Joseph Scott’s Blog

Quick reminder that we’ll be meeting Thursday (tomorrow) night to start plans for a WordCamp in Utah. If you are interested in helping out and making this happen then now is the time to step up. Details for Thursday night’s meeting are on the Upcoming event page.

Recently I’ve been talking with a few people about the idea of a WordCamp ( WordPress conference ) in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. This isn’t something that one person can do alone though, so I’m putting out the call for help and feed back. If you are interested in helping make this happen we’ll be getting together for a planning meeting:

Applebee's in Draper
105 E 12300 S
Draper, Utah 84020

Thursday 10 April 2008 @ 6:30pm

Upcoming Event Page

One of the reasons we chose that Applebee’s location is because they have free WiFi, so feel free to bring your laptops.

In addition to people helping, I want to hear from Utah WordPress users about what they’d like to see in a WordCamp. Any thoughts on potential locations (in the greater SLC area), sponsors, topics and speakers? If you are interested in presenting let me know. And if you are interested in sponsoring WordCamp Utah, then I really, really want you to contact me :-)

First order of business is to lock in a date and location, so that everyone can make plans.

Also, a big thanks to Thom Allen for being willing to get involved and push me to get moving on this.

There’s a Geek Lunch planned for Friday (14 March 2008) 12:30pm at the Bombay House Brick Oven Pizza in Provo, Utah (near the BYU campus). Come sit around and talk about tech, or anything else. I’ll be making the drive down to Provo for this.

Then on Saturday is PodCampSLC (Pod Camp Salt Lake City) from 10am - 4pm at Neumont University in South Jordan, Utah. A new media (blogging, podcasting, videocasting) BarCamp style event. If you plan on attending you can RSVP at the PodCampSLC Upcoming event page. I’m planning to be there for at least part of the day.

I grew up and spent most of my life in one area of California. As a result it was pretty easy for me to have at least a general idea of how local and state government worked. This was something I hadn’t really thought about until we moved to Utah and I realized that I really didn’t know much about how the city, county and state governments worked and how they might differ from what I was used to in California.

So my first, admittedly small, step in learning about the government in my new home was to add links and names for my representatives at various levels to my about page. Over time I hope to familiarize myself more with how things work here. I wonder if there are any good books on the topic.

Not sure what happened, but the State street address for Taj India might be an old one, the other address I’m seeing is:

4515 South 900 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84117

So if you are coming the WordPress meetup be aware that I may have originally posted the wrong address.

On Saturday February 2nd we are having a Utah WordPress meetup lunch (noon) at Taj India Restaurant with Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress. Please RSVP at the Upcoming event for the meetup, this will help us ensure that we have reserved enough room.

Date: Saturday, February 2, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM (noon)
RSVP: at Upcoming Event Page
Place:
Taj India Restaurant
3540 South State St
Salt Lake City, Utah 84115

Everyone is invited, so come on out and enjoy. I believe they even have free WiFi at the restaurant.

UPDATE 2 Feb 2008 @ 10:10am : Looks like I might have put down the wrong address. Not sure if the State street address is an old one or what, but the new address I’m seeing for Taj India is:

4515 South 900 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84117

It is officially winter here in Utah. It’s about 2pm and it has already dropped about 5 inches of snow today and it is still going. Here’s the view from my front door:

Here’s what the front of my house looks like in the snow:

This being my first winter in Utah (or anywhere else that gets snow) it is something of a learning experience. Earlier this morning I saw some kids out on an ATV dragging a snow saucer with some rope down the street. They came through my court and made a nice arc, looked like fun.

My plan for getting through the winter, leave the house as little as possible :-)

Having the Christmas season start earlier and earlier in the year is one of those things that many people like to gripe about. At least that is how I remember it being in California.

In Utah the Christmas season starts early. I don’t mean a little bit early, I mean EARLY.

The first signs of the Christmas season I saw here was back in September. I was on a routine trip to Home Depot when I came across an entire section of Christmas season products. Artificial trees, lights, decorations, etc. This surprised me, but since it seemed like a relatively isolated incident I didn’t think too much of it.

