raffle

Following last week's great news from the Guardian Open Platform about sponsoring the two remaining Oxford Geek Nights, there's more great news for the Oxford Geek community, as Apress and Friends of ED have also agreed to sponsor OGN14 and OGN15 with books a-plenty.

We try to always have a book raffle at the end of each Oxford Geek Night, where anyone who's stuck a business card in our magic business-card box gets a chance to win one of several books donated by a generous sponsor. So thanks for Apress for stepping up to the crease and fielding a whole over of books in our direction for OGN14: we're guaranteed a great selection of books for local geeks, and another great reason for coming along to OGN14. How can you not?

Two or three days ago whenever anyone mentioned the 7th Oxford Geeks Night to me, I winced. By then it was less than two weeks from Wednesday June 25; we only had four microslots out of six; I’d just started filling in existing speakers on the drill; and I was looking at spending a weekend writing a talk on server-side on-the-fly web-to-document creation with OpenOffice.

Now, suddenly, it looks like being the best night so far in 2008. We’re starting with two great keynote speakers: Charlton Barreto of OASIS, W3C and Adobe, talking about the takehomes from Web 2.0; Tom Taylor of Headshift talking about the beauty of pointless mashups (such as his Twitter feeds @lowflyingrocks and @towerbridge).

There’s then a full roster of microslot talks covering a crazy range of technologies. My colleagues Matthew and Tom have answered two of the requests that the Oxford geek community themselves put out, and are doing talks on the new technologies of Comet and Google App Engine respectively; Andrew Godwin will be showing off his beautiful if computationally… trying… graphing code for Last.fm; Drew McLellan continues his simultaneous journeys through good web practice and late-70s/early-80s children’s TV shows; Simon Whitaker does some anyone-can-try-it hacking of the OSX address book; and Duncan Parkes discusses the mySociety application PlanningAlerts.

The evening will finish with a book raffle, courtesy of Friends of Ed. So if you stay for the full three hours then you’re in with a good chance of going home one book richer. Disclaimer: the venue seats 140 people and we won’t have a book for everyone.

If you’ve not stuck it in your diary yet then do so: Wednesday June 25; doors open 7.30, entrance free thanks to Torchbox and Google. I’ll be the one panicking, and hotswapping laptop monitor cables.

I don’t know how well this reflects on me.

As I was wondering idly when the delivery would arrive containing OGN5’s book lottery giveaways (thanks again, Friends of ED!) I started making a note of calendar dates for different bits of OGN organisation. I was working with Trac milestones at the time, so they were all in the format MM/DD/YY.

“Let’s see,” I thought, “today is 01/30/08; so the books should arrive hopefully on—let’s say—02/02/08. That means I’ve got the weekend plus a couple of days before OGN5, which is on….”

02/06/08. I stared at this date longer than I probably ought to, and noticed something about it. Can you spot what it might have been?

If so; if you’re like me and you read a date like “02/06/08″ and shortly afterwards think “2 plus 6 is 8″—just as an aid to memory, you understand; then you probably ought to join us at OGN5. We will understand.

The fifth Oxford Geek Night is shaping up to be a really great night. Following on from our keynote confirmations, we’ve now got a full house of microslotters.

Not only that, but we’ve also sorted our extra sponsorship. Joining the ever-indulgent, ever-understanding Torchbox are Google and Friends of ED. In return for sponsoring us, Google have asked us to contribute a post-OGN article for the Google Code Blog, a request which would have been churlish to refuse. Friends of ED will be providing us with another book raffle, which is basically meant to keep people hanging around till the bitter end in the hope of free stuff. We’re of course always open to new sponsorship opportunities, so feel free to get in touch (me, of all things, at jpstacey.info) if you’ve got any ideas.

If you’re interested in coming along, you can let us know on our Upcoming listing, as that lets us keep track of interest. Either way, tell your friends; blog about the geek nights; most importantly, come along!