photo by Reid Beels, from Calagator's 1st birthday celebration
Two years later and you’re still going strong.
Join Calagator developers and users for a birthday party this Friday, 7pm, at Bailey’s Taproom. Bring a dessert to share, or just stop by for a drink. We’d love to see you there.
Comments Off
Posted in events, technology
Tagged birthday, calagator, calendar, open source, party, software
Last week I finished up the content for the “Life of Audrey 2009 Retrospective” magazine and uploaded it to MagCloud.
You’ll be able to buy it here after I receive the proof and approve it, probably later this week. I’ll post on Twitter when it’s ready. [Update: It's available now.]
The third annual Winter Coders’ Social was last Tuesday night. This has become a really cool year-end tradition for the local tech scene. People from a bunch of different user groups get together for a holiday potluck and board games.
My current reading interest is noir crime novels. While I love a lot of the later derivatives of these, I’d never picked up a Hammett or Chandler book until a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I love the writing style and rhythm. It feels like they were meant to be read out loud, like radio plays. So I recorded a bit from Maltese Falcon on AudioBoo. It’s the section where we first encounter “the fat man”, and the adjectives he uses just crack me up.
I also just finished From Hell, the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel. It’s a huge book, which I didn’t realize when I ordered it, but dense and engaging. They do some really interesting things with time, consciousness, and different characters’ perspectives throughout, like a section when we’re fully inside Gull’s head and everything around him seems to glow. Highly recommended.
On Saturday we had a Calagator code sprint, the first one in quite a while. Only 5 attendees, in part due to the weather (we were promised freezing rain, which turned out to be cold and damp but only a little icy). But we got through several tickets, and added a couple of small features which should improve usability. You should be on our mailing list and following Calagator on Twitter if you want to find out when the next sprint will be.
Comments Off
Posted in events, portland, projects, technology, weekly report
Tagged books, calagator, code sprint, crime novels, end of the year, geeks, magazine, magcloud, noir, reading, retrospective, review, winter, winter coders social
A slice of the weekend.
Everything set up for the party at Gallery Homeland.
James Fee plays with his phone.
Rafa kept the music going.
Toward the end of the night.
Rick Nixon from the City of Portland talks about the open data initiative.
In front of the schedule grid.
Preparing for the zombie apocalypse causes much laughter.
Hackity hack.
Mayor=1
Ben ponders the PacManhattan set up.
Ghosts waiting for their turn to go.
The start of the Timbers game.
Smoke after a goal.
We lose. It is sad.
Comments Off
Tagged photography, photos, soccer, unconference, weekend, wherecamppdx
The second annual WhereCampPDX is coming up in just a week and a half. I’m really happy to be helping plan this again. Last year’s event was a great mix of location tracking ideas, games, food system discussions, and planning for community preparedness.
What’s in store this time? Friday, October 2nd, we kick off with a party at Gallery Homeland. Come meet people, talk about session ideas, try another round of the Arrivals game we invented for last year’s event. Please RSVP (helps us plan food/drink/chairs) on Upcoming.
Then, Saturday morning, we’ll have the unconference session kickoff at the Metro Regional Center at 9am, with sessions running all day. Add yourself to the attendee list on the wiki now, and browse or add to the session idea list.
Saturday night we’ll have pizza and hacking at PIE in the Pearl District. Bring your project, or just an idea for something you’d like to try, and find other people to collaborate with. Calagator, Geomena, and maybe even Shizzow are all likely to be represented there.
On Sunday we’ll wrap up with a day of games. PacManhattan is scheduled for a repeat run. We’re also considering geocaching, a mapping walk, scavenger hunts, and other fun. Check the blog for an updated schedule closer to the event.
See you there!
Selena already did a great job of thanking everyone who helped put this on, so I’m going to cheat and just link to her.
Highlights for me:
* People took our directions to “go forth and talk to each other” seriously, and I heard so many good things from attendees about the conversations they were having. I hope that this will also turn into new collaborators and new projects.
* Sitting in on sessions about Couch DB, evil programming tricks, space geekery, and learning the ropes for PR. I can’t wait till we have the audio available so I can share these with people who weren’t there.
* All of the enthusiasm among my fellow organizers and volunteers for how we can make this even better next year.
Oh, and the food cart field trips.
Yesterday we published the Open Source Bridge schedule. There’s two days of talks and a third day of unconference goodness to check out. Now you have no excuse to not go ahead and make your plan to attend. Do you really want to miss this lineup?
I am thrilled to announce our sessions for this year’s Open Source Bridge conference. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted a proposal and gave us an awesome set of talks to choose from.
You can browse the full list of sessions on our site.
And don’t forget to register. You want to be there for this. Trust me.
Last night, Reid launched an update of the Open Source Bridge site, now with links to attendee information like registration and booking a hotel room in our block. Conference passes are $175 if you register now, and $250 after March 31.
We’re also still accepting proposals. Current submissions include putting the cloud in the clouds, how and when to fork a project to do your own thing, and RubySpec (filed under hacks!). We’re interested in a wide range of topics, including advanced material, as long as it’s open source.
Comments Off
Posted in events, portland, technology
Tagged conference, open source, osbridge, portland
As Selena announced on her blog:
There’s going to be a new conference in Portland next July.
We’re calling it Open Source Bridge.
Our goal is this:
Create a completely volunteer-run, community conference to connect developers working with open source.
I am excited to be co-chairing this event. Portland is a fabulous place to be working on open source projects, and we’re the ideal community to build an inclusive, diverse conference that focuses on developers’ interests and needs.
Tomorrow night (10/30) we’re having a town hall meeting to talk about our plans for the conference, and what you can do to help. We’ll be meeting at 7:30 PM at Cubespace. Please RSVP if you’ll be there. If you can’t attend but want to get involved, let Selena or myself know, and we’ll get in touch with you. We’re also planning a second daytime meeting for west-siders next week.
WhereCamp PDX is coming up at the end of next week, Oct. 17-19. If you’ll be attending, take a minute to RSVP on Upcoming so we can plan for food.
In addition to sessions at Souk on Saturday and Sunday, we’re having a kick-off party at the Olympic Mills Building from 4-7pm on Friday. And for extra fun on Sunday, we’ll be running a set of urban and locative games. I’ll be leading a session of Cruel 2B Kind, a game that involves assassinating people with kindness. We’ll have details on how to sign up for this on the WhereCamp site soon.
I’m planning to do a session on Saturday about mapping food, so if you’ve been following the Ravenous threat for Superstruct, I hope you’ll join that discussion as well. Start thinking about your own session ideas now. Do you want to talk about location-enabled phone apps? The psychology of place? Open standards for geographic data? Anything on the people-place-technology spectrum is open for inclusion.
If you’re wondering how else you can help make WhereCamp PDX awesome, come to one of our last two planning meetings: tonight, 6:30PM at Produce Row, and the same time and place next Wednesday (the 15th).
Comments Off
Posted in events, portland, technology
Tagged event, geography, location, place, portland, technology, wherecamp, wherecamppdx
