Archive for category Conferences

Brickskellar Night Out At Codeworks DC 2009

We took a break after day one of the Codeworks DC conference and went to the Brickskellar. The Brickskellar is a famous institution of beer in Washington DC, noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as been the place selling the greatest number of different beers of any drinking establishment on the planet earth. We met up with the group going there in the hotel lobby. We had originally scouted out the fine dining in Alexandria, of which there is plenty. We were thinking of Overwood, 219, The Flying Fish, or others, but on a whim we decided rather to join the conference folks down at The Brickskellar. We got the address from the hotel, entered it in the TomTom, and made it there before the main group did.

We had thousands of possible beers to choose from, but we were most attracted to the pumpkin beers from local microbreweries from the taps. We enjoyed a down home meal of mussels, beef, and a crab cake sandwich and fries. A few things to point out in the pics above: Not the skull foam in the beer glass, the chocolate cake, the double chocolate stout, the elephant tap, the cans in the wall, some familiar faces from the php community, and the trappist ale. So never mind the fine dining in DC, go for the soul food and beer.

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CodeWorks in DC October 2009

I am back recently from Codeworks 2009 in Washington, DC. It was in Alexandria, Virginia actually, but close enough, its a big place and its the same thing. This is the first time I have been able to go to a conference  without being involved at all in its planning and organization. I know from experience that a lot of work is put into organizing and hosting a two day event with top-level speakers from all over. The DC Codeworks event was just one event in a series of dates in major cities across the us. Yep, php has gone rockstar. I am proud of the work I have done in the past but I found that by the time the conference came around I was too tired to absorb the lessons as I would like to. So while I am busy recompiling notes from the talks I attended, here are some photos from the conference I would like to share.

The conference was great, I learned stuff, I learned what I know, what I dont know, what I need to know, and more. I met a great group of people and traded lots of business cards.

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BCCLA hosts Dr. Michael Geist for evening lecture

The BCCLA, in partnership with the UBC School of Journalism and the Tyee, will be hosting renowned copyright and internet law expert Dr. Michael Geist at the Wise Hall in Vancouver on October 1, 2009 for a unique evening lecture.

Dr. Geist is Canada’s leading technology law expert and the guru of the Canadian movement to prevent copyright restrictions from infringing on key free speech principles including parody, artistic use, fair use, and device transferability.

A national innovator in using Web 2.0 tools like blogs and Facebook for campaigns for law reform and policy change, Dr. Geist’s advocacy, in partnership with Cory Doctorow, resulted in more than 30,000 people joining a Facebook group opposing proposed Canadian copyright law changes and ended in the tabling of the proposed changes by then Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

To learn more about Dr. Geist’s work, visit his website at www.michaelgeist.ca.

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=147315202089

Host:
Type:
Network:
Global
Price:
free
Date:
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Time:
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location:
WISE Hall
Street:
1882 Adanac Street
City/Town:
Vancouver, BC

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A Tale Of Two Logos

It seems that some spineless technical provider which ordinarily would have used our beautiful conference logo was somehow terrified by Open Web Logo and said they weren’t willing to use it, because it had a skull & cross bones in it. Of all the spineless nonsense I have ever heard, somebody pencil pushing nit wit who rotates on a stool somewhere, probably using hand sanitiser after everything they touch was too afraid of the logo, so they had to shit on somebody else’s freedom of expression. Ooh! Skull and crossbones! Its so scary! We don’t understand it! We have to censor your identity!

So this beautiful logo:

vector_open_web_logo

Got turned into this:

open_web_logo_telus

I think this is what Viktor Frankl meant when he said Logos is deeper than logic.

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RMS Explains the Four Freedoms of Free Software

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Short excerpt from Richard Stallman’s lecture at UBC on 7 February 2009,
Sponsored by the Vancouver Institute and the UBC Faculty of Law

Dr Stallman is founder of the Free Software Foundation and progenitor of much of he Gnu/Linux operating system: http://www.gnu.org/

UPDATE: FULL audio lecture from the UBC talk in OGG vorbis format link

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