Laughing Squid 10th Anniversary

Congratulations to Scott "Laughing Squid" Beale on tonight's 10th Anniversary Party for his off-the-beaten path hosting company. I've run into Scott a few times recently and he really represents the best of what underlies the San Francisco stereotype. Which are, after all, usually based on some distortion of reality and that's what Scott is. He shows up at so many events, happenings and parties I wonder if he bothers to keep an apartment/house or just has a dresser and shower in the office! Always with a camera too. Happy 10 years, pal, and best wishes for many more decades of merging art, commerce and community. [tag: laughingsquid]

SHDH5 was a blast

Had a great time last night at the Prime, stayed until 2:30! Huge crowd turned out and despite the chill we got a bunch of good demos and presentations. Big spread of food, of which I ate too much, and lots of alcohol including currently hot combination of Red Bull and Vodka but, uggh, I didn't try it. David Weekly was a terrific and gracious host, he has a house that even I envy over in Hillsborough, and Scott "the Laughing Squid" Beale was again omnipresent with his digital camera so you can see many pictures of the night on Flickr. Many people spent much of the evening playing with code--it was a dev house, after all--though I barely broke out LittleSteven because for me the opportunity for conversation was much more interesting.



Pitches included:

• Andy Smith did a funny, if questionable, presentation on getting chicks with python
• Keith H showed us the very hot Zimbra mail system which won one of the shiny statues for most likely to earn a huge payday
  
• Drew talked about using RDF to organize and analyze his four-plus years of gas purchase receipts (later on he showed me a very different kind of webserver called, I think, Redfern which is implemented as an RDF store)
• Jesse Andrews (GreaseMonkey, BookBurro) on how to build your own Google Maps in 10 minutes with almost no code using the Dojo Toolkit
  
• The singularly-named Freeman on projects (PostMaNet) he's supporting to bring intermittent connectivity to remote towns in India; we had one of those nearly-midnight nature of existence conversations beforehand
  
• The (recently aqcuired by Yahoo!) upcoming.org trio showed that being inside the Big Y is will unleash their creativity by giving them a wide palette of components to play with
• Chris Messina discussed the CivicForge project which I missed because, well, it was cold and I needed a break, but which did win another of the statues.
  

Can't wait for the next House!