RasterWeb!I came up with a few logo ideas for BarCampMilwaukee2.
None of these should be considered final in any way, I just wanted to get the ball rolling. I expect others to pitch some ideas out there so we can do this in a collaborative way. With that said, if you have ideas, comments or suggestions, feel free to leave them here, on the Flickr page, or join the BarCampMilwaukee mailing list.
It happened innocently enough. I had some index cards, and I started writing things on them. They were better than scraps of paper because they were more sturdy, and when I tossed them in my backpack, they didn’t get all crumpled up.
I kept putting these loose index cards into the front pocket of my backpack, and every now and then I’d take them out, look through them, rearrange them, and put them back. No problem.
Then I thought, maybe if I put a binder clip on them, they’d all stay together, and I could even put them in order. Wham! That was it. Before I even knew it, I was a Hipster Doofus with an index card/binder clip PDA…
Of course mine does have 1GB of flash memory, which I find quite handy…
We’re in the planning stages of BarCampMilwaukee2 and I’m trying to come up with a few session ideas. We don’t want to do all the same things we did last year in Milwaukee, or earlier this year in Madison. I like fresh ideas.
So what should we do? What should we talk about, present about, have a workshop on? OpenID? I’d like to give an overview and maybe have people set up OpenID on their own sites, or at least sign up with an OpenID provider. I’m still really interested in Drupal, but I’d like to go deeper into it, and maybe look at how to improve your existing Drupal site. I see some weaknesses in Drupal which might be easily remedied if I just knew what to do. LED throwies? I’m hoping I can convince someone I know in Milwaukee to come show us how to make them.
I’m also really interested in doing something like a mini-One Minute Film & Video Festival, where we’d either determine a theme at the beginning of the event (and do a workshop during the day to help aspiring makers) and then do a showing at 10PM Saturday night, or maybe we’d just ask people to put together short videos we could show at night. I think it could be similar to the Wii Fight Midwest at BarCampMadison, in that it was something happening on the big screen, and gave everyone a break from talking and thinking. Some people participated by just being the audience, and that’s actually fine once in a while…
So what ideas do you have?
Starting in March of 2008, Indoor Football will be back in Milwaukee… The new team is the Milwaukee Bonecrushers.
I worked on the build of their web site mkebonecrushers.com, which had to be completed in just a few days to be ready for their first press conference. I think I prefer sites that have to be built quickly with short deadlines as opposed to projects that go on and on and on. (There’s a site I’m working on now that has been in progress for 11 months. We’re hoping it launches before a full year is up.)
Oh yeah, back to the football. Honestly, I am not much of a football fan (saying this in Wisconsin could get me strung up, but it’s true) but I’ve got to know some of the Bonecrushers, and these guys are passionate about what they are doing: having their own team, and having it in Milwaukee, has been a dream of theirs, and it’s exciting to see it come true.
If you want to see this crazy brand of indoor football, where it’s up close, on a small field, with 7-on-7, and narrow goal posts, they’ll be playing at the U.S. Cellular Arena in 2008. (But keep an eye out for exhibition games in 2007.)
I’m now running Windows XP on my new Intel-based iMac thanks to Parallels.
Previous to this I was using Virtual PC on my pre-Intel Mac, and it worked… slowly… but it worked. I was able to test web sites in IE5, IE6, and IE7 in Windows. It wasn’t fun, but it was pretty much required. Virtual PC for Mac was killed off by Microsoft, which meant I had these virtual machines laying around which were useless, until now.
I wasn’t paying attention to virtualization on the Mac until I got the new iMac and my days of using Virtual PC were over. I ended up taking a quick look at VMWare’s Fusion, which is in beta now and available for pre-ordering at a reduced price. It looked interesting, but as I did more research, it became clear that Parallels was exactly what I wanted. Why? Because of Transporter.
Transporter allows you to put to use those old Virtual PC machines you created. It migrates them over to the format required by Parallels. It’s not a quick process, but it works. I did hit a few issues along the way, the first being that I had no networking, which means the first virtual machine I had was completely useless. I searched through forums, tried a few things, and rebooted the virtual Windows machine, only to be told I had to activate Windows before I could log in. Since there was no network, I had to activate via phone. This is the nightmare that is Windows. After talking to a robot, where I read the robot a string of 50+ characters and then the robot read me a string of 50+ characters, Windows was activated, and I could log in. (Is Microsoft serious? This is how they do things? In all my years of using the Mac, I can’t remember anything as frustrating as this process to just use the system. Anyway…)
Ok, so I finally figured out that in Parallels I had to go under Edit to Virtual Machine… and add a Network Adapter. I guess the original Virtual PC machine did not have a network adapter or something? I don’t know, but I did this to all the machines I migrated and they were all good after that.
So now I am running Windows. On my Mac. Again. Let the IE testing and swearing begin!