Lazycoder

Weblogger meetups and all the people I have met

Jebus Friest, I had two weblogger meetups in the past two days. One was the big Seattle one, the other was a smaller one that Steve Maine and I set up after Rory’s MSDN event.

The Seattle meetup came on the heels of my “Seattle Survival guide for Dave Winer” post, which gets second place for “most comments on my blog”, the first being the spongmokey post. However the quality of the comments is much better in the survival guide. I spent most of the evening talking with Tom and Andy. It ends up that Tom worked with a guy I worked with while I was in Albuquerque. Andy is was responsible for my favorite FireFox extension. Dave Winer showed up and I thanked him for the two links. There was a reporter from the Seattle Times there as well. It turns out she is starting a blog and wanted to see what the whole scene was like.

Thursday I went to a MSDN event over in Redmond. I hate trying to drive on the eastside. As bad as people think the traffic is in Seattle , it’s far worse on the eastside. Luckily, the event location ended up being about 3 or 4 blocks away from where Brian used to live so I remembered the area and found it with no problem. I posted earlier on my other blog asking if anyone else was attending the event and wanted to get together over there for an impromptu nerd dinner since there was no way I was trying to drive home on Hwy 520 at 5PM. Turns out that Steve Maine had been thinking the same thing. Wesner Moise responded, Steve got in touch with Rory and we were off…errr…on.

Rory did a great job during his presentation, even fending off vicious Mortlocks (nod to Rory for the new term). He appeared calm, cool, and collected but wore black pants just in case. The talk covered Infopath, custom controls in ASP.NET 1.1, and some of the new controls in ASP.NET 2.0. The 2.0 stuff wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before, neither was the Infopath. We invesitgated Infopath as a target application for our data abstracting interfaces for the application I’m working on at the Hutch; But after we estimated the amount of time it would take to create an Infopath based application that would suit our need against the time it would take to create an ASP.NET application, we decided to go with the ASP.NET application. The main reason being the lack of a Macintosh client and the other platform requirements. If Microsoft is targeting large corporations and governments they need to tackle the platform issue first. I made an encouraging comment on Rory’s blog when I found out that he was presenting at the event I was attending, “try not to suck. “. It was supposed to be a friendly jibe. I TOTALLY used a “winkie” at the end, but it still came off as snarky. I’ve been getting a lot of that lately, my winkies aren’t working. I need new winkies. That being said, Rory really seemed to be in his element and enjoying himself and it showed in his presentation and in the way he fielded questions. I gave him higher than sevens on my eval.”

The dinner at Crossroads was fun. Steve, Rory, and Wesner are all really smart guys and the conversation was lively. I do have one thing to say to a certain QTPi that Rory USED to know.

update The Seattle Times article about the downtown blogger meetup is online now.