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.