2011 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients

At the keynote for Southwest Fox 2011, Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and I had the pleasure of announcing this year’s recipients of the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award.

First, Tamar announced the award was being given in memoriam to Drew Speedie. Drew spoke at just about every VFP conference and user group, was the first editor of FoxPro Advisor’s Tips column, wrote numerous articles in Advisor, was Technical Editor of the first Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro, and coined the famous “LISA G” mnemonic (Load, Init, Show, Activate, and GotFocus) for the order of events when forms instantiate. Tamar also told a story about how one year Drew, known as a fast speaker, wore out two signers for a hearing-impaired attendee at DevCon. Sadly, we lost Drew and his son Brent in 2005. There were more than a few people with tears in their eyes during Tamar’s presentation.

I was up next to announce the second recipient, Steven Black. Steve is the creator and host of one of the most important VFP sites, the FoxWiki. Like Drew, he’s a well-known author and speaker. Steve is one of the world’s leading experts on localization; his famous INTL Toolkit has helped many VFP developers adapt their applications to other languages and cultures. Steve is one of my favorite speakers—his sessions on design patterns introduced that important topic to VFP developers—and it’s been a long time since I’d seen Steve speak, so I was very glad we convinced him to present at this year’s conference. Special thanks to Alan Griver (yag) for roping Steve into what he thought was just a reunion of Fox friends but turned into much more.

Rick then announced the final recipient, Toni Feltman. Toni was a Senior Support Tech and Sysop of FoxForum on CompuServe back in the Fox Software days. She is also a well-known speaker and author, co-creator of Visual FoxExpress, co-creator of DBCX (a data dictionary extension for VFP used in many products, including Visual FoxExpress and Stonefield Query), and creator of ProjectHookX. Toni was doubly-surprised when she came up to the front to receive her award and saw her husband Mike and his brother Phil at the back of the room, as she had no idea that either was coming to the conference. It wasn’t easy keeping them hidden from her until that moment!

Congratulations to Steve, Toni, and Drew, where ever you are, for this well-deserved award.