Professional, Personal

I attended my first Barcamp this weekend at the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center in Atlanta.  What is Barcamp, you ask?  It's an unconference, where the agenda is decided by the participants.  For this reason, all attendees are encouraged to participate by offering a presentation or demo, or at least participating in a discussion.  As a barcamp virgin, I wasn't ready to give a presentation this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.  I did my best to be engaged in the discussions, ask good questions, and get to know the many others from the Atlanta (and nearby) technology community.

For a free event, I was really impressed with the amenities.  The ATDC is a first-class facility, with plenty of conference rooms with whiteboards and projectors.  Also, our sponsors really took care of us, providing a barbecue dinner Friday, Flying Biscuit sandwiches for breakfast on Saturday, and pizza for lunch.  Also, there was free soda, coffee, and beer.  What more could you ask?  Nobody went away hungry.

The wide variety of people, in terms of expertise and lines of work, really made this a cool event, covering a wide array of topics.  Some of the sessions I attended included:

• Independent Consultants - Pricing your Services
• Genetic Algorithms (OK, I still don't really get what those are)
• Erlang overview and demo
• Starting a website: Framework (Rails, CakePHP, etc.) or CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, etc.)?
• How to generate buzz without being treated like a spammer
• "Push Protesting" - using Microformats to get your minority message out
• Yahoo Pipes demo (Sanjay Parekh's construction of startupgossip.com)
• COPPA - the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act, and how it affects your site
• BeagleBoard demo (what is that?  see http://beagleboard.org)
• Web Security resources and tools
• Twitter API
• Open Source roundtable

There were some off-the-wall sessions as well (which, perhaps unfortunately, I didn't attend):

• Freezing different types of food in liquid nitrogen
• "Alternative Funding" - (ahem - it was a poker game)
• Be your own beatbox (making beatbox sounds in a microphone)
• Be your own barista (making coffeehouse coffee in your own home)

Overall, Barcamp is worth attending for just about anyone with an interest in technology, even if it's just a passing interest.  You'll come away from it with a new appreciation for technology, the people involved in it, new things you may have never heard about, and a renewed excitement to learn more.

After months of neglect, I am finally writing a new post!  As I dove head-first into the world of web consulting, I got too busy to keep this site up-to-date.  But now I'm back--still busy, just better organized.

Kudos to consumer guru Clark Howard for discussing open source alternatives on his radio show.  He specifically mentions OpenOffice in his show notes.  He is correct that businesses and consumers can save lots of money by using free, open source alternatives to expensive commercial applications such as Microsoft Office.

This is just further evidence that open source software has entered the mainstream.

(Image courtesy of bnnrc.net,  under a creative commons license.)

Drupal gets considerable praise for being versatile, flexible, and open. At the same time, it is often criticized for being difficult to configure, with a large learning curve even for seasoned developers. So given the criticism, why do I use it? And why do I recommend it to clients? This article provides an overview of Drupal, and in doing so, explains why I stake my business on it.

Summary: Thrills, Chills, and Hills

The ING Georgia Marathon was held on Sunday, March 30, 2008, just three weeks after a tornado hit the start/finish line area around Centennial Olympic Park. The fact that this race was still able to occur, despite the tornado damage in downtown Atlanta, is a testament to the organizers: they made the necessary adjustments to ensure the race could happen.

The Thrills: the people who came out to cheer us on, especially: the Agnes Scott College women, the Dekalb Police Department, and the Peachtree Tri Club (including my wife, Sarah) at the last, desolate mile.

The Chills: This year, the weather was cold, cloudy, and breezy. There was rain early, around 5:30 am, but it stopped (thank goodness). The temperature was in the 40s. This was the opposite extreme from last year, where it was sunny, and the temperature soared into the 80s.

The Hills: with the changes in the course, I think this year's race was hillier than last year. The course consisted of continuous, rolling hills, with a break in the middle. However, I won't harp on that: I covered most of the course on my training runs, and I knew what I was getting into.