The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I’ve set this post to appear

right about the time our plane takes off for San Francisco. For those

of you who’ll be in the San Francisco area tonight, Boss Ross, my wife Wendy and I will be

holding a dinner meetup at 21st Amendment (563

2nd Street) at 7 p.m.. It’s an open invitation to come hang

out with us — anyone can come!

February is “Strong

Beer Month” at 21st Amendment, where they’ll be featuring these beers,

all of which boast 8.5% alcohol by volume or

more:

• Golden Doom Belgian

  Tripel

• Double Trouble Imperial

  I.P.A.

• Mac’s Strong Scotch

  Ale

• Lower De Boom Barley

  Wine

• Hendrik’s Russian Imperial Espresso

  Stout

Yes, we know that it’s probably insane to

schedule such a gathering timed for right about when the Superbowl will

end, but it was the only day we could hold it. We hope you can make it

there!

On Monday and Tuesday, Ross and I will be at

the Evans Data

Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference, where we’ll be

learning the tricks of the trade of evangelizing to developers. This

will be only the second year that this conference has been held, and it

promises to be interesting. I’ll be taking copious notes and blogging

the event — watch this space for details.

For more details, see here.

[via AKMA] I’m going to be at the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday, which means that it’s very likely that I will have to sit through who-knows-how-many PowerPoint presentations. Perhaps I should bring along a USB key loaded with Gary Turner’s slide for derailing PowerPoint presentations, pictured below:

Gary writes:

This should create the required disturbance in the PowerPoint

forcefield and, with a little luck, force them to let go of the wheel

and actually talk to you as humans without the crutch of 78 slides to make a point that should take only 3.

I’ve written about one of the unintended consequences of PowerPoint before in an entry titled The Breakup Style of PowerPoint, from which David Byrne (yup, the Talking Heads guy) borrowed for his presentation. Check it out!

Once again, another reminder about the meetup this Sunday. The details:

We’ll be the table with the accordion, which should make us hard to miss, even though they passed a law saying that the piano accordion is the official instrument of San Francisco back in 1990.

The invitation

is open to all. We’ll probably talk a little tech if enough techies

show up, but it’s really a “Hey, we’re in town and we’d like to see

you” kind of gathering. I plan to have the accordion with me, so it’s

likely there will be some kind of performance. The timing may not be

the hottest — this Sunday is Superbowl XL — but it’s the only day

that Ross and I could be available this trip.

(Boss Ross and I will be in San

Francisco to catch the Evans Data Developer Relations

Conference on Monday and Tuesday, and Wendy and I are making

a mini-vacation of the trip.)

If you’re planning to

come, please let me know via

email or in the comments so we know how much room to set

aside!

For my more technical readers, I’ve posted part 2 of my notes from the Bell Mobility/ESRI Location-Based Services seminar on the blog I get paid to write, The Farm.

In case you missed part 1, those notes are here.

Click to see it at full size.