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Bob said something like this in an email:

At or after BarCampMilwaukee, we should plot the number of Campers registered vs time to see what the signup curve looks like.

As soon as I read this I thought – we got people coming from various parts of Wisconsin, probably some folks from Illinois, and even a bunch of hardcore geeks from Iowa – we should map this stuff out using the Yahoo! or Google maps API, and see what it looks like. But wait, we also have Scott from Iowa proposing a session called “Online Maps, Mapping Tools & Geohacking” and a Mini-Mash Pit planned. Maybe we can even combine what we learn in the Microformats and Online Photo Sharing sessions…

Revolutionary idea? Not really, just a neat idea, but it’s one of those things where you take the bits and pieces and see what a group of creative people can come up with. Bob’s comment helps illustrate what we hope to have happen at BarCampMilwaukee, smart people thrown together, and neat things happening as a result.

And then there were 50… We are up to 50 campers signed-up on the wiki page, and we’ve got 4 sponsors so far: C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions, MailLaunderer, Digital Bootcamp, and CA.

Activity has really picked up since the newspaper article hit, and we’ve got just three weeks left to finalize all plans and make BarCampMilwaukee a reality.

The Yahoo! Group has been key in planning all of this, and I’m sure many of the members look forward to finally meeting face to face at BarCamp. One of the more interesting things to come out of it, is that Saturday’s lunch will be a potluck meal, with people supplying the food. We felt this would help enhance the community aspect of the whole thing, and allow for socializing early on. It should also help keep costs down, so sponsorship isn’t as much of a concern.

We’ve come a long way since my original BarCampMilwaukee post which helped get the whole thing started. I thought for sure we’d get some folks from the Ruby and Java communites interested, but so far there has been almost no interest from them. Luckily, the Drupal community will be there, and even Jeremie Miller (of Jabber/XMPP fame) will be coming… all the way from Iowa!

So if you haven’t yet signed-up, go to BarCampMilwaukee.com and do it today. (Or just keep reading this blog, where you’ll see about 100 more posts on the subject…)

I heard about Senuti long ago, and even copied the .dmg to my iPod, but I never used it until recently.

The explanation I heard/read was that it lets you copy files from your iPod to your iTunes library, the reverse of the normal process. (Hence, the name: “senuti” is “itunes” backwards.)

I don’t have much use for moving the songs from iPod to iTunes, but what Senuti actually does, that is very useful to me, is act as a remote control, allowing you to connect an iPod to a Mac, and use Senuti to contol what is played, without having to copy it to the host Mac. This is perfect! I can take my iPod to the office, and plug it into the iMac and listen to my music and podcasts without having to deal with one more iTunes library.

Once I figured this remote control thing out, I emailed the author a big thanks for the work he’s done, and made a small donation. Hooray for Senuti!

About a week ago I spoke with Stanley Miller from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about BarCampMilwaukee. The result is online now: BarCamp stuffs tech ideas into 24 hours, and since BarCampMilwaukee is technology-focused, Stanley even signed-up to attend, and will be a participant like everyone else there.

We’re up to 42 campers on the wiki, as of right now, and as the list grows longer, there are more people I don’t know, than people I do know – which is good. Besides everyone learning something new, I hope that people get to make new friends that have similar interests… Of course I still worry that it’ll be just Mike and I sharing our gadgets and I will be the only on in the Mini-Mash Pit.

I’m hoping Stanley has a great time at BarCampMilwaukee and does a follow-up story about how it all went. Now it’s up to us to make it an unforgettable event.

(Oh, we are still looking for sponsors, so if you want to be associated with Milwaukee’s first BarCamp event, contact me, and we’ll work something out.)

Job interviews are weird. I know this because I did a few of them this summer. Seth Godin thinks most companies should put an end to the job interview process. He’s probably right.

At my last long-term job, my potential manager interviewed me. He came from the tech world and actually got his hands dirty with code, and was also good at management. He knew how to do an interview, and knew what he was looking for, a general purpose web hacker. Not someone who knew how to ace an interview, but someone with a broad range of knowledge who could get the job done. I also interviewed with the HR person, who seemed clueless as to what my job function would be. I think she thought I was going to be doing desktop support. I’m guessing they just ran me past her because that’s what large inefficient companies do.

There was also a department manager with a great track record. While I was there, he did did two interviews with potential hires (by himself) and the company ended up hiring both people. Both turned out to be lunatics and were either fired or quit months later.

Now, I am known to get the job done. I appreciate companies and managers that are interested more in the end results than micro-managing every single detail that leads to the end result. Part of this is trust. Does management trust you to do your job?

In an interview this summer with a huge-beyond-huge corporation, I made the comment that as far as software choices, (they were/are very strict, definitely not an environment for a rouge) as long as I could use bash I’d be ok. In a drop-dead serious tone, they said that they all used korn. That’s when I was sure I didn’t want to work there. The fact that they dictated which shell you could use seemed a little nuts.

Let your people use the tools they want to use, and see how productive they can be. When I worked in the print world, the people paying for a brochure didn’t care if you used QuarkXPress or InDesign, they care that their printed piece was done right and looked good. Maybe this only works in the world where people are self-sufficient enough to do those sorts of things, but if your people are self-supporting, give them the freedom they want and need, and see what happens…