Jon Brown's take on travel, photography, technology and WordPress.
One of the many cool things that the folks at Automattic do is provide a year end stat report for anyone on WordPress.com as well as anyone running WP Stats (part of JetPack) on self hosted WordPress sites.
Well, 2013 wasn’t exactly an “amazing year” for traffic on WanderingJon.com, but suspect 2014 will be different now that I’m blogging again!
Checkout my report here: https://jetpack.me/annual-report/12537792/2013/
I’ve been working this week from a coworking space in Chaing Mai, Thialand called PunSpace which lucky me just opened 2 months ago (March 2013).
Meanwhile back home on Maui many parties are continuing discussions about opening a coworking space there. Obviously being back working in a coworking space has gotten my neurons firing on the subject as well so I had some thoughts to share.
I was super fortunate to have first dropped by PunSpace the day before a bi-weekly BeerCamp night they host. For those unfamiliar with BarCamp see wikipedia here, for BeerCamp however I quote the BarCamp Chaing Mai website:
Beercamp is a continuation of the discussions and connections that emerge from Barcamp. It’s a bi-weekly tech meetup. We get together every other Wednesday. Roughly half the time we have a presentation and/or discussion about a selected topic.
Not clearly stated in there is that they really have two things: BeerCamp (socializing) and BeerCamp+ (Socialiizing + a talk). I presume this is in part because they don’t always have a volunteer willing to speak. I actually think it’s brilliant , which Ibecuase it means people meet regardless of whether someone volunteers to speak or not lending consistencny of schedule and the more familar people get with eachother the more willing the shy ones are to share thier knowedlge.
This week one of the several ex-patriot business owners (runs a web development shop) gave a talk about “Programmer Optimization”. He was test running it as a talk he wanted to give in Singapore in a few months (I assume BarCamp Singapore). The talk was about 15 minutes and we had about 15 minutes open discussion/comment period afterward. We then all refilled beverages and hung out chatting for the rest of the night. Being Thailand the rest of the night invovled changing locations at 11pm to the Blah Blah Bar for late night food and more drinks. It was a GREAT intro to the coworking and ex-pat tech scene here, I’m glad I didn’t miss it. This is tech and ex-pat community at it’s finest.
I had many nice discussions with both members and owners of the coworking space. The thing that struck me was that there was a small, but active and growing, tech scene in Chiang Mai before the coworking space opened. The tech community seemed to be focused around BarCamp, TEDx and Creative Chiang Mai and it was a little ragged, but it existed and it had leaders. There exists a paradox as to which comes first, the nucleous that a coworking space can be, or the energized cloud of folks that orbit it. IMHO this hasn’t been, and needs to be, discussed in regards to Maui Coworking.
Seeing the evolution of tech and creativies here made me realize that one of the things lacking in Maui is any sort of tech/dev meetup where geeky creatives get their geeky creativeness on with like minded folks.
Neither MauiSMUG nor MauiWP is that venue. As many know, I’d really hoped MauiWP would someday be the spark to ignite that, but it’s not and I’ve come to realize why. The meetups are far too much community help group where new users come to learn and far too little sounding board for new ideas (don’t misunderstand, I love helping my community, but that is a while different mode from a user group).
The Beercamp+ talk was pretty generic, it could be applied to anyone working on anything, not just a programmer. Someone who knitted for fun could easy draw analogs from the topics of avoiding burnout and maintaineing focus. I’m sure there are talks that are very narrowly focused, but the talk itself is only a small part of a BeerCamp night which is in part why I think it’ll work.
I’m thinking we need to reach out to a larger audience on Maui and put together some sort of BeerCamp+/BarCamp style gatherings. Something to start to build community around the creative tech arena. Such gatherings would principally be to build community (which I crave) but would also act as a gauge for the critical mass necessary to support a coworking space (something I also crave).
I feel the key to these gathering is that they would NOT be another user group nor a group where any one narrow thing defines it (ie. WordPress _or_ Social Media _or_ Drupal). It would try to draw a broad crowd. People could come for 15 minutes and leave, or stay for 4 hours if they saw fit. I know there are a few tech folks I see 2-3 times a year that I could try to pull out to an gathering like that. I also think the Maui Makers folks would be a perfect fit.
TechHui used to do socials of a sort on Maui, but I haven’t seen one in more than a year. Perhaps the approach is restarting those, or restarting those with a modification.
I wondering if I make any sense… please share your thoughts!
