Colorado

We’re just a few days away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 and things are becoming more and more tangible by the minute. Just now I got a package in the mail at the new offices.

The stickers just happen to be 2”x4” which is exactly the right size to emblazon them on the back of your iPhone. Ever since lijit gave it to me my phone has rocked a lijit sticker:

but now…at least for the next week…it’s a DrupalCamp phone:

About quarter of the calls I get are organizing the camp so it seems only fitting.

If you’re not convinced by these stickers that this will be a rocking weekend, here are the sessions.

Also, my best to the sticker’s designer Don Hajicek and to the other logo designer amytremper.

This was the first “New Tech Meetup” that I’ve attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at “The Cup” in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like “The thing about Boulder is that there’s more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here.”

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the “polling” model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I’m not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: “We got $h*t to pop”. Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn’t 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What’s the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I’m not a business guy….Let’s say for now we’re doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn’t get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it’s hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it’s a fitness guide via cell phone that’s for sale now.

Ah, it’s that time again. Time to plan for summer concerts. A quick review of all the craptastic concert calendar sites shows me too many artists coming to town this summer. Who should I see?

• ColoradoInfo.com which is pretty disorganized…but seems decent.
• Westwords Concert Search which is just plain overwhelming
• DenverPost.com Summer Concert Calendar
• Boulder Daily Camera less complete, easier to digest, not Boulder focused (odd, that last bit)
• Denver Botanic Gardens Concerts which are, at least somewhat, already sold out!
• KBCO Concert List which should be awesome but, is kind of hard to navigate. What’s up with the website, guys, 3 clicks to get to the concert list?

Let’s say that you live in Denver and you have an old bike that you’re getting rid of. Or, let’s say that you don’t really like our petroleum-economy. Or, both! The solution is, frankly, quite simple: Derailer Bicycle Collective.

As you can read from their own website, the organization is based on the idea that

because bicycles are the most affordable, sustainable, efficient, healthy, environmentally friendly, FUN, and liberating form of transportation and recreation, the Derailer Bicycle Collective aims to teach and share knowledge about bikes and bike maintenance to anyone and everyone

Good enough for me!

What I couldn’t believe was the feeling at the place. It felt like I was in the middle of the revolution. Working poor who need bikes to live their lives, bicycle aficionados, and a handful of folks in between all getting together to build a better world one spoke at a time. Literally. Before the doors even opened there were at least 30 people chatting about what they were going to do that day to get themselves rolling on a bike or help someone else build a life rolling on a bike.

This is awesome. The Democratic National Convention Committee has announced a credentialing process for bloggers so that bloggers can cover the event with permission and access that will help them get a scoop not unlike the old-school media. That blog post makes it clear that it will be in a separate “pool” which is a slight bummer, but giving bloggers the same access as old-school media is probably just forward leaning enough to make the old-school people pout. This is a great step for citizen media and freedom of speech.

Are You Cool Enough to Blog the Denver Democratic Convention?

The requirements they have for applying seem interesting.

One of the problems I have with a lot of “green” building ideas is that the products are so specialized you have to get them from across the country. At which point it’s not so green anymore…

From elephant magazine I found Sutherlands Lumber which sells all sorts of building products in Boulder and Fort Collins. Not exactly convenient to Denver, but not bad.

They also had some tips for running a “green” business like commercial composting and products made from renewable sources like potatos available from Eco Products.

I’m currently traveling the Spanish speaking world but I’m still working. So…there are lots of things that I read about, or work on, and I wish that I had a place to talk with people about them. Those places exist locally, and I’m taking advantage of them but nothing beats face time with my favorite local user groups in the Denver/Boulder area.

So…I don’t want to forget these things and am therefore creating this list:

• Presentation from the Amazon AWS evangelists and suggest a startup project event (also suggest that Amazon get a real CMS that can do pretty urls)
• CLUE Session on actually using EC2
• Drupal bugday with dbug - aka “how to work the issue queue”
• Create an Open Coffee Denver a la the boulder one which might help benefit or spark a coworking facility
• Drupal working session to create an ec2 management panel inside Drupal (which of course morphs into a “turn on more servers under load” module
• more to come…

On a slightly more personal note:

• Shop at IKEA in California/Utah - consider new bad
• camp in yosemite? zion? joshua tree? grand teton?