Talking about *camps and unconferences on my business blog is starting to have some effect: yesterday, I received the following email thread that had gone between two conference organizers in my industry:

You mentioned a technique for facilitating a discussion and I think you called it CAMP? I did a brief search on the web but didn’t find it. Did I remember the acronym correctly? Would you point me to a website for more information? I want to investigate techniques for getting the audience more engaged.

The recipient had passed it on to me, and I responded with some information on Open Space to get them started.

It may come to nothing (especially when they realize that they can’t charge as much for this sort of format), but any interest in unconference formats by conference organizers has to be a good thing for the participants.

Damir, my other half, is a much more traditional engineer than I: he likes to ponder over new technology for a while, while I’m leaping about in it, shouting “c’mon in, the water’s great!” and trying not to get eaten by the sharks. When he does jump in, however, it’s with both feet.

In the past 3 weeks, he learned WordPress and MediaWiki, and last weekend relaunched his website using WordPress for the site content and MediaWiki for a knowledge base. He’s working on getting 100 articles into his wiki, both for general interest (that is, if you’re interested in getting data out of PLCs and into Excel or SQL Server for data analysis) and as a support reference for his customers. A lot of the material is pretty basic, but consider that his audience is the electrical and mechanical maintenance staff at automotive manufacturing plants.

I’ve been talking about moving my corporate website, small as it is, onto WordPress for about a year now, ever since I converted the site for my wine club, but somehow never seem to find the time. Obviously, the bar for websites in our household has been raised, and I have some catching up to do.

Last night, we had the first Toronto Girl Geek dinner, which drew about 40 people with only one brave male soul amongst us. The rules of attending a Girl Geek dinner are simple: if you are male, you must bring a female with you or be brought by a female. You don’t have to be invited. You don’t have to be a girl. You don’t even have to be a geek.

One of the questions that came up was how to get more women integrated into the Toronto tech community, and I suggested that the *Camp events were a great place to start: they’re more casual, it’s easy to gain some experience and confidence with public speaking by heading up a session, and the male attendees are not the usual chest-beating alpha males that you find at some technology events. How disappointing, as I looked around the room, to realize that not a single TorCamp man was in attendance to show his support for women in the Toronto tech community.

The next dinner is planned for September 19th, hope to see more of you then.

I get a lot of spam, but this one is new to me:

From: Tech Support [mailto:Admin4@mllka.com]
Sent: June 8, 2007 8:34 PM
Subject: Here is the information you were asking for.

Recipe for great BBQ Sauce:

INGREDIENTS
1 quart apple cider vinegar
1 (20 ounce) bottle ketchup
1/4 cup paprika
1 pound dark brown sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup lemon juice

DIRECTIONS
In a large container, mix together the apple cider vinegar, ketchup, paprika, brown sugar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice. Pour into an empty vinegar bottle, ketchup bottle or other container and store in the refrigerator for up to
1 month.

The email was plain text so no virus or tracking payload that I could find. Not sure what possible benefit that sending this spam message could have to anyone, unless this is the BBQ sauce that you’re supposed to serve on your Spam.

Heard yesterday from an employee of my customer, a logistics company:

“Did you know that Wikipedia is editable??!!”

We need to work on that digital divide problem…

This is cool: GeoGratis, geospatial data provided for free online by Natural Resources Canada. My first job after university was writing software to analyze satellite images, and I still have a soft spot for them.

I’m blogging live from Enterprise 2.0 Camp today over on my BPM blog under the Enterprise2.0TTW category.

Why do people think that a loudly-vibrating phone (usually a Blackberry in a hard holster, to get the maximum vibrating resonance) is less annoying than a beep to announce an email? Okay, it’s less annoying than hearing a tinny rendition of Mariachi music, but it’s still annoying. Turn it off, already — just put it on the desk in front of you so you can watch the display if you’re that concerned about missing an email.

Back in the good old days, you couldn’t turn around at a tech conference without being handed a t-shirt with a logo on it. In the past few years, however, t-shirts have gone out of style as conference schwag, to be replaced with USB flash drives, coffee mugs, and this year’s favourite, notebooks of various sizes (I’ve been given at least six different notebooks this year so far). For the occasional times when I use a notebook rather than my laptop, these are great, but it will take me years to work my way through all of them.

The bigger problem, however, is the lack of t-shirts: if I don’t go home from a conference packing a man’s large t-shirt, I hear about it for days. This week will be especially bad, seeing as how I’m missing his birthday to be here.

On May 13th (Mother’s Day), you can call any phone in the world free from your computer using Skype. If you don’t have SkypeOut service now and are eager to try it out, Sunday’s your chance to do it for free.