The Eccentric Eggplant may have been the best GeekDinner yet.  We had a great turn-out (just not enough to have to have people eat their food standing), and our first attempt at Slideshow Karaoke was brilliant.

It all went down at Ferryman's on Wednesday (ie, the 28th November 2007). 

Jonathan Hitchcock, our logistics occifer, was our MC again, and also our first Karaoke victim.  But, before that, we had Adrian Moisey talking about OpenStreetMap, and Jennie Stenhouse talking about her experiences in the Games industry (not "gaming" as in gambling).

After Jonathan's Karaoke on the etiquette one must follow when dealing with British Royalty, we had Adrianna Pińska presenting on licenses and Charl van Niekerk talking on the Google Summer of Code, and on his experiences working on Joomla! recently on it.

Bryn Divey then brought the roof down with laughter as he gave his Karaoke on a topic that doesn't matter as much as the way he presented it.  The DoD's long-term plan to have the CIA start Facebook to collect all our data featured.  "Privacy is part of Web 1.0" was well-received as well.

Finally, Albert Visagie gave us some information on the Cape Town chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network.

Lots of new faces, and lots of people talking to people they hardly new and making new connections - that's really what makes doing work (no matter how little) on these GeekDinners worth it.  Why not help organise the next one, by joining the GeekDinner planning mailing list?  Or sign up to hear about the next on the GeekDinner announce mailing list.

We're up to 78 Geek Diners for Eccentric Eggplant, the fifth Cape Town GeekDinner, to be held at Ferryman's Tavern at the V&A Waterfront on Wednesday (ie, the 28th November 2007).  According to the sign-up page, only 2 more people are allowed, but there are always a couple of last-minute cancellations when people remember that it's their anniversary and their spouse will kill them if they're off geeking instead of taking them to a nice dinner.

(Extra points: Take the spouse to the GeekDinner.  Don't get killed, and get to geek out at the same time.)

This will be our first attempt at Slideshow Karaoke - where we volunteer two victims (Jonathan Hitchcock and Bryn Divey in this case) to give a talk on a subject they know nothing about with slides prepared by others (Russell Cloran and Jeremy Thurgood in this case) and given to the speakers at the same time the speaker is giving the talk to the audience.  If it works, I think we should have a few slideshow karaoke sessions at StarCamp...

Thanks to Nur Ahmad Furlong and a couple of iterations inspired by Jonathan and I, StarCamp now has a logo.  Nur also made a badge to put on your page so that people know that you're going and can find out what it's about - you can get the code on the StarCamp main page.

I'm going to be checking out a venue tomorrow that sounds perfect for us.  Just in time too - only two more weeks to go!  We've had more trouble finding venues than I thought we would, as evidenced by the running commentary on the venues page for StarCamp, and I've certainly learned a lot about what's out there and what people expect and why my "perfect dates" for getting school halls weren't quite so perfect after all.

Hopefully we can finalise the venue in the next day or two, and then we can stop holding back on inviting people.  We have 50 people signed up on the wiki page, which is a good start, but I want to see at last 75 people on that list by mid-next-week.  I know I've delayed sending invites until things looked certain, and they're looking fairly certain to me now. 

I'm a bit late with this this month - two of the events have already happened.

On Saturday the 10th November, the first OpenStreetMap South Africa mapping party happened in Noordhoek.  (Unfortunately I was unwell.)

Last night, Tuesday 13th November, the Western Cape Linux User Group (aka CLUG) held one of it's twice-a-month meetings at its usual venue at the University of Cape Town.  Thomas Andrews talked about the Blio PBX, developed in part by CLUG members.  (Unfortunately, still not well.)

Tonight, Wednesday 14th November, the first Cape Town Ruby Brigade meeting will be held at the Bandwidth Barn from 19:30.  Well done to the Ruby guys for organising themselves, and I think it's great that GeekDinner played a part in this getting organised.  The Cape Town Ruby Brigade will be meeting on the second Wednesday every month.  (Unfortunately, I have another meeting to attend this time, but I'll try make it in future.)

On Saturday 17th November, the Cape Town Python User Group (aka CTPUG) will be holding their 7th meeting (or "CTPUG 7") at the Bandwidth Barn at 15:00.  We're going to hear about Python Profiling, as well as the Pygments syntax highlighting library.  And, it seems, some planning for StarCamp as well, so hopefully there'll be some Python-related talks and maybe a sprint there as well.

Tuesday the 27th of November is the Western Cape Linux User Group annual general meeting at its usual Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre venue at UCT.  Jonathan Hitchcock is going to talk about desktop bling (things like compiz fusion and so forth).

Wednesday, 28th November, is Eccentric Eggplant, the fifth GeekDinner to be held in Cape Town, and it will take place at Ferryman's Tavern at the Cape Town Waterfront.  Still a few seats open for this, and the line-up looks pretty diverse and interesting - I'm especially interested to hear from a game developer about the games industry.

Last Wednesday was my last day at CareerJunction (well, this time around).  After some initial issues (mostly to do with culture), I'd started to settle in, I got my team a quiet environment, and my team was hitting milestones and generally impressing everyone.

So, why leave?

Well, I'd decided to stay on at CJ for a bit, while waiting to see if other options would pan out.  I'd put bits of my life on hold, since there's little point to finding a new flat or buying a new vacuum cleaner if you might be leaving the country in a few weeks.

Then, I got a phone call from Synthasite, saying that they'd like to have a chat with me.  So, I went past their offices, chatted to them for a bit, got really excited about what they had done and what they were planning on doing, realised that they were wanting me to work there, told them that I might not be around long since I was waiting on those options, and they said they'd take the risk.  Which either meant they were truly confident of their ability to convince me to stay, or didn't think I was good enough to have the other stuff come through.  But I gave them the benefit of the doubt.  And then I took the weekend to think about it, and decided to give it a go.

Fast forward a month: Day 3 of new employment being the launch of the Synthasite beta (more from boss-man Vinny Lingham in his announcement), and much watching of Munin graphs to see how well we're handling the load.