zerosum dirt(nap)

I’ve got my itinerary planned out for Railsconf. I’ll also be hitting up a couple other west coast cities before landing in Portland. First stop is SF to visit my friend Ankit on Friday. Then trekking up to Eugene on the Amtrak Coast Starlite (I love me my trains) late night Sunday to hang and brainstorm with our designer/big-thinker Ty for a few days. Then it’s off to Portland on Thursday.

If you’re in any one of those cities and want to grab a beer (or a smoothie), hit me up on Twitter. Hopefully I’ll see some of you at Railsconf.

Also, I’ll be giving a talk at NHRuby tonight (5/20) on Rack. If you’re in the area, stop by.

Yep, that's right. Hackfest tomorrow night in Portsmouth. Bring any code you're having issues with. Failing that, I've got a couple project tickets (DataMapper, Radiant) that we can dig into. We'll spend 30 minutes or so on a quickie mod_rails demo while we're there too.

In other local news, John Herman has been swell enough to put together an NH Media Makers group. The first get-together is May 11th at Crackskulls in Newmarket. Rock out.

If you're in the ME/NH/MA area on Tuesday, make sure to stop by the NH Ruby SIG; Brian Turnbull will be presenting an in-depth talk comparing the philosophies of Rails and Django. I've never done any Python work at all myself, so I'm really looking forward to this dissection.

If you're not in the area, you're still in luck. We're trying something new this month, and will be broadcasting the event live via WebEx. Big thanks to Tim Golden and our sponsor RMC Research for hooking this up!

(NOTE: we usually meet on the third Tuesday of the month, but our host had some scheduling problems this time around; we'll be returning to the normal schedule in April)

The Seacoast NH Ruby SIG (NHRuby) will hold it’s first meeting of 2008 tomorrow, Tuesday January 15th in Portsmouth. I’ll be talking about OpenID and Scott Garman will be doing an overview of some funky stuff he’s doing with ActionMailer. Check out the Wiki for directions and other goodies, as usual. Hope to see you there!

I also want to send a quick congratulatory note to Scott, who launched his Rails-based startup CampaignLever a few weeks ago. CampaignLever is a tool to help grassroots organizations build effective letter writing campaigns. Nice work man!

As Scott notes over on his blog, this month’s NH Ruby meeting will be off by a week and a day this time around, due to holiday stuff. Instead of the third Tuesday of the month, it’ll be the second Monday. Yessir, that’s this coming Monday.

My good friend Dave Berube will be the main speaker, and he’ll be discussing reporting techniques with Ruby and Rails. Dave is putting the finishing touches on a new book on the subject, so he knows of that which he speaks. It’s sure to be a good conversation and if you’re in the area, you should definitely check us out.

If you're in the greater NH/Maine/Mass seacoast area, don't forget to check out tomorrow's NHRuby group. Sir Brian DeLacey will be visiting us from Boston and talking about Shoes, the Ruby desktop UI toolkit from the ever-enigmatic _why.

If there's time left to spare, I'll probably spend some time blathering on about how you should participate in the upcoming Rails Rumble. Believe me, after seeing some of the prizes, you're going to want to get in on the action. I was dead f**king serious about that championship belt. You'll see.

Usually the NHRuby meets are scheduled for the third Tuesday of the month, but we had to change it up this time due to some schedule conflicts.

I'll be speaking about integrating a Flash widget with Rails-based RESTful web services and also giving a brief overview of how to contribute to Rails and other open source projects (I guess you could say Josh Susser's talk at Railsconf inspired me). Scott will be doing an overview of the tabnav plugin and... something else, too.

More information and directions can be found at the NHRuby Wiki. Also, many thanks to our new host/sponsor for the meetings, RMC Research.

Join us tonight at the Portsmouth Public Library for a bunch of lightening talks on Ruby-related subjects. I'll be speaking on REST, Rake, and RMagick (if I can manage to put together a preso and demo app in time). Scott will be presenting a demo of his Rails-based ProgressPuppy task manager. And there will be other stuff, too.

Note that we're still doing the meeting, despite aftereffects of the nasty coastal flooding. Hardcore, eh? As always, more information (including directions) can be found at the NHRuby Wiki.

If you're in the seacoast New Hampshire area, don't forget to attend tonight's NH Ruby User Group meeting. Click on the link for directions.

Brian DeLacey will be speaking on Security and Cryptography in Ruby on Rails, and there will be some free book giveaways from O Reilly.

If you're a Ruby developer (or just an interested outsider) living in southern Maine/NH or the northern Mass area, don't forget to attend the next meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails User Group. Discussion topic this week is RJS and Ajax. Come hang out with us in Portsmouth tomorrow and make sure to stick around afterwards for drinks, discussion, and merriment.

Oh yeah, and Scott has some free stuff to give away at the gathering too. You like free stuff, don't you?

If you're in the seacoast NH area (north of Boston), don't forget to attend the first meeting of the Seacoast Ruby/Rails User Group tonight from 7-9 at the UNH campus. Apparently there was such an overwhelming response that Scott had to move the location to Morse Hall in order to accommodate the additional heads. Wow, cool. More information and directions are on Scott's blog. See you there!

I just got word that there's a Ruby on Rails user group starting up in my area. It's being organized by Scott Garman and the first meeting will be January 16th at the UNH Library in Durham, NH. More details at Scott's Blog. It'll be great to meet some other local Ruby dorks -- most of my contract work is non-local and the other devs I know in the Portsmouth area have sadly yet to be bitten by the bug. I'm psyched that someone has taken the initiative to set this up. Thanks Scott!

On completely unrelated news, I'll be afk for a few days. Heading northbound to visit relatives and then some college friends for a New Years' extravaganza of sorts. Hopefully I can remember how to play beer die -- it's been awhile. See y'all in 2007!