CodeStock 2011 - Adventures in Speaking

Adventure 20110603

CodeStock 2011 was fantastic.  Once again Mike Neel out did himself and set the bar higher than any other local code convention has any hope of reaching.  Unfortunately for the poor attendees he did make one mistake.  He let me be a speaker.  ^_^  So Friday at 12:30 PM I presented a short session in the general track titled "A Knoxville Hackerspace - What do you want to build today?".  Despite some issues with swapping rooms at the last minute I did manage to draw eight people in for what turned into a pretty good discussion on what exactly is a hackerspace and am even hopeful that one or two might come to check out the local Knox Makers group.  I will note that even though I got flustered by the room change and ended up speaking and going through my slides far too quickly I think I may be hooked.  Presenting a session was exciting and I felt much more involved in the convention itself.  I think I'm going to have to see if I can come up with another topic for next year.

Aside from speaking I also got to attend several great sessions:

• The Geek's Guide to SEO by Jay Harris.  Walked out with a half-dozen links to hit up for more info.
• Kinect Hacks 101 by James Ashley.  Unfortunately, now I have to go buy a Kinect to play with.
• Introduction To Ruby On Rails by Rod Paddock.  Goes under my "nifty toy I must find time to play with" category.
• The Open Spaces discussion on how we learn and the future of publishing with Charles Petzold was fascinating.  It may simply be time for tech authors to reach directly out to their readers and skip the publisher entirely.
• Open Spaces discussion about the Netduino with Brady Gaster. Of course I had to go and back-order a Netduino Plus as soon as I got home that night.... 
• I shared an Open Spaces session with Thomas Langston discussing gameful ways to build developer communities.  I really think that a coding based version of the Chore Wars website has a lot of promise.  This discussion also helped me make the mental shift to start thinking about team leadership and the Agile Scrum Master role the same way I think about the Dungeon Master role when setting up a pen-and-paper RPG for my friends.  Saving throw versus deadline!
• Eulering up your coding skills by Matthew D. Groves.  Project Euler is now in my "must play with" bookmarks folder.
• Arlene Gray led a great Open Spaces discussion about what it would take to hold a SQLSaturday here in Knoxville. Can't wait!
• Why aren't women speaking at CodeStock? (and other WiT issues) by Mike Neel and Jennifer Marsman.  Very thought provoking.
• Your OS is going the way of the dodo by David Smith was a good intro to Google’s Chrome operating system.

My top pick for "Best of CodeStock" this year has to be the Open Spaces discussion on how we learn and the future of publishing with Charles Petzold.  Although the Open Spaces session with Thomas Langston discussing gameful ways to build developer communities and the over-the-top buffet at the Keynote tied for second place.  ^_^

Greg's Peanut Butter Tardis Birthday Cake

Experiment 20110521

For Greg's birthday this year I wanted to try something a little different, so I came up with a new Peanut Butter flavored cake recipe.  It turned out well if not as strongly Peanut Butter flavored as I would have liked.  For a decorating theme I used Greg's interest in Doctor Who and one heck of a lot of blue dye to create the dreaded Peanut Butter Tardis.  Powered only by Peanut Butter it travels through Time And Relative Dimensions In Space!  Next step, Daleks out of Nutter Butter cookies.  ^_^

Photo Album on Picasa

Douglas Adams themed 42nd Birthday Party

Adventure 20110430

For my 42nd birthday party this year I decided to go with a Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy theme.  I even went so far as to hold a "Worst Dressed Sentient Being" contest so I suppose I can only blame myself for the pictures below....

Photo Album on Picasa

KMG Meetup with Hacker Consortium and Midsouth Makers in Nashville

Adventure 20110416
The Knoxville Makers Guild had an impressive turnout for our trip to Nashville with all nine of what are quickly becoming our "core" members able to attend.  It was an awesome opportunity to get to see what the Hacker Consortium has been able to do with their space, and Mudflap, Seeblind, Skydog and the rest of the HC folks were fantastic hosts.  It was even better that three members of Midsouth Makers were able to come over from Memphis as well and Joe, Dan and Mary had lots of great information for us to use to get our group up and running.  You hear that Knoxville?  Nashville and Memphis already have their cool maker/hackerspaces up and running.  ^_^  What are you waiting for?

KMG Old School Blacksmithing Workshop

Adventure 20110402
In an effort to expose the members of the Knoxville Makers Guild to some old style making I asked my friend and neighbor John Enloe of Art In The Burrow and the Clinch River Blacksmith Guild  to hold an old school blacksmithing workshop for the group.  The session was well attend with a crowd of ten very pale geeks exposing themselves to the dangers of the dreaded day-star to have a chance to pound hot metal and create hand-forged wall hooks and railroad-spike knives.  I personally discovered that it is quite possible to make steel burn, which is frankly pretty darn awesome.

Photo album on Picasa.

OLCF/NICS Spring Training

Adventure 20110307
One of my buddies from the Knoxville Makers Guild clued me in on an opportunity to attend a week-long training workshop for the world-class Cray XT5 systems, Jaguar and Kraken, hosted by the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computational Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  I've gotten a lot of strange looks for spending some of my vacation time to attend what was basically a "beginning programming for Science Doctorates" workshop, but I had a great geeky time.  Always having been on the commercial software side of the house, getting to visit ORNL was kind of akin to a trip to Hogwart's minus the brooms and owls.  Instead of the normal treatment of being pushed into the background, fighting for the bare minimum hardware and getting squeezed for every last penny it was a great change to get to see a place on the forefront of technology focused on what computing can do to improve the world.  After some quick refresher sessions on UNIX, the vi editor and basic C programming we moved into some fascinating discussions on parallelization, MPI, OpenMP and debugging with DDT.  Great stuff and really gave me a lot of notes for future topics to research.  I have to say that the high-point of the workshop for me was during the tour on the first day when our guide actually was able to let us go in and actually physically lay hands on and get pictures of the Jaguar, Kraken and Gaea super-computers.  Yeah, I'm a geek, but that was frakking awesome!  (Shame I only had my crappy cell-phone camera with me.)

Carrie's Chocolate Hazelnut Birthday Cake

Experiment 20110226

My friend Carrie requested a chocolate hazelnut cake for her birthday this year, so this experiment was all about exactly how much hazelnut I could cram, shoehorn or inject into a single cake.  The cake itself was a basic chocolate Dream Whip recipe that I added four shots of Frangelico Hazelnut Liqueur, then filled with Nutella hazelnut spread, and finally topped with Lindt Hazelnut Chocolate Lindor Truffles.

 

Con Nooga and Biltmore weekend

Adventure 20110219

A hint of Spring is in the East Tennessee air so this weekend I tried to pry myself out of hibernation and engage my sense of adventure.

First up was a Saturday trip down to Chattanooga with my Step-Dad to day-trip Con Nooga.  This was the first time we have had a chance to attend Con Nooga and I was very impressed.  Lots of costumes, a good sized crowd without it being difficult to get around, a wide selection of programming tracks, and a very friendly atmosphere.  I particularly enjoyed the Ms. ConNooga contest, and you could tell the ladies were having a great time and enjoying being silly and putting on a show.  We will definitely be back next year.

Next up, Kathy and I drove over to Asheville on Sunday to visit Biltmore.  I can't say that I was very impressed personally, I kept noticing signs of maintenance issues like cracks in the ceiling and cobwebs in the windows.  Also, the sense of scale was off for me, huge cold and drafty rooms were offset by small cramped corridors.  I felt more like I was visiting an old bank than anything else.  Although impressive architecturally, I certainly wouldn't want to live in it.