geeknight

In two weeks' time it's Oxford Geek Night #21. Twenty-one, eh? Sooner or later we'll have to stop numbering them. We'll just have to refer in retrospect to "OGN: the classics collection", or "OGN: the difficult progressive-tech years".

You should be at OGN21. You should be at every OGN, but you should definitely be at OGN21. We've got two design-themed keynotes: Clearleft's Paul Lloyd talking about "styleguides for the web"; and Thoughtworks' Eewei Chen and Nicholas Bailey trying their hand at live rapid prototyping. There's also four volunteer "microslots", covering a typically usual broad selection of topics and technologies. 

Not only that, though, but OGN21, like every other, is presented by Torchbox: so entry is free! And not only that, but Historic Futures have sponsored a free drink for every geek, while stocks last. So free entry, and a free drink. How can you not be at the Jericho Tavern on April 13? You won't get a better offer than that anywhere else on a Wednesday evening in Oxfordshire!

(Disclaimer: better offers in Oxfordshire might well be available on the night, but geekier? I doubt it.)

As I gradually emerge from my long, occasionally messy (but mostly fruitful) encounter with Drupal, I hope to neglect this blog less and less. As a couple of well-meaning friends have put Graceful Exits on their aggregator site, Oxford Geeks Planet, then I ought to acknowledge the faith they have in my ability to churn out high-quality content more than once a month. Acknowledging it is easier than living up to it, anyway.

In other news, Oxford Geeknights #3 has been announced: it’s in the same venue as before, on 25 July. Hopefully I’ll be able to give organiser Natalie more of a helping hand than at the last one, where I essentially helped out by not turning up and thus reduced the alarmingly high headcount by precisely one.

Further to my earlier post, the first Oxford Geeknight was splendid. It all ran very smoothly, and though Simon Willison, Tom Dyson and I each had a small hand in setting up the tech, really all the praise has to rain down on the head of Natbat, who organised everything down to the minutest detail, but left us all with plenty of time to natter and mingle.

I’ve never known the first in (hopefully) a series of events go so well. Clearly from the reaction of the crowd this night fills a hole in the Oxford geek community’s calendar. I can’t comment on my own talk, of course, but there was some interesting stuff there: without doubt the two keynotes from Simon W (OpenID) and Olly Willans (Photoshop CS3), but also Tom’s peastat, James Wheare’s scraping of bus timetables LiveBus.org, and the Drupal and Mapnik introductions.

My talk went as well I could expect: I hope to put some slides and screenshots up here shortly. Unfortunately it touches on work that I’m trying to make live by the end of this week—the new version of my short story site—so I’m snowed under with that right now. Gosh, it’s all go, isn’t it?

(Note: I work with, for, by or under several people mentioned in this post. Take it as fawning sycophancy if you like.)