can be purchased in advance for $50 or $75 for VIP entry. Evan will be selling tickets to help this great cause. If you are interested please email him at evan@centresource.com

Visit www.nashvilletop30.org for more information.

8 Ways To Optimize Your Mac’s Performance

1. Clean Out Startup Items
   • Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items
2. Turn Off Universal Access, Bluetooth, Speech Recognition, and Internet Sharing
   • Also in System Preferences - this will save you some valuable RAM and processor resources.
3. Clean Out “Other” System Preferences
   • How many items are down there? Do you know what they do? Do you use what they do? Turn them off!
4. Get Rid of Languages and Translations you won’t use
   • Use a utility like “Monolingual” to get rid of Catalan, Farsi, and Klingon.
5. Cool Off
   • Use utilities like “Fan Control” to keep your computer running cooler (though it does shorten battery life a little bit).
6. Evaluate Your Widgets
   • It takes RAM and Processor Power to keep these Widgets running, even when Dashboard is hidden.
7. Keep An Eye on Activity Monitor
   • Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU Usage, RAM Requirements, Virtual Memory Usage, etc.
8. Clean Off Your Hard Drive
   • Sometimes a little more free space is all you need to be a peak performance again!

Our downstairs fireplace mantel is getting a bit more crowded. We picked up a Silver Telly Award statuette for our work in creating the online video for the Two Futures Project. This is the second major award for the site, the first a “Best in Show” from the W3 Awards. The second Silver Telly Award is given for our work in creating a video called “No Charity” for Blood:Water Mission.

More than 11,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents were received for the 2010 competition, honoring the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions and work created for the Web.

Well, Sensio decided to steal our thunder by suggesting Symfony 2 Conference Hubs a few days later. Hey Sensio, we still take credit for the idea. We thought of it first. And now that’s off my chest, the sales pitch:

The Symfony Live 2010 Online Conference will explore the state of Symfony 2. We encourage you to register online (for the low price of 25 dollars) and join us on June 23rd at 10:00 AM in the centresource conference room. We will watch everything on the projector, laugh, cry, and have a very emotionally rewarding experience together. The conference will run 3 hours, from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM.

A complete list of Symfony Live hubs can be found on the symfony blog. We hope to see you there!

1. Evernote: Its more than an iPad app, its a fantastic note management system. Almost like my second brain. Great for receipts, ideas, passwords, random info that’s important but has no place, etc.
2. Penultimate: Great hand-writing app for notes.
3. IM+: Great app for instant messaging across AOL, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Facebook, Skype, Twitter with Push Notifications
4. ToDo: Great daily planner that integrates with the site, www.Toodledo.com
5. 1000 Experiences: Neat travel-idea app from Lonely Planet
6. iWork Apps (Keynote/Pages/Numbers): Good apps to run/edit Powerpoint, Word Docs, and Spreadsheets. Keynote also outputs to VGA
7. ArtStudio: Nice if you like drawing
8. WebMD: Beautiful app to help you become a hypochondriac :)
9. Pulse: Beautiful RSS reader, but only as good as the RSS feeds you read. If you read mostly commercial feeds, then it isn’t as great because commercial places really limit the amount of data they’ll share in a feed
10. Wikipanion: Nice Free app for searching Wikipedia
11. Amazon: My fav place to shop and the iPad app makes the experience smooth as silk
12. Goodreader: Nice app that connects to your mail server and lots of other services for mobile file access. It can read PDF (but so can iBook) and many other file formats. I combine ‘Dropbox’ and Goodreader as my main method for reading lots of files/docs on my iPad.

And yes, I play games too - but mostly 2 player with my wife :) The most fun 2 player games (for me) are:

1. WTD: Awesome ‘Whats the Difference’ game
2. Harbor Master: Absolutely crazy when you’re playing with two people
3. Word Slam: Fun, but super intense. I start sweating when I play.
4. FriendSheep: At first I thought it was lame, but its actually hilarious when you actually play. Moreover, its physically exhausting :)
5. CheckersHD: Basic but fun. I like the fact that it enforces the ‘Force Jump’ rule
6. Air Hockey: The board is a little short, but definitely fun.

Enjoy!

If you have never been to one our mixers, this is a great month to start! It is as simple as walking through the door, grabbing something to eat and drink and just hanging out with some of our colleagues here in Nashville that are doing some incredible things. As always, the event is free and you are welcome to bring a friend or co-worker. Don’t worry if you can’t be here right after work, we’ll be going all the way up to 8 p.m.

See the invite and RSVP at http://mixer.centresource.com/.

Here is a snapshot of some of the recent projects that have kept our development team busy outside of their normal day-to-day work for our clients.

