The Geekess

The video from my talk is up. I'm disappointed that they didn't show my slides in the video, but man did I rock! I think that was the best speech I've given yet. I hope that talking about the Portland State Aerospace Society in front of 750 Portlanders will lure people to a PSAS meeting.

(Yes, 750 people. They hit the fire code limit and had to start turning people away.)

I met some cool people at Ignite Portland. I saw some women I had previously met at a pdx geekchix lunch. One of them told me to check out Code 'n Splode, a group of (mostly women) programmers who get together to talk about whatever they're working on. I met a guy (Justin maybe?) who told me about beer and blog, a newly formed group that meets every Friday at the Lucky Lab to talk about blogging.

I've been thinking that maybe I've outgrown livejournal. I'd just rather have control over my blog style, Ads, and content than let livejournal handle that. I love my LJ friends, but I'm not connecting with the local Portland geek community. Justin argued that it's better to join a social networking site and host your own blog than let the blog site decide your audience. I would probably host my blog on Jamey's domain (http://thesharps.us) and have an RSS feed for it.

Speaking of blogs, PSAS needs one! I had someone say, "Oh, yeah, I'll check out the website, maybe subscribe to the RSS feed if it has one." I think we talked about having a news page with an RSS feed, but it was never implemented. It would be cool to have each team have a blog, and have it feed into the news page. It would be cooler if we could have a git post-hook for automatically sending out an email to the teams list when the blog is updated. I know it would be helpful for me! Half the time I don't know what the airframe team is up to.

Justin also said that he might be able to make the PSAS wiki look prettier. It's just ugly. Plus our front page looks stale. *sigh*

Last week, I heard that my presentation proposal for Ignite Portland 2 was accepted. The idea is that you present your passion in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

I was originally going to do a standard (if very compressed) introduction to the Portland State Aerospace Society. Where we started, what the different teams are, and what does open source, open hardware, and an open community mean. However, I think my proposal was interpreted a little differently. The quote from the Oregonian Living section is "An electronics guru will describe how to build a rocket."

I had originally thought that my audience would be a little less technical, and wouldn't be interested in the details of actually *making* a rocket that would go into space. Of course, I thought the video of the talk at Ignite Seattle on the multi-person pogo stick was pretty awesome.

So, should I go more technical? The audience and the Oregonian seems to expect me to. This is a pretty geeky audience. Blah, I've got to get the slides done before tomorrow, so I'd better make my mind up fast.