North Shore Web Geek Meetup

Last night I attended the North Shore Web Geek Meetup, hosted by Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com. The venue was The Grog in Newburyport, a nice little bar and grille, where we had our own private room on the second floor. A little over 20 people showed up on the cold and wintry night.

I showed up at 6pm, the first person there other than Josh, and I left at 10pm (there was still a handful of people there). I might have stayed longer, but I did have a 40-minute drive home, and work the next day. I’ve been to a number of other meetups, and this is the first one where I’ve stayed more than an hour or two. I met some fantastic people, had some great discussions about technology, the web, the North Shore, and life in general, and enjoyed a bit of good food. The setting was very informal; people just stood around and drank and talked, and would order food whenever they felt like it. When my food arrived, I ate as quickly as I could so as not to miss too much time socializing (and because I was hungry).

Some observations from the evening:

• Roughly half of the people at the meetup appeared to be in their mid-twenties and under (I didn’t take a survey). The <=25 crowd and the >25 crowds seemed to naturally band together, perhaps because of similar temperments and life experiences. This was kind of an eye-opener for me, as I’ve always felt like part of the younger crowd. But last night it hit me as I found myself sitting at a table with a bunch of guys who were married with kids and had spent more than five years in their respective fields. I’m 29 years old, I’ve been married for five years, have an almost-two-year-old, own a house, and have been working for the same company for almost eight years now. I don’t feel like that makes me an old guy, but in fact that’s about all it takes to cross the bridge. What is more surprising to me is that I’m okay with it. I enjoyed hanging out with these people, had a lot in common with them, and felt very comfortable. So here’s to my “old”ness. (Not that there’s anything wrong with the younger folk - the ones I talked to were very nice people in their own right, but in terms of interests, life outlook, and work experience, I really hit it off more with the “older” crowd.)
• Most of the people that I met were from Newburyport, or from fairly close by. Thus, the meetup might more accurately be named the Merrimac Valley Web Geeks Meetup. In fact, Newburyport is only part of the North Shore in the broadest definitions of the term. On the other hand, having “North Shore” in the name was a selling point for me, as I identify strongly with the North Shore. So I might not have been as interested if the meetup was more “accurately” named.
• All of the people I talked to came from one of two different job types: employees at small design/development/consulting firms, or individual freelancers/consultants. These types of people work in small teams for a variety of clients, in contrast to my work which is steady, permanent work for a single client. From what I recall, nobody I talked to has been in their current position as long as I have, and I’m not sure that even the older guys I talked to had worked for any one company for a long period of time. So for me, it was interesting to talk to these types of people to see what their work is like, and I hope that it was somewhat enlightening for them to hear from a long-time corporate developer type.
• Something I’ve observed at other meetups, and seemed to hold true at this one as well: People generally don’t like going to meetups far from home. At the meetups I’ve attended in the cities of Boston or Cambridge, people generally balk at the idea of traveling to the hinterlands of the North Shore, while at the NSWG meetup, I heard people talking about not being able to / not being interested in attending meetings in Boston. Personally, I’m up for traveling just about anywhere as long as I’ve got the time. It took me about 40 minutes to drive to Newburyport, but I’ve driven twice as far for lesser events. Maybe it stems from the fact that I’m originally from a small town in the Midwest, and we had to drive far to get everywhere. Or maybe it’s just my temperment. Or maybe the reason I drive so far to attend these types of things is that I haven’t found many geeky meetups in my immediate vicinity. There’s the North Shore Computer Society, which holds meetings in Peabody, but they’re a bit more formal and old-school than I’m interested in. If there were a bunch of great meetups being held in Danvers or Peabody, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to drive so far to attend other ones. Hmm.

To wrap up, I’ve got a gallery of photos from the North Shore Web Geek Meetup, and I’ve been using del.icio.us to tag the people I met with nswgm. Check out those links and my commentary. Hopefully Josh will be planning more of these events in the future. Overall I had a great experience at this one, and came away feeling very excited and affirmed.

See you at the next one!

20 Years Of Perl

I slacked off yesterday, and forgot to write up a blog post about this, but December 18 marked the 20th birthday of the Perl programming language! Woohoo!

I’ve personally been using Perl for about ten years, and for the past seven years I’ve been using it in my job at Christianbook.com. I love coding in Perl, and I’ve learned how to make it do some really crazy things over the years! I guess you could say that Perl helps me “put bread on the table,” so I owe Larry Wall some thanks for creating such a great language and guiding it through all of these years of development.