I’m also specifically wondering:
(One thought I had was piggybacking onto one of the Friday Town Parties to start, ie meet then mingle, or maybe with our own booth… maybe that’s crazy. I also seem to recall there is a Pau Hana or Maui Happy Hour group that meets somewhere, wonder when/where they do their thing. Finally, maybe something like what MSB did, start with some coffee meetups?)
Peter Liu got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects, one’s personal history with computers. So I decided to take my comment on his blog post site and elaborate some.
My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. I’ve long thought it was a Timex Sinclair 1000, but based on my mother’s memory and the timing I’m pretty sure it was a ZX80. Back then there wasn’t really much commercial software to speak of so to play with a computer you had to program it yourself. It was also before hard drives which meant storing your work on an external casette tape recorder for storage, the same cassette player I used to listen to my very first audio cassette tape (The Best of the Beach Boy’s if I recall correctly). The first real program I ever wrote, at 8 or 9 years old, was on the ZX in BASIC with the help of my mom. The program took took a list of spelling words and scrambled all the letters and then printed them out to create word scrambles for her students. Later I made it into a game so that one typed in what they thought was the right word, unscrambled, and it’d tell you if you were right or wrong to try again. Later I wrote a program to make crossword puzzles but I kept running out of memory and crashing the little computer if I gave it more than than a dozen words.
About a year or two later we got a TI-99/4A which was far more a “real” personal computer than the ZX. In addition to taking cartridges like the old Atari’s it also used an audio tape recorder for storage, but later we got a 5.25″ external floppy disk for it. The change from audio casette storage to floppy disk was as dramatic then as the change happening today from Hard Drives to Solid State Drives. I do remember commercial software for the TI-99/4A actually coming on audio tapes, as well as on cartridges and later on floppy disks. Unlike the ZX which I honestly barely remember, I do vividly recall playing text based adventure games like Zork & Oregon Trail on the TI which were then followed by games with actual graphics like Tombstone and Hunt the Wumpas… mind you not video, just static graphics that changed one frame at a time when you moved or did something.
In 1984, at 12 years old, my parents bought me my first computer (as opposed to the other’s being “family” computers), an Apple //c. I spent uncountable number of hours playing games like Ultima on that computer. In fact all I really remember about being 12 and 13 was playing on that computer and skate boarding anywhere and everywhere I could. The really significant event for me surrounding that computer however was when I first went online thanks to a Hayes SmartModem.
As a fun point of reference, 300 Baud modems back then transmitted 1 bit per baud, meaning 300 baud = 300 bits per second and hence todays 20Mbps broadband is roughly 100,000 times faster. I don’t remember if my first modem was actually the 300 baud model or a later 1200 baud model, but It was enough though to connect to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) all over the country and rack up excessive phone bills. BBSs back then operated mostly like forums do today, except that generally only one person could call in and connect to each site at any given time, meaning for popular BBSs a lot of time was spent redialing and listening to busy signals. Later multi-node BBSs came about which allowed a few people to connect at the same time but it was still nothing like the instant on and thousands of simultaneous connection world we have today.
I wish I could remember the names of all the BBSs I used to dial into back then but a few names stick: The Lexicon of the Cabal, Cult of the Dead Cow, PeaceFrog, The WELL, The Crow’s Nest, TheFallOut Shelter, The Nucleus, The Asylum…. there were so many others though. As a 14 year old kid it was an amazing connecting with people all over the world via BBSs back then. There was plenty of hacking, phreaking and file sharing going on, but mostly it was just community. I imagine it was a a lot like the birth of amateur radio although at that age I didn’t really know what Ham Radio was to draw that comparison. One could also argue that that it was at that time I did my frist User Interface Design work creating new menu pages and primitive ASCII art for a couple BBSs I frequented. I really enjoyed figuring out what was the most important navigation elements and what would make the most sense to use as a menu… no not graphic menus, text menus where B meant go to Bulltien Board and F meant go to File Sharing Area etc.
The Apple //c was followed a couple years later by an Apple IIgs which I eventually took to college. Near the end of college however I switched to a windows laptop knowing that the engineering industry I was headed into was not Apple friendly. Since that first laptop I’ve never again owned a desktop computer. At school and work I still used plenty of desktops and servers, but as a personal computer it’s been laptops ever since.
In 2008 I switched back to Apple and am now onto my second MacBook Pro. A few years ago I added a Mac Mini Server at home which works mostly as a media and file server. I also have a couple remotely hosted virtual servers running Linux for various personal purposes (remote storage, GIT/SVN, etc) in addition to those I manage for web hosting clients.
