BarCampBoston – June 2006

Headed out to Maynard yesterday for BarCampBoston. I had the dubious distinction of being the first person to show up (other than the volunteers putting it together), but fortunately some others were quickly behind me. Hung around for about an hour or so before the first session… At first, it looked like it was going to be slim selection, but the schedule filled up quickly. The first session I went to was on “Neo-Cartography”, but it was pretty lame because the guys running spent about 15 of their 30 minutes on going around the room … I was worried that the “ad-hoc” nature of the event would cause all the sessions to be kinda chaucey, but I think people just needed a bit of time to figure out how short 30 minutes actually is.

Went to several great sessions, and I even took notes for several of the sessions I attended.. I used SubEthaEdit for the first time, and while nobody else contributed to my documents, a few people requested copies of the notes by adding their address to the bottom of the docs.

I didn’t go back for day two of the conference because I woke up early to take to the airport and when I got back I took a nap that ran “a little long”. I was going to do my talk today on “Why working on classified software sucks”, but oh well.. The deal with BarCamp is that every attendee is supposed to give a talk, so I’m a leech, but the whole grid was pretty much full yesterday, so whatever.. I’ll be more prepared next time around…

SubEthaEdit for Free!

Since learning about SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys, I always felt it would have been a great piece of software to have access to while in college. The thought of collaborative notetaking seems very powerful. Anyway, there is some special pricing today on SEE as part of BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com. The software starts out at a discount of $5, and every weblog/journal post about it (like this one) submitted to them will decrease the price by 5 cents, eventually making it free. That would mean that MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software back to the community that made this sale possible. Sounds like some kind of crazy pyramid scheme, but it is sure to generate tons of buzz!