Category Archives: igniteportland

How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

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I had a great time at Ignite Portland 5 last night. There were seventeen other fantastic presenters, amazing volunteers and the always great Legion of Tech crew there to cheer us all on. Oh, and like 700 people in the crowd!

Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this presentation. Especially my husband, Scott, who really did volunteer for that slide.

Enjoy the slidecast below, with some audio commentary I recorded this morning (drop.io FTW!) below. @linuxaid‘s video should be up soon!

How to kill 4 chickens in 3 years

And here’s @linuxaid’s video:


Calagator, Ignite Portland, new PUGS site, geek2geek, SCALE — whew!

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I’ve been filling my time with some community and open source work.

First, I’m working with Audrey and some other fabulous community members on Calagator, open-source calendar aggregation with teeth! Our next codesprint is coming up on February 2. Everyone is welcome!

Ignite Portland is coming up on February 5, aka Super Tuesday. We’re up to 400 RSVPs. I’m hoping for a rowdy, fun crowd.

The new PUGS site is coming along. I just got some patches to plug a wiki in there, and I got a pre-release of the PostgreSQL theme used by the Italian PostgreSQL site. Looking forward to digging in this evening.

Michael Schwern’s geek2geek has been a taking off. I wrote a guest post about the Pickup Artist. We’re riffing on the idea of social engineering, and the Pickup Artist focuses on manipulation and physical cues.

Finally, I’m leaving for SCALE on February 8th. Lots too do before then!

legion of tech

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I recently joined the board of a tech non-profit called Legion of Tech. Our goals are:

  • Grow and nurture the local Portland technology community through educational, not-for-profit, community-run events.
  • Make it easier for community members to organize technology events.
  • Provide resources and assistance for technology community events.

Dawn also just wrote about it. We had a great first board meeting, full of interesting ideas and energetic people.

A few of us at the board meeting talked about event calendaring and keeping in touch with all the user groups in the greater Portland area. Members of the Perl community recently volunteered some time to write some code in support of a better calendaring system. We currently have at least two Google calendars, a PBwiki, dozens of mailing lists and many individual blogs.

Have ideas for how we could all work together and make a better system? Raven suggested the hCal microformat for announcing meetings, I thought it would be cool to have a Planet Portland and someone else mentioned Drupal. What do you think?

ignite was fun, some links

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Last night’s Ignite talks were awesome. My thanks to MJ for encouraging me to drink a FULL glass of wine before my talk.

I posted my slides here. Those of you wondering who that handsome man is on slide 3, here’s the wikipedia entry for Benjamin Bloom. He was an educational psychologist whose learning taxonomy (Bloom’s Taxonomy) is still used today in grad school education curricula. He’s mostly known for the Taxonomy and his study that said 95% of all test questions given to students only addressed the bottom of his taxonomy – knowledge questions, or questions that only tested the ability to memorize facts.

My presentation was about making better questions for community-oriented surveys. One caveat is that I am not a statistician! My suggestions sprung from a series of surveys I’ve seen and a small amount of work I’ve done on the Perl Survey data.

One good thing that came out of the talk was that Audrey agreed to have a look at the perl survey data with me in a couple weeks.

Another great thing that came out of it was a friend of mine saw the How Chickens will Save Your Life presentation, and now, I think he’s going to get chickens. How awesome is that?

Thanks all fellow presenters. I enjoyed meeting you all and was thoroughly entertained.