Aug 04 2008
Update: Just Got to Durham
I’ve been kind of quiet recently, because (as those who follow my Twitter stream know) I’ve moved to Durham. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m loving it.
Our house is in the Eno Woods area — sometimes called “Eno River Valley”. If you pop up a map of Durham, look for “Eno Woods State Park”: we’re around there. What’s funny about this area is that it has the reputation of being really rural and distant, but it’s 15 minutes from downtown Durham, and Duke is even closer. Now, part of that is probably because of the strange organization around here: we’re in this weird grey zone where we’re not technically in Durham city, but we’re in Durham county, and there isn’t another city in Durham county other than Durham city, soooooo….what? I guess we’re just kind of chillin’ out here in the woods. Anyway, the house is a heavilly wooded lot convenient to the city, which is pretty awesome given our housing budget (think “student”). We’ve set up bird feeders, which means we’ve got a large population of squirrels that have moved in with us. I’m considering growing catnip around the sides of the house, because it repels bugs and invites cats (which repels squirrels). Now, if we can just get the couple of bully crows to stay away from our bird feeder, we’ll be set!
The bigger trick is going to come when we decide to plant fruit and veggies into our gardens. We’ve got deer and moles around here, and although we haven’t seen them, we probably have rabbits, too. So it’ll be amazing if we actually get some veggies at the end of the season, but Alicia sold me on trying out some heirloom veggie gardening (she’s been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), so I’m going to give it a shot.
Furniture has been less than awesome, even though North Carolina is apparently the furniture capital of the country. Alicia went to Rooms to Go, who proceeded to deliver roughly half of our furniture (and not even all of the half they did deliver — missing screws and such). Thankfully, Alicia has griped at the management, so they’re taking away the furniture we don’t like without charge. Hopefully they’ll finish delivering the rest of our furniture (including the railings that form the base of the bed frame!) on Wednesday.
The social/technical community here is really solid. Unlike Minnesota, where the only media starting to tap social media is MPR (I’m talking about you, In the Loop and Jon Gordon — with apologies to Julio Ojeda-Zapata), there’s a lot of engagement here in the area. Specifically, it seems like the local NBC affiliate is significantly behind social media, including providing support for 30 Threads, a regional blog roundup. There are also a number of regular gatherings, including “Triangle Tweet-Ups“, which are cataloged over at Social Carolina.
The first event of his I went to was the 30 Threads launch party, which was cunningly veiled behind a get-together for area bloggers (”blogger bash“). The crowd was pretty huge: I’m not sure you’d get as large a crowd in the Twin Cities, even though the Twin Cities has a larger population. I met a lot of people there that I first met through Twitter (most notably “ArsePoetica”, “AbbyLadyBug”, and “Gwen Sutton”), learned about a lot of cool blogs (e.g. Carpe Durham), and discovered a Kölsch style beer (Angry Angel).
After that, I went straight to BarcampRDU. It was huge — maybe not quite MinneBar size (”only” ~250 people registered instead of MinneBar’s 400+), but certainly at the same quality. There were 8 distinct tracks that were busy from 10 AM to 5:30 PM (with an hour and a half for lunch). Sessions ranged from VProbe to Walzing, which was pretty awesome. I discovered that Michael Kimsal (of the excellent WebDevRadio) lives in the area and basically co-hosted a Groovy/Grails session with him (he talks about it here): that was a blast, too, because I’m a bit of a podcast fanboy. I did a bit of OCaml evangelism, but discovered that doing it the last slot of the day is rough on both the presenter and the participants (cite). In general, there was lots of talk about driving start-ups in the area, including talk about structuring an incubator in the area and the recent start-up weekend. Exciting stuff going on in that arena, which I really want to be a part of.
The next big thing for me is starting school (get-together tomorrow, classes start two weeks later) — I’ve also thrown my hat in the ring for VP of the Graduate and Professional Student Council, because I’m physically incapable of resisting committee meetings (I blame my Presbyterian upbringing). There’s also a faith blogging conference which is supposed to be coming up in the fall, but I’m on the planning committee and haven’t heard anything yet from the leadership. Other things I’m planning on checking out are the WordCampRDU, Refresh the Triangle, and Raleigh.rb (which is apparently presenting Erlang — do Ruby meetings ever present on Ruby?).
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