Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Intros from Nick Simmons and Brent Bradbury. A couple of programmers for Newsgator.

-- posted 1:43 pm

So here's a longer post on DrunkCamp, in the same style as Wolf's, and my impressions on people and things that happened.

First, the panel.

Rosyna: An interesting guy from Unsanity who let it be known that he owns 900 anime dvds. Yikes.

Jason Harris: Another Unsanity programmer, and an all around great guy. He wrote ShapeShifter and Mighty Mouse, as well as "Chicken of the VNC" which was popular with the crowd. He also plays the drums, so I know who to call up when I decide to start my mac-indie blues band.

Paul Kafasis from Rogue Amoeba: I've known Paul for a couple of years now, but I haven't seen him since OSX Con about 2 years ago. It was funny- he walked in and I said hey, how's it going? But I already knew how it was going because I talk to him every other day online. We caught a cab together with Jason and Brent to Jack's Tap for the after party, and talked about a tons of random things through the night.

Wil Shipley: talked to him once during half time, introduced myself and said I lived about 15 miles north of him in Everett. Wil is Wil, and seems to do things in the extreme.

Brent Simmons: Brent is Brent. You know, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, etc.. Speaking of MarsEdit, Brent announced that NewsGator is holding on to MarsEdit, and they are going to have someone else finish up the 1.1 release which Brent has been working on this past summer. That's good news to me, because I use MarsEdit to publish to my site.

Jonathan Rentzsch, aka "Wolf". It was great to see Jon again, he's full of so much technical know-how and humor that he should have exploded from it years ago. I don't know how he does that. I was also hoping that we'd get him liquored up enough that we would at least find out what one of his secret projects was. But alas, that was not to happen.

Nicholas Jitkoff, the Quicksilver guy. I talked with him on the walk over to the Adler, and it turns out he uses VoodooPad a bit which is cool because I use his app Quicksilver quite a bit. He's a quiet guy, and extremely likeable. He also got the most applause from the audience when he said what he did at the introductions- even more than Brent did for NetNewsWire. He's got some real talent... maybe in a year or so once he is out of school he'll take it full time.

Bob Frank- I didn't get to talk to Bob very much except at the very beginning. But from what I could tell about him he was a good guy.

Eric Peyton- Super cool guy, and very opinionated. I wish I had gotten to talk to him more, since I wanted to pick his brain about some things ... but I'm not sure exactly what it is that I'd ask. I sort of felt the same way with Jason- he's got all this reverse engineering experience which I'm curious about, but I have no idea what to even start asking questions about.

The Talk

I thought the talk was great. My mic died during the second half so there were things that I just didn't bother interrupting on, but that was the only bad part of it. Topics went back and forth between everything from Unit Testing (which I didn't think I'd be talking about and was caught sort of off guard on), to DRM, to starting up your company, and what's going to replace C for programming. It might have been too developer-ish for some folks, but hey.. what did you expect putting a bunch of programmers up on stage like that?!

It was cool meeting folks from the crowd. Mike Piatek-Jimenez from Gaucho Software showed up and it was good to talk to him again. I met Mike a couple of years ago at OSX Con and he's been coming out with his own apps and doing the full time thing as well. Some guy also came up and took some very very very close pictures of the whole panel. I want to see those...

Celebrity-ness

One thing that was a little odd was being treated as though some magic celebrity dust had been sprinkled on me. I started noticing this about a year or so ago, but it was a little more apparent in Chicago. Folks will come up to you and say "hi", and I can tell they want to say more or ask a question or something but they don't. Some people just stand there and sort of look at you :) Or they might ask a question or make a comment but be slightly nervous about it.

So here's the thing- I'm just some guy who lives in Everett, WA who writes software for the mac. I'm really no different from anyone else. I just put some hard work into what I do and got lucky. So there's no need to treat me any different. But I do appreciate the free beer :)

However, I will allow one exception. Say you are a cute girl and for some reason you decide that I'm worthy of a little crush- I'm completely fine with that. More than fine with that. In fact, you are allowed to multiply my actual celebrityness by whatever amount you feel is appropriate at the time. (Now I get to watch out for payback from Kirstin as well as Justin. Crap.)

The After Party

This was also a ton of fun. This was probably the whole purpose of the evening- talk, and then drink. And that I did. I also got a podcast interview in for MacZealots.com while at the party. I met the guy behind The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Scott McNulty, as well as lots more great folks.

After that I stumbled back to the hotel via cab and took off early the next morning to visit my Grandma while I was in town.

Elsewhere:

Chicagoist: DrunkenBatman (and posse) at the Adler Planetarium. Wolf: DrunkCamp Postmortem Mike: Adler! Paul: Talking In The Second City Wil: Drunk and Blog DB: Adler Aftermath

Thanks again to DB for putting an a great show- it was pretty awesome.

-- posted 1:39 pm