Dyepot, Teapot

BarCamp Portland is happening just two days from now, starting May 2nd, 6pm, at CubeSpace.

If you’re not familiar with BarCamps in general, this is an unconference, an event with set times and dates, but the schedule determined on site by participants. It has a technology focus, but really anyone who can read this blog is likely to find something of interest. And it has one of my favorite rules for any event: if you’re not learning or contributing by staying where you are, then you should respectfully find somewhere else where you can be. If that means switching sessions, or adding something to the schedule, that’s great. You have the ability and the responsibility to make this your event.

Some topics that have been suggested so far:

• Design and geekdom
• Digital photography
• Object-oriented programming
• Erlang and Haskell
• A mini WordCamp (for users of WordPress) on Sunday
• Software business cooperatives

This is only a start. We’ll have over 100 session slots filled with … something … that you can help decide with the rest of us this Friday evening and through the rest of the weekend.

This is what we had for dinner last night.

Take two pork chops (we got ours from Deck Family Farm) and cook over medium heat in a large cast iron frying pan, turning every few minutes, until done. We just eyeballed it, and they came out fine.

Move the pork chops to a plate, and add chopped green onions and mushrooms to the pan. Pour in a couple splashes of red wine. Let that cook down, then turn the heat to low, and add cream and crumbled bits of Rogue Smokey Blue cheese.

Pour the sauce over the pork chops, add a couple of baked potatoes slathered with butter, and serve.

Recently I’ve been talking to people about Portlanders and their many side projects. It’s been a little while since I attempted to describe the full list of mine (my Portland on Fire profile had a shortened version), so here goes.

• Calagator. Aka the Portland Tech Community Calendar project. Status: Always looking for volunteers. Next code sprint on 4/12.
• Cooking. I like to cook. When I start to feel cooped up, I read cookbooks from other parts of the world. Right now I’m very interested in cultured/fermented foods, and things eaten on picnics and other outdoor excursions.
• Etsy shop. Status: majorly neglected. Somehow a skein of sock yarn that’s been listed for most of the last year sold last week, despite no attempts to promote it. I think I need a sales rep.
• Food Cart Map. Status: needs updating. I’m thinking about replacing the current setup with a Rails app that would make adding things and searching easier. Right now I have to hand-edit an XML file, and it’s pretty tedious.
• Knitting. I knit, usually in huge spurts of interest that wax and wane every few months. I gave a presentation on geeky knitting at the first Ignite Portland. I also have a sweater pattern in the just-released More Big Girl Knits book. I don’t usually work from a pattern if I can help it, but other people do, so I’d like to write down more of mine as I go. I’m pdxspinnerin on Ravelry.
• Legion of Tech. Status: very active. Our next big event is Portland BarCamp 2 on May 2-4. You should come. My mom will be there.
• Photography. Not a for-income activity lately, but I’ve been doing occasional Holga and pinhole experiments in addition to digital. My ex-coworker Anna and I used to talk about quitting our jobs and starting a mobile portrait studio, but it never happened, and now she’s living in Spain taking pictures of olive harvests.
• Planet PDX. I still haven’t set up feed stats, so I have no idea how many people are making use of this, but send me your blog url (if you’re in the Portland area and work on tech stuff or other geekiness) and I’ll add you.
• Portland User Group Wiki. The problem with trying to catalog all of the user groups in town is that more are starting all the time. You can help by taking a peek at the wiki and adding anything you know of that’s still missing. (Mobile Portland? Android devs? PDX Data Plumbers? I’m sure at least one of you still needs a link.)
• Writing. Well, there’s this blog, as sporadically updated as it is. I had an essay in O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series. I keep coming up with book ideas, and abandoning them because other things come up. Actually writing one would be a good sabbatical idea. I’ve done fiction on and off since I was a kid, but have yet to figure out how to make a story run longer than ten pages. Someday, maybe.
• Yog’s Notebook. Status: still (sadly) on hiatus. You can still buy the first two issues on our website. We need a couple of interns/volunteers to help read submissions and write for the blog. Most of the actual layout and editing for an issue happens in the space of a couple weeks, but there’s a lot of wading through slush to get there, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to keep up on it with something else as my full time job.

I’m sure I’ve managed to forget something, but there it is. What are your other things?