Dinner and Edmonton Tweetup

Last night after I finally had to give up on the UPS guy coming with the RAM for my Mac Pro, I went to go pick up Diane on our way to her coworker An's place for dinner. An had spent the entire day cooking up a storm. When we got there, her entire kitchen was filled with lots of food! We started our dinner off with salad rolls -- they're kind of like not deep fried spring rolls. Next were some freshly deep fried spring rolls, and then a bowl of wonton soup. After that the other two guests arrived and we continued to eat. There was grilled pork ribs, shrimp and chicken skewers, shrimp and squid stirfry (I've never had squid so tender and non-rubbery before!), and a bunch of other great foods as well. I ate so much that I didn't eat anything all day until dinner. Today was the Edmonton Tweetup. A while ago, I joined twitter and blogged a bit about the experience. To put it quickly - I was a bit bummed out that I was the first of my group of friends to join the twitter experience. Well that's changed a bit, thanks to @mastermaq who found me using twitter local. After just a couple of weeks, I had several twitter friends and the service became useful for me. Not long after that, Mack started organizing a twitter meet, which apparently is affectionately called a tweetup. The planning and organizing ended up with today being the day for the tweetup.

I showed up with Diane and we had a great turnout. We had at least 14 or 15 people there, and it was great to meet everyone. There was quite a large range of people who showed up -- young people, older people, and a fair range of fields (although most were tech related in some way). It was quite a fun time actually. I spent a lot of time chatting with @bruceclark since we shared an interest in photography, but I also chatted with quite a few other people. It was a most enjoyable afternoon.

After the party seemed to have waned a little, I returned home for a short time before heading out to the airport to pick up my parents who were in Europe on holidays for a month. I took them out for supper as a mother's day thing since the actual Mother's day involved driving my sister to a couple of gigs. I got to hear a little about their trip, and it was good to have them back in town :)

This evening I played a bit of poker, having my first real downswing at 200NL since an early downswing when I first moved up. Downswining 7 buyins is not my idea of a fun time. All sorts of crap happened to me that I had somehow avoided for the most part over the last little while of playing. Oh well, it can't all go my way. I'm still up playing those limits, it's just unfortunate that I couldn't continue the trend that's been lasting for the past little while. I guess it brings my winrate down to a much more sustainable level. It just sucks for it to happen all at once like this.

So I'm off to bed. I'm taking Megan to her first of two gigs tomorrow at the Radisson Hotel (formerly the Coast Terrace Inn) tomorrow morning. If you're in the mood for some fancy brunch with some harp music for entertainment, feel free to stop in between 10:15 and 2:15.

Heraldk

Ahead of the Curve

One of the problems I have with starting to move ahead on the technology curve is sometimes you don't get to benefit from critical mass. Recently I started playing with Twitter, but using it has made me feel kind of lame because I barely know anyone who uses it. I've added the one friend I know who has it, but he doesn't use it actively. I'm also following a couple developers in the mac community, but that's it. So. What is twitter? It's hard to describe it in a way to make it sound as cool as I think it does. If you watch the video on the twitter page it seems kind of lame at the worst, and no different than facebook status updates at its best. They describe it as a way to keep everyone informed on what you are doing, and keep up to date with what other people are up to.

If that's all there is to it though, then that doesn't explain why I keep reading about it all the time on the blogs I subscribe to. So finally my curiosity got the better of me so I looked into it a little more and found this post that describes some of the features that twitter offers for people who have learned to use it. Hmm. Intrigued, I finally signed up. But now I have a problem: I don't have the social circle of people on twitter yet which means it doesn't have the value for me yet.

So. Anyone want to sign up and help me make it useful to me?

Heraldk