Donate Nashville / WeAreNashville.org

Team: Chip Hayner, Brent Shaffer (and over 30+ other volunteers)

When the city of Nashville was flooded in early May, many of us were left stunned that the costliest non-hurricane natural disaster in United States history had struck our home. The flood waters began to recede late Monday night, but by Tuesday the Nashville technology community was already working to find a way to help. During the regularly scheduled Symfony Group meeting, our office transformed into a war room of developers, designers, strategists, copywriters and other volunteers to build a “help your neighbor” donations platform based on a simple premise: If you have a need, list it; If you have time, stuff or money give, list it.

Check out Chip’s interview with the Symfony Project where he shares some of his observations in the 96 hours between the idea and the launch of the site.

Check out the site at http://www.donatenashville.org/.

Even this side-project had its own side-project. Inspired by an essay by Patten Fuqua, a single-page Web site and poster was created to help raise money for relief efforts. The poster and site were designed by our very own Hannah Schmitt.

Check out the site at http://www.wearenashville.org/.

Superglue

Developer: Jared Scheel

Superglue is a lightweight, easy to use PHP “micro framework” for Web development. The idea is that designers and developers can quickly deploy a static Web site, but do so in such a way that future feature development will still fit nicely into a MVC pattern. It’s super geeky and still in active development, but stable versions have already found their way into a couple of CentreSource projects.

Check it out at http://github.com/superglue.

Idol Schmidol

Team: Chip Hayner, Brent Shaffer

LOST is probably the only show that is talked about more around CentreSource than American Idol. Similarly, during football season, there is a lot of trash talking about which fantasy team dominated (or was not so-dominant) over the weekend. Thus, Idol Schmidol was born. Now, not only can you watch folks belt out 30-plus variations of “Billie Jean”, you can trash talk to your friends too!

Check out the site at http://www.idolschmidol.com/.

Nshvll.org

Developer: Travis Roberts

Borrowing the idea from Prtlnd.com, Travis decided to create an easy directory to the Nashville interactive community. It was built on the Ruby on Rails framework. If you are a developer, blogger, copywriter, strategist or any other Internet-related profession in Nashville, be sure to add your profile!

Check out the site at http://nshvll.org/.

Conanize Yourself

Developer: Brent Shaffer

Remember when Conan O’Brien hosted the Tonight Show on NBC? While “CoCo” is launching a new show on TBS this fall, you can still answer the question that has baffled the mystics for centuries: “What would I look like with Conan’s hair?”

Check out the site at http://www.conanyourself.com/.

Photo by Chuck Bryant

As you may have seen in the national news, a series of storms over the weekend have caused the worst flooding in Nashville in decades. At least six people in Middle Tennessee have lost their lives, and countless more have lost homes and businesses. More than 2,000 people stayed in storm shelters last night. We are truly blessed to report that all of our team is accounted for and is safe, but our hearts and prayers go out to those who are not as fortunate.

This morning, CentreSource CEO Nicholas Holland (@nicholasholland) has asked our team to get out and support the volunteer efforts that are underway in Nashville. Groups are organizing in various parts of the city to be ready with food, bottled water and other basic needs.

Here are a few of the service opportunities that we are aware of right now:

• Hands on Nashville (partnered with Metro Davidson County)
• Nashville Red Cross
• Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee

Our Germantown neighborhood office remains open with only minor damage, and our staff will be available via e-mail to help with any of our clients’ needs. If you need assistance with your project, please contact your Strategist.

• Contxts.com
  Business cards are so 2007. What with the environment in shambles do you really want to be that guy who is handing out chopped up pieces of bleached trees? Contxts.com lets you share your information via SMS!
• Mozy.com
  An online backup service for consumers and small businesses. Back up all of your personal files, photos, music, etc. automatically online. Worry free!
• SnapaBug.com
  Help widget for customer service chat on web sites.
• RealTime Inline Validation article on GetElastic
  Realtime in-line form validation to improve conversions and avoid shopping cart abandonment.
• Pixlr.com
  Free photo editing right in your browser!
• HitMeLater.com
  When you’re too busy to respond to an email right away, just forward it to 24@hitmelater.com and we’ll resend it to you 24 hours later.
• XFruits.com
  Site with tools for combining and/or manipulating RSS feeds in many different ways.
• SupportDetails.com
  A one-stop resource for the kinds of tech details an online customer support representative will need to address a user’s web-related issues… ID10T errors excluded.
• 10MinuteMail.com
  Surfing a site that requires registration? Beat spam with this quick easy email generation service.

Found a Web site that you just can’t live without? Let us know in the comments section!