This past weekend’s BarCamp Portland was a fabulous, fun, exhausting time. Thank you to everyone who came and helped out and lent their knowledge and interests to making this such a great event.

Keep checking Flickr for pictures, the Drupal site for session info and notes, and the Legion of Tech site for what we’re up to next.

Personal highlights: plotting the start of a new web service during Bikes and Geeks, Fermentation Club (coming soon!), the ongoing My Other Thing conversation, and getting to introduce my mom to more of the neat things going on in our local tech community.

I’ve been talking about doing some kind of survey of the local tech community for a few months now, but today it’s up and running. If you’re in Portland, and involved with any kind of technology activities for work or fun, please go to http://moourl.com/lotsurvey. The more responses, the better, since we want to see the breadth of our community, and whether Legion of Tech events are on your calendar. Tell your friends, coworkers, and neighbors. I’ll be posting here and on the Legion of Tech blog when we’ve crunched the numbers.

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?

Over the weekend I read To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, which is a time travel caper that references Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. And since the first one was fun, I picked up the second, and am now reading about Jerome & friends’ adventures on the Thames.

One of my current research interests is food eaten on expeditions (long story—maybe I’ll write about it later) so I glommed onto the references to overladen Victorian picnickers in both books. A little digging around online found this recommended menu from Mrs. Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861:

BILL OF FARE FOR A PICNIC FOR 40 PERSONS.

2149. A joint of cold roast beef, a joint of cold boiled beef, 2 ribs of
lamb, 2 shoulders of lamb, 4 roast fowls, 2 roast ducks, 1 ham, 1
tongue, 2 veal-and-ham pies, 2 pigeon pies, 6 medium-sized lobsters, 1
piece of collared calf’s head, 18 lettuces, 6 baskets of salad, 6
cucumbers.

2150. Stewed fruit well sweetened, and put into glass bottles well
corked; 3 or 4 dozen plain pastry biscuits to eat with the stewed fruit,
2 dozen fruit turnovers, 4 dozen cheesecakes, 2 cold cabinet puddings in
moulds, 2 blancmanges in moulds, a few jam puffs, 1 large cold
plum-pudding (this must be good), a few baskets of fresh fruit, 3 dozen
plain biscuits, a piece of cheese, 6 lbs. of butter (this, of course,
includes the butter for tea), 4 quartern loaves of household broad, 3
dozen rolls, 6 loaves of tin bread (for tea), 2 plain plum cakes, 2
pound cakes, 2 sponge cakes, a tin of mixed biscuits, 1/2 lb, of tea.
Coffee is not suitable for a picnic, being difficult to make.

Things not to be forgotten at a Picnic.

2151. A stick of horseradish, a bottle of mint-sauce well corked, a
bottle of salad dressing, a bottle of vinegar, made mustard, pepper,
salt, good oil, and pounded sugar. If it can be managed, take a little
ice. It is scarcely necessary to say that plates, tumblers,
wine-glasses, knives, forks, and spoons, must not be forgotten; as also
teacups and saucers, 3 or 4 teapots, some lump sugar, and milk, if this
last-named article cannot be obtained in the neighbourhood. Take 3
corkscrews.

2152. _Beverages_.–3 dozen quart bottles of ale, packed in hampers;
ginger-beer, soda-water, and lemonade, of each 2 dozen bottles; 6
bottles of sherry, 6 bottles of claret, champagne à discrétion, and any
other light wine that may be preferred, and 2 bottles of brandy. Water
can usually be obtained so it is useless to take it.

The section of the book directly following this is on managing one’s servants. You’re certainly going to struggle to carry that much food without some kind of help.

During lunch I poked through the cupboards, tossed out a few things, and made a list of everything that needs to either be eaten soon or go elsewhere.

• cashews (maybe a handful left in the bag, and the chopped kind I don’t like as much)
• garlic (three heads from the farmers market last fall. a little shriveled.)
• soft cheeses (from various milk culturing experiments. a single batch of lasagna would take care of it.)
• miso (a really good single-serving packet kind from Uwajamaya. just not a big miso eater I guess.)
• Kung-fu brand ramen (I think this is still in the cupboard because Lucas didn’t like it.)
• stuffing mix
• chana dal
• red lentils
• urad dal, split
• tuna (one can)
• gyoza wrappers
• pumpkin puree

It’s actually a bit better than I expected. Nothing too weird, and it’s all theoretically edible. But still. Help?

