GeekSouth Dinner 1.31.06 Wrapup
Wow! I am blown away by the response to the Geek South dinner last night. We had CEO’s in suits all the way to nerds in t-shirts and the mix was perfect. With 40+ folks from hardcore geeks to the very interested newbies thanks to everyone who made it out and I am very excited about the future of Geek South. We had folks from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte NC
Thanks go out to everybody who showed up (check out some of the blogs and websites on the writeboard password: pacific ) and more reviews of the meeting will be updated here. Thanks in particular to:
GeekSouth website
Austin and Jeff for building the site and Tim for the details
Thomas for actually agreeing to do a podcast with me
Hugh for the idea
Stormhoek for the wonderful wine
Tim and Brad for presenting great content
North East TN Tech Council and Debbie for helping spread the word
KNETIC for promoting the event and providing much needed moral support
AVI for technical and projector support
Tatiana for the photos, even if they were under duressPlease let me know if there are others that I missed. Thanks again to everyone for coming out and keep the conversation going at GeekSouth
Mentions
Thanks to David for his excellent review and ideas.
Jeff Rainey’s review – thanks for your help!
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
Jose, aren’t you a little short for a geek trooper? Juuuust kidding. So, the big question I’m hearing is “What is this monster you’ve created?” Somewhere (I couldnt’ find it actually) there were some rough goals of the concept. IIRC, they were
1. Be geeky
2. Share resources
3. Promote geek power
4. Play warcraft
I realize that may not be ENTIRELY accurate, so can you tell me where I can find these tenets of Geek South?
I’d like to start the dialogue about the group’s identity with suits. Just airing it out there, you know… I mean, I like wearing suits from time to time. It’s just that I didn’t expect a meeting of *geeks* to be a formal affair. I, for one, felt somewhat underdressed for such a classy establishment. I’d never been there and was very impressed with the Pacific Grill. Why does Kingsport get the good restaurants anyway? They already had the lockdown on Thai and Indian cuisine and now they can add California fusion (or whatever you classify the PG as) too! I digress. My point is, if you had told me that a geek get-together was all about the business attire, I would have guffawed - untill, that is, I actually attended one.
But, once again, I must say, I am Not Down on the Man, man. In fact, GEEK POWER BABY! Let the suits be worn, I say. Embrace those in suits! Pat them on the back with reassurance that they Shall Not Be Left Behind. For, as we all know, the age-old steretypical corporate executive is an endangered species and the most powerful players in the world are, you guessed it, geeks.
To really really get to the point (wasn’t the first rule of writing for the web to keep it short? DAGNABBIT!), there is clearly an interest among the business-leader contingent of our area about what we are up to here, and that is a Good Thing. I believe that Jose is a good choice for President of Geek South (yes, there should be a president, a treasurer, etc) because I think he can work well with geek and non-geek, corporate and non-corporate individuals to most efffectively leverage this gathering’s influence and importance to our community, our careers, and our iTunes playlists.
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I enjoyed the Geek Dinner immensely. Great presentations, nice venue, fun conversations.
An idea for the next Geek Dinner - invite the Computer Science students at ETSU and Northeast State and King and Milligan. I’ll be glad to look into getting e-mailing lists for them.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Tim–
Awesome idea. Simply because I think that a lot of hardcore comp sci people aren’t in touch with this use of technology sometimes. When I was a comp. sci. student at ETSU I think I was the _only_ person there with a blog or even knew what one was.