Jesse says...

Introducing MinneBar…

MinnēBar is based on BarCamp and is an ad-hoc open-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. All attendees must either give a demo, host a discussion, actively participate in a session, or help with one.

We were in dire need of a good, geek-oriented technology conference here — I am all over this. Congrats and good work to Ben Edwards at AltText for getting the ball rolling on this.

I hope to see many of you Saturday, May 6th!

I hung out with Katie last weekend. Katie is Jim’s girlfriend, and, for those who know, Jim was my best friend all through middle school, the one who introduced me to D&D and who I spent my formative years with, listening to Nine Inch Nails and drawing comic books.

Katie is a really cool girl, and I’m in the process of building a site for her business. Well, we were working on her site, and chatting about places in the world we wanted to visit, and got on the topic of China. She apparently lived in Hong Kong for aroun 13 months, and would love to go back. Her biggest qualm with the city though, was that they spoke Cantonese and she was most interested in learning Mandarin. Mandarin! She had followed it through enough that she had even met someone local who was interested in tutoring her in Mandarin. Well, needless to say, I jumped on this opportunity — and now she and are going to be study buddies and learn some Chinese together.

Yay!

So, I chalk this one up to synchronicity and riding those underlying patterns in the world. It’s not plum pudding, but this goes a bit beyond coincidence, I think.

Yes, I’m a fricken geek. We already know this. For fun and pleasure I enjoy talking to computers and trying to convince them to do things. Lately I’ve been looking into Ruby, a very clean programming language that’s getting a lot of hype in the web dev community for it’s “killer app”, Ruby on Rails. Since Tanya has been doing a lot of yelling at me lately, trying to prompt me to get out of the house and interact with people more, I decided to go to the local Ruby Users Group meeting last Tuesday.

I have to say, I was quite surprised at the number of people there. There were probably close to twenty people, but I guess part of that is due to the good PR Ruby has been getting. About half of the people were really new to Ruby, some of them hadn’t even installed it yet. The other half seemed to consist of Java developers, and system and database admins.

There were two lectures/presentations. The first one was on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby in Java (similar to Jython, a project I was following for a while and even did a logo for). The second was about Watir, the Web Application Testing In Ruby framework. Very, very cool, I must say. Unfortunately, since it only currently works with IE on Windows, it doesn’t help me much. But, if you’re a Windows monkey and you work on web sites, this is definitely something to look into.

So, needless to say, I think I’ll try to hit the next one, the last Tuesday of February. They’re going to be building a site for a non-profit in the Twin Cities, which is really awesome… maybe I’ll try to contribute. I’m also thinking about making a presentation of my own about building Jabber bots with Ruby. What better way to learn something than force yourself to give a presentation on it. :)

UPDATE: The new Ruby Users of Minnesota site is at Ruby.MN

Death Cab for Cutie rocks my panties off. Well, not quite, but they definitely know how to rock. I just got home from First Ave. and, man, were they good. Ben is my new personal hero: the man can play fricken every instrument on the stage. They played a nice long set, mixed up the rocking songs and the quiet songs, had me both bobbing my head and in tears, and, all in all, left me feeling good coming out of the show. The crowd was interesting… there was the shy girl who obviously came by herself and is obviously in love with Ben, dressed in all black, with a black backpack and black hoodie and gigantic black boots. She was probably a cutter and used to write bad poetry. Then, there was the overly-confident, baseball hat-wearing, polo shirt a bit too tight (to show off his massive pecs), California transplant wannabe jock with his blonder-than-blonde, booze bottle in one hand, glittery top a bit too tight (to show off her massive boobs), Fox-watching, California transplant wannabe girlfriend (who he’s probably cheated on at least once). Then, there were all those other guys who are probably in their own emo bands, who aren’t quite so pretty, and had their heart broken and stepped on by the one girl they gave their soul too. They all sung along pretending they were up on stage. And then there were all the other girls who wore scarves (even though it was a zillion degrees in there), and long skirts, and strange fuzzy sweaters, and clung to their other girl friends so as to avoid having to talk to the emo-boys. All those girls want to take Ben in and love him and cherish him, but you know that they probably are _exactly the same type of girl_ who broke Ben’s heart in the first place.

Oh, yeah, Ben is the lead singer of DCFC, if you didn’t gather that already. And, obviously, I’m making broad generalizations and buying into unfounded stereotypes. And, just so you know, I was in the emo-boy crowd (except I don’t have a band, which significantly decreases my chances at rockstardom).

Maybe one day I’ll teach myself how to play the guitar or something and then I can write songs and make the kids sing along. God knows I’ve got the material for at least an album’s worth of emo lyrics.