Beer and Blog Eugene

For any of you diehard followers (not sure if we have any) in 2009 we started with good intentions, and ended with, well a lot of unanswered questions. So in 2010 we have scaled back to once a month in an effort to be stable (not that any of us are). We found that with a one a week meeting the same three dudes showed up on most weeks, with the occasional few extras here and there. So we are hoping that with a once a month gathering we can heard in the crowds.

We met in January at Cornucopia and had a great turn out. Lots of new face and excitement. So we are really pumped to keep the momentum flowing into February. So this month we are going meet on Friday the 26th at the Wetlands Brew Pub, 922 Garfield St, from 4-6.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

BBEugene

During the Willamette Innovators Night (WIN) we are hoping to bring together the Beer and Blog participants from three cities — Corvallis, Eugene, and Portland. See the Three City Beer and Blog page for more details. Please RSVP if you’d like to attend. If there is enough interest, we may be able to secure a bus to shuttle us up there.

There are more events lined up for WIN 09. Take a look at the Event Program.

WIN 09 Event Essentials

What: Bringing together the Willamette Valley’s most innovative companies and organizations to share, learn, and connect.
When: November 5, 2009
Where: Corvallis, Oregon, Oregon State University, CH2MHill Alumni Center and LaSells Stewart Center
How: This event is free to attend.
Who: Innovators, influencers, leaders, entrepreneurs, and inventors.

It’s May and this month Eugene Beer and Blog will be held at Sam Bond’s Garage at 407 Blair Blvd in Eugene. Please come down and enjoy the company and great selection of brews that are on tap! We hope to see you Friday’s at 4.

To help cross promote other activities in the area, I’d like to do a monthly post on upcoming meetings. Here are a few that I know of. If you happen to know of others, reply in the comments and I’ll try to include them on next month’s update…

In Eugene:

• IT Pro Forum is a monthly meeting in Eugene, the next meeting is April 21st with the title, “Colleen Dick on Building Your Rep (aka The “M” Word for IT Professionals)”.
• The Eugene Unix and Gnu/Linux User Group has weekly meetings.

In Corvallis:

• Beaver BarCamp is April 4th in Corvallis.

Last Friday we had a great discussion about the new Mino HD Camera from Flip. Luke Mazziotti showed off the camera and some of what is possible. With the addition of HD, it looks like it will be a really cool device for capturing video. The only thing I can think of to improve the camera would be to add wireless so you can click an upload to YouTube. Kind of like the Panasonic G1. Imagine that API request on Flickr… “This is Panasonic. We’d like to access the API so our camera can directly load to Flickr…”

We briefly discussed the Zed’s blog post extolling Django. An entertaining read.

We also got to discuss MyEugene.org. Looks like a promising project. Best of luck.

What does everyone think of the new venue? Villard Street Pub seems to be working out nice. And pretty soon, it will be warm enough to hang outside on the front patio.

Let us know your comments and feedback.
Dave

For the month of March (and beyond possibly) the Eugene Beer & Blog will be moving to the Villard Street Pub.  There are a few benefits that we saw in this venue change…

1. First and foremost, Beer!  Villard St. Pub has a nice, rotating tap line-up with good variety.
2. Happy our is from 3-6pm, encompassing our meeting time in full.  There is a also a Friday special according to their website.
3. This venue is a little more centrally located.
4. Parking should be more accommodating, hopefully.

Had a great time meeting folks and talking tech.

It is amazing to me that when you get a bunch of like minded individuals together, something cool happens. There seems to be a spontaneous “Have you seen this?” that takes over and the next thing you know, your discussing new search engines, interface options and proxies. Add into the mix discussing art shows that are coming to town next month and what is NOT good design and you have a pretty good evening.

Personally, I’m excited to look at the search engines that Lee and Rob discussed. Rob mentioned Django-Solr and Lee mentioned djapian. Both are search engines with some amazing features that can connect to Django. What is cool to me… being able to add a search engine, on it’s own server instance (thank you Webfaction!) to get nice performance.

Started this today.

This way we can do email announcements etc.

* Group name: Eugene Beer and Blog
* Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/eugene-beer-and-blog
* Group email address eugene-beer-and-blog@googlegroups.com

Sign up!