Here’s to 20 more great years!

Nano, nano

With a little bit o’ the old birthday money, I bought myself an iPod Nano 3g. Let me just say that this thing is gorgeous:

I got the black 8 GB model. My old iPod was a 20 GB 4th gen, so I’ve had to prioritize the stuff I really want to sync to the Nano, but I still find that I have plenty of space for the things I really want to listen to.

The Nano’s implementation of Cover Flow is excellent, and the user interface design is just beautiful. I love the way it grabs snippets of cover art and movies, and floats them around while I’m browsing through menus. It’s also got some fun games, and the screen resolution, brightness, and color are terrific. It’s actually not too bad to watch movies on the screen, and I love being able to have videos and photos of the fam with me in this matchbook-sized device. The size, of course, is one of the best parts - it fits right into the coin pocket of my jeans.

Many other have reviewed the 3rd gen Nano, so I’ll leave the full-fledged reviews to them. “Awesome” sums it up for me.

P.S. I now have a 4th Gen iPod that I’m looking to sell. I thought I’d toss it out to my blog readers before it went up on Craigslist or eBay.

P.P.S. Ditto on the above for a Panasonic DMC-FZ20 12x zoom digital camera. Sorry, this has been taken. Thanks, Beth!

Geeky Onesies A Hit!

So those Geeky Onesies that Becky made me for Christmas have become quite the sensation!

First, I raved over them on Christmas. Then our relatives in Pennsylvania thought they were great when we showed them off later that day. Just recently, Becky posted them on the Craftster forum where they were received with a great response. And yesterday we discovered that Leah, the admin of Craftster (and fellow Boston-area resident) had submitted the Geeky Onesies to MAKE, a do-it-yourself magazine/book run by O’Reilly Media. MAKE posted about the onesies earlier this week! That’s pretty awesome in both geeky and crafty circles!

I have created a new album just for the onesies here. At this point, Rebecca has not revealed her plans, if any, for doing any further work with Geeky Onesies. But if you have any thoughts for her, be sure to let us know, either by leaving a comment on this entry, or by contacting her via our contact page.

Update 01/13/2006

We’ve got another mention, this time at one of my new regular reads, Daddy Types, the “Weblog for New Dads”. Cool!

Update 2 01/13/2006

Whoops, and there are even more links that I’ve found by way of searching for the Craftster thread. I was searching for links to our blog, but since most people are just linking to the Craftster thread, that didn’t turn up anything. Becky’s work was mentioned over at Darryl Smith @ Radioactive Networks, and also at Yes, I’m Canadian.

Podcasts

I’ll admit, I have been slow to join the ranks of Podcast listeners. Recently, though, I had heard about some good Podcasts, and decided I would try downloading a few. Turns out that I really enjoy them! To find out more about the Podcasts I’m listening to, read on.

(If you don’t know what Podcasting is, first proceed to Wikipedia for a definition.) Continue reading…

Comrade Mac

Comrade Mac

Computers deserve souvenirs, too! Our PowerMac G4’s monitor is adorned by a Red Army hat pin, part of a collection I purchased in Moscow. One of the most common items for sale was an old brown army cap, with 20-30 reproduction Soviet pins attached to it. A fun souvenir, and not terribly expensive either - 250 roubles ($9) or less.

Boston Weblogger Meetup

Tonight was the Boston Weblogger Meetup. This is only the second meetup I’ve attended, but I had quite a good time. I met a bunch of completely new-to-me people, chatted about blogs, technology, society, had a good burger, and got a whole new list of blogs to put on my blogroll… Continue reading…

Noreascon

Why do I not hear about these things until it’s too late? This year, the world science fiction convention is being held in Boston: Noreascon. This only happens in Boston sporadically - apparently it’s been 15 years since the last one, and the previous ones were nine years apart each. It started yesterday and runs through Monday, but it costs upwards of $50 per day to attend, or $200 for the whole convention. But wow - they’re holding the Hugo Awards here, and such notables as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman will be there.

Speaking of Neil, I didn’t even realize this thing was going on in Boston until I read the first line of his blog entry from yesterday! I mean, I read it every day, and I know that he’s always talking about conventions he is going to attend, but I had no clue it was in Boston until now! Gahh!

I guess I’ll sign up for his author tracker - maybe they will actually be a bit more specific about his actual plans.

Too bad I can’t qualify as press to receive a press pass.