Then November 1st hit. The day after Halloween we had Christmas music started playing on the radio, with at least one station playing nothing but. People started putting up Christmas lights, wreaths on the door, that sort of thing.

What’s most interesting about this to me is that it doesn’t seem out of place here. Perhaps it is because this is my first winter/Christmas in Utah, maybe it is because it snows here (although the last few days have actually been nice and warm), who knows, but for what ever reason having the Christmas season start on November 1st feels just right.

That isn’t to say that we are forgetting about Thanksgiving. I still plan on putting on a few pounds by the end of this week :-)

Went to the State of FOSS in Utah by Clint Savage at PLUG. Here are some notes:

• Trying to help users groups by providing live streaming of meetings.
• Provide a way for people to meet and network, hear about job openings.
• Did Utah Open Source Conference last summer.
• Planning “education weeks” for training on one specific topic. Low cost, 2 hours a night for a week.
• Promoting open source in education.
• Family track at Open Source Conference in 2008. Digital scrap booking?
• Core Team for coordination, sysadmin, media, sponsors, development and promotion.
• Victor Villa is going to be working on a cross-group newsletter.
• HomeRunsInIt.com - December 6, 2007, semi job fair event.
• Cross group calendar, so people can subscribe to one calendar and stay up to date with all of the groups.
• Perhaps sharing speakers across groups? UTOSF is like a meta group, not something you would attend, but would each group be better.
• Focus of next years conference is “How To”. Probably going to be late August 2008.

This PLUG meeting was held at Omniture.

• State of Utah Elections Office - The number of registered voters in the State of Utah, by county. Just under 1.5 million total.
  Tags: utah vote stats

• The BabelFish Blog, Limitations of MetaWeblog API - Couple of years old, but a good list of complaints.
  Tags: xmlrpc metaweblog

• PHP mail() and The Path of No Return ? All in the head - If you are using PHP’s mail() function then make sure that Sendmail is happy with the From address on the envelope.
  Tags: php mail sendmail

• WLW+AtomPub, Part 4: Categories | whateverblog. - Sounds like categories in AtomPub will still need some work.
  Tags: windowslivewriter atompub

I went to see Guy Kawasaki give his Art of Innovation talk this afternoon. Phil Windley does a good job of covering the core details of Guy’s talk.

What Phil didn’t mention was that Guy didn’t turn off the Twitter app he was using on his Mac, so throughout his presentation in the upper right hand portion of the screen a tweet from the people he follows would show up and fade out. The font was rather small so it was difficult to read, even on the massive projection screen. That was rather fun to watch.

During the Q & A at the end Guy mentioned that he didn’t need to make $2 billion off of Truemors.com, after all he’d only put in about $25,000 so far. At that rate selling it for $50,000 would be doubling his money in 6 months. This led to the very last question asked by a woman in the back (Allan’s wife, who’s name I don’t recall) saying if Guy wanted to sell she’d write him a $50,000 check. Turns out she works for a investment fund or something, so in some respect she very well could have made good on the deal. That helped end the event on a nice light hearted note.

That’s it, I’ve been burned by Google Maps for directions in Utah one too many times. I’m not sure what the deal is but Google will often be no where near the correct spot when looking up locations around here. And I don’t mean by a few blocks here or there, I mean several miles. Oddly enough though Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest were able to get it right, at least in the few test addresses that I tried.

So if you happen to be in or traveling through Utah and are tempted to look up an address or directions using Google Maps, remember that it might be plus or minus seven miles :-)

A few weeks ago I took some pictures of the mountains in the evening looking to the east from the playground at Alice’s school:

Of course that was before it started snowing.

Next Tuesday the 30th has two events, the CTO Breakfast at Novell in Provo that morning and that evening is the second Facebook Developers Garage at Noah’s in Lindon.

I’m planning on attending both events, if you’ll be at one or the other be sure to say hi.

UPDATE: The location for the Facebook Developers Garage meeting has changed.

This Friday there is a Geek Lunch at Buca Di Beppo. Here are the details:

Geek Lunch:
October 12 @ 12p
935 East Fort Union Boulevard
Midvale, UT 84047
Phone: 801.561.9463

http://www.bucadibeppo.com/locations/location.aspx?location=4501

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