Wednesday I attended the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. Jake Kuramoto had the idea to try this locally, and AboutUs hosted. I really enjoy how each new event seems to bring out a slightly different group of people, which got me wondering: why don’t we have more daytime events? Obviously, most people have to work, but usually we get some kind of lunch break, and it seems easier than evenings for people with kids.

Coincidently enough, earlier in the week I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Schwaber about the function that Friday symposiums serve for academic communities, and how something like that might work for our local user groups. Linux groups have traditionally been the one place people working with different open source technologies all come together, but these days we’re as likely to be using Macs, and the LUG just isn’t our starting point anymore. So what about some kind of brown bag lunch symposium? User groups could take turns presenting their best talks from past meetings, and we’d all learn something.

Another type of daytime event I’m interested in are the Jelly-style rotating coworking meetups. I’d love to spend half a day every couple of weeks working from the same space with other local geeks. It would not be a bad thing for me to get out of my apartment while it’s light out.

Portland has a lot of cool things going on right now, and I’m eager for even more. But we shouldn’t wait for a good idea to import from San Francisco or Seattle. This is a place with it’s own unique characteristics, and most of the time no one worries about whether we’re as cool as Location X. In the tech sphere we can fall into that trap because there’s just so much noise coming from other geek hubs. Ask “what would help me get my work done or meet interesting people or have more fun?”—that’s the important part.

I’m a little obsessed with yeast and bacteria right now. They’re responsible for tangy butters, bread, yogurt, cheeses, and all sorts of other delectable foods. I’m a little disappointed at how much of the info about this on the web is just a cut & paste repeat from one site to the next, so here’s my attempt to add a little more usefulness.

Butter: I’ve been doing cultured butter from the directions at The Traveler’s Lunchbox for a couple of months. If you have any kind of electric mixer, it’s not much work, and the result is rich and yellow. Commercial butter seems anemic in comparison.

Bread: I had a sourdough starter in college, one I did from scratch in my own kitchen. The bread it made was tasty, but very dense. I forget what happened to it, maybe died from neglect? I’m trying again, this time using buttermilk along with flour and water to give it a kick-start. I found recipes for this online, but nothing else along the lines of “I tried the recipe and [stuff] happened.” I’ll try to remember to report back later in the week, when I see if it’ll properly leaven bread. If it doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try a potato water version. Or I could ask around for a batch of starter, but it seems more fun to make my own.

Cheese: I really like paneer and other fresh cheeses, so with all the buttermilk I have on hand I’ve been making batches of my own. You take milk (I do a half gallon) and a glop of buttermilk (I don’t measure—probably 1/3 to 1/2 cup) and heat the mixture until it curdles. It’s a little slower than vinegar cheeses, and creates a softer curd. This is delicious mixed with jam in crepes, or with pasta. I wonder if I could inoculate it with blue cheese mold… that might be an upcoming experiment too.

Yogurt: I can’t walk into a Lebanese restaurant without ordering the labneh, aka yogurt cheese. It’s one of the best foods ever. It’s also really easy to make as long as you have real yogurt (milk + ‘active cultures’, with no sugar, gelatin, flavorings, or other crud). Put a coffee filter in a funnel, dump the yogurt in, and let it drain overnight in the fridge. Next I’m going to try making my own yogurt from scratch. What I really want to experiment with, though, is different regional yogurt cultures. Like with sourdough, yogurt-making bacterias exist in a variety of different sub-strains, with various effects on the yogurt’s taste and texture. Sourdoughs International provides a wide range of cultures for breadmaking, but I haven’t found the yogurt equivalent.

You could get really worked up about food safety with these kinds of experiments, but if you’re using pasteurized milk, clean dishes and utensils, etc. and not letting goop sit around without your friendly bacteria in there working, it’s pretty reliable. Use smell, taste, and texture to keep an eye on what’s happening. Healthy cultures are tangy and bubbly.

We’ve set a date for the next Portland BarCamp. It’ll be held May 2-4 at CubeSpace. If you’d like to participate or help, check the link above or contact Dawn Foster or myself.

Corvallis is staging their own as well. BeaverBarCamp will be on March 1st, at Oregon State. Topic ideas from their wiki include rockets, kinetic sculpture, and a tour of the OSU Open Source Labs.