winter break is over!

Sadly, my winter vacation is over. I needed a couple weeks to recharge after a crazy year of wrapping up old stuff (finally done with the ERP project) and starting lots new things (Legion of Tech, PostgreSQL Conferences, my first cyclocross race!).

If you’re interested in more about me, you can check out my profile at Portland On Fire, a new project from Raven Zachary about Portland residents. Raven is planning to profile a new person every day this year. I’m January 6.

Also, don’t forget about PostgreSQL Conference East. Registration will open this week! The call for papers will be open until February 3, 2008. I’ve got my work cut out for me arranging all the details from here, but I’m looking forward to working with some great community members out in College Park, MD.

I’m giving a talk on January 17th, titled “10 new things you can use in PostgreSQL version 8.3”. Last week, I felt like PDXPUG was running itself — we’ve got the next six months of talks lined up already. I’ll be publishing our calendar over on the PDXPUG blog tomorrow.

legion of tech

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?

december coder’s bash – thanks, sam

I made it out for the last hour or so of the December Coder’s Bash last night. The first thing I noticed was how many people were there! At least 50 were still hanging out at 9:15pm on a Tuesday night.

They were chatting and playing games — Settlers of Catan, some kind of card game, something involving bean bags. And, of course, there was programming shop-talk. I got to talk about embedded systems with Matt, tried to beg some help with a Drupal installation from part of the PostgreSQL crew, and started to decompress a little from the ERP migration I just completed on Monday.

And there were a ton of women! My unofficial assessment was that about 15% of the group were women.

Portland is so awesome.

I want to thank Sam Keen for putting this together. I know that a lot of other people were involved, but he was the guy sending out the email, contacting us user group leaders and getting sponsorships. Sam, you really did a great job.

Hands On Greater Portland posts disaster response volunteer opportunities

Hands On Greater Portland has posted disaster response volunteer opportunities on their site. The partner programs are Victim Volunteer Services (Vernonia and Columbia County) as well as the American Red Cross.

The Red Cross is looking for folks to show up tomorrow morning (12/7/2007) at 8am. See the Hands On site for details. Vernonia Victim Volunteer Services is also looking for folks to just show up at their space across the street from Vernonia City Hall.

Hands On will likely be coordinating a few projects in the weeks to come. If you have some time this weekend, however, just head out to either of the locations mentioned on the Hands On website.

conference audio is up!

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 audio is now available! Check it out.

I didn’t edit much, other than to eliminate break-time chatter. My apologies to Neil Conway — I missed about 10 minutes of his talk. Thank goodness for redundancy! Once I rip the video, I will update the audio and publish the whole thing.

I’m leaving early Sunday morning for a week. I’m taking a break from the interweb while I’m away. So, I look forward to catching up with everyone when I return.

ignite was fun, some links

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.

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – only two more days

We’re taking care of all the last minute details – making sure we have enough coffee Saturday morning, getting nametags printed, stuffing folders and practicing (or in some cases finishing) talks.

I created a special page for my conference posts. I’ve included links to public transportation, all the maps to find your way to and from the conference location and the party, cab info, and links to all my other posts which have more detailed information.

There is free public wireless access inside the PSU engineering building. I’ll have information on how to connect when you arrive. Please send any questions you have to the attendees mailing list (here are the archives).

We are making video and audio recordings of the conference. I’ll announce here when they’re available and make them all available from the conference page.

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – Friday meetup

A few people on the mailing lists and IRC are organizing a meetup on the Friday before the PostgreSQL conference. Check out the wiki page set up to select a location and say whether or not you’ll be there! If you’re a local, vote for the location you’d like to meet at.

Here are the restaurants and bars currently on the list:

  • NW Lucky Lab – 1945 NW Quimby (pretty central, good space, outdoor seating)
  • Side Door – 425 SE Washington St (great food)
  • Paddy’s – 65 SW Yamhill Street (right off the max! excellent scotch selection)

If you’ll be there, and haven’t already subscribed to the attendees mailing list, go subscribe now so you’ll get the latest updates on events.

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – Where to eat lunch

Screenshot of conference mapThanks to many suggestions from PDXPUG‘s mailling list and Gabrielle Roth‘s patience with Google Maps, we have a great map of the area around the conference. She was kind enough to put the nearest parking garage ($9/day) on the map as well. If you’re looking for some parking that’s a bit more affordable but a further walk away, try Smart Park. You could also park on the East side of the river, and walk across one of our beautiful bridges or hop on a bus or the Max (you’ll need to transfer to a Bus or the Street Car from the Max to get to PSU campus). To figure out where and when to ride public transit, you can call for live help at 503-238-RIDE, or use the Trip Planner.

Portland has great food. If you’re going to be in town for a couple of days, there are great restaurants walking distance from the downtown hotels (Higgins, Typhoon!, Saucebox, many others), on the waterfront (Three Degrees, McCormick and Schmick’s), and over on NW 23rd/21st (Paley’s Place, Lucy’s Table, Serratto, Muu Muu’s). You can get directly to NW on the Streetcar, which has a stop one block from the conference. And of course there are many food carts throughout the city. If you want even more suggestions, check out the Willamette Week’s top 100 restaurants in Portland.

Those of you who have come to Portland for OSCON the last couple of years probably know about a few of the great places on the East side of the river. We’ll be on the west side, and there’s a ton of great places to explore.