I survived. I am mostly caught up on sleep. I have a whole Sunday left to lounge around playing Mario Kart and eating pancakes!

So here’s some of the fun from the week.

Schwern’s People for Geeks tutorial had everything from introductory etiquette to manager-speak to running a user group. I think I’ll be using the concept of tact filters frequently, to explain where geek / everyone else communications go wrong.

One of the presenters, Kirrily Roberts of the Geek Etiquette blog, has also just started a Geek Feminism wiki to track information related to women in technology/gaming/sf. This, combined with Geek Speakr make great starting points for anyone wondering how to get more women involved with their conference or tech events.

Ben Bleything’s Ruby and electronics projects always make me wonder why I still don’t have an Arduino. There’s links to most of what he talked about on his blog.

Selena and Gabrielle gave an intro to running a user group, complete with a short illustrated handbook for attendees (you can download it at the link above). I liked that they had us model some of the techniques discussed as we went.

I really enjoyed leading the panel on Tools for Local Communities. Thanks to Selena Deckelmann, Sulamita Garcia, and Michael Dexter for participating. If you missed it, you can download an audio recording.

This year’s FOSCON, Cooking with Ruby, was entertaining as always. Reid, Igal, and I gave a lightning talk on the Calagator development process. Notes here. The Rails team won the coding competition, with PHP/Symphony coming in second.

I gave a lightning talk on anarchy during the Art of Community session on Thursday.

Emma Jane Hogbin’s “Form an orderly queue, ladies” blew me away. There were so many things in there that I’ve been trying to formulate into coherent thoughts—now I can just tell you to check out her talk and join in the quest for open source world domination. Slides here and video from the version she did at LUGRadio Live.

Finally, on Friday morning I spoke on OPB Radio’s Think Out Loud, as part of an entire hour on open source. You can download the podcast if you’d like to listen. I’m on about 40 minutes in, but Raven Zachary and Rick Turoczy participated throughout the hour. Reading the comments on Twitter afterward was pretty entertaining.

Get your nerd on!

FOSCON III is upon us — tonight at 7:30 at Holocene.  Prepare yourself for free pizza, lighting talks, and hob-knobbing with Ruby geeks from around the world.

Check out the Upcoming page for more information, including a map and how to hitch a ride from OSCON.

It’s that time of year again!

O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) is coming to Portland, and the Portland Ruby Group is putting on FOSCON, a free event where geeks of all stripes can meet, greet, and get their nerd on. The last two years were standing room only (don’t tell the fire marshal), so we’re movin’ on up to a larger venue!

If you’re coming to OSCON, register today for FOSCON III — it’s free!

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/216872

PS: If your business is interested in a little attention from an international crowd of alpha-geeks and decision makers, we’d love to talk with you about sponsorship for food, drinks, and other goodies.

Our Ruby Rodeo (aka FOSCON 2) last night was a blast. See pictures here. Sean Mountcastle has a good summary of the talks on his blog (link seems to be broken now, but try later), and Chris Dawson captured audio, which you can download as a set of podcasts. We had more people than the space could hold, which I think is fabulous, but next year we may need to hold it at the convention center with the rest of the OSCon events instead of at Free Geek. It’s great to have that much interest.

I’ve been wandering over to the convention center to catch bits of OSCon when I can, including lunch today and yesterday. I’m eager to get back to working on programming projects (with the hot weather we’ve had, it’s a little hard to concentrate… if only I had a laptop and could escape to an air conditioned place). Seeing what other people are working on makes me want to write more code, and especially to get more comfortable with Ruby, so I can do some of these neat things too.

Tags: oscon, oscon06, foscon, foscon06, ruby rodeo, code, programming