Nerdvana

[bcholmes]

I finally made it out to Hacklab tonight.

In my day job, I feel like I don't really get much opportunity to stretch outside of my comfort zone. So I'd love find a place that exposes me to stuff that I might not otherwise find the round tuits to toy with on my own.

There were cool parts and not-so-cool parts. Not-so-cool was that it has a serious lack of estrogen in the room. There were probably 20 guys. Average age was probably around 27? At the most, I'd guess. So, I'd be weird in being a lot older than the group. Also: they suck at noticing or saying 'hi' to new people. There were about six or seven different new people who showed up (Tuesdays being their "open" night). Newcomers would come up the stairs and sort of stand at the top of the stairwell and... stand there for a few minutes. Then they'd be all, kinda, "Is this... Hacklab?" And people were like, "yeah. *shrug*"

But on the other hand: cool geek energy. I was there pretty early and so I was chatting with someone who'd just been handed an old web cam. He connected it to his Mac and decided to write a driver for it.

"You're gonna write a driver for that in Java?" I asked. I'd noticed him with an Eclipse session open.

"Yeah, it works pretty well," he said. We geeked a bit about that. I don't know why the idea hadn't seemed obvious to me before. (Could it be... comfort zone!) I was all, like, hey, that's pretty neat.

I think this could be worth another visit.

Also, d269330400: Owen and I talked about you.

Comments

[d269330400.livejournal.com]

I've considered coming out (to hacklab), but I'm not at all a hardware & sys admin type, nor do I need a python intro. I keep overhearing: terabyte... rack... RAID.. laser... and I feel compelled to start ranting about the quality of lychees I got at the market this month. We're talking a whole different language.

Hacklab has grown my fuck-off skills. I'm getting good at saying, "This is not a conversation, but rather a lecture, and I'm not interested". I'm not dissing Hacklab -- I'm a big fan of public spaces, and I may yet come around, but as of yet I just don't think these are my people, and I struggle with the notion that you have to be a geek on all fronts to belong.

Glad to hear you had fun though. Let me know when you plan on going next. I may just join you.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

*nod* I grok that.

I'm certainly no hardware person, by any stretch of the imagination. But I have wanted to play with some things that require more nuts and bolts awareness than I currently possess... frex: the JavaCard API or things like that. I've never really found the motivation to do it. But I can see finding the motivation with this crowd.

I'm sorry to hear that you've felt pushed to try out Hacklab in the past; that scrapes. I certainly don't think that one needs to be a geek on all fronts, and you certainly have enough geek cred in my books.

I'm prob'ly gonna go back next Tuesday. If you're interested in coming with, I'm always happy to see you. If not, that's cool, too.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

My current plan is to pop in to Hacklab tomorrow night. If you were interested, I'd love to see you. If not, that's okay, too.