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Nerd Night

Filed under: Belgium,Hacking,Python,Spain — Thomas @ 16:58

2008-05-23
16:58

I remember when I moved to Barcelona I was planning to take the opportunity to bring out my inner nerd more. I was going to go find a LUG to join, meet up with fellow hackers in the local area, and do the things nerds do.

I also had this vague idea of getting people from work over to my place on a weekend and working together a whole day on a common project.

Well, the LUG idea didn't pan out - I remember finding two LUGs around Barcelona, one being entirely Catalan and the other with less of a nationalist focus, but still pretty Catalan. I guess I was scared to join up with my nonexistent Catalan skills. I didn't meet very many local hackers, though I recently started going to the Barcelona Python Meetup, and I still have to meet up with Pau whom I met on the subway.

The hacking weekends didn't happen either - I don't think people were as interested as I was to do so in the weekend, although I had a few succesful stints with Jan before he left for Ireland that I remember fondly. But mostly people were happy to go out and get drinks/food/partied.

So, I was happy when Peter proposed we organize Nerd Nights. The idea is we get together and do nerdy things. We used to do this automatically in the house we shared before I moved to Spain. But now the other guys need to find a way to get some me-time away from wife/girlfriend and kids, and this is the perfect activity in which we're guaranteed to have the women not join in.

Tonight's the first one. We have various things we want to work on, including noiseproofing PC's, getting Linux on a really old laptop, teaching Jeroen how to bittorrent, Setting up the Tux Droid, setting up the scrolling marquee Peter and I have, using the Cue::Cat, designing a new DAD (Digital Audio Database), making a VGA-over-CAT-7 cable ... The list goes on.

It's not exactly like the Hacking weekends I wanted to do, since it's not Linux- or hacking-oriented, but it's still enough to keep my inner nerd happy for now :)

3 Comments »

  1. Well, I think is normal that the LUGs around Barcelona are Catalan, in the same way the LUGs around Paris are probably French, and the LUGs around Roma are probably Italian. You have to take into account the one of the main arguments we had here to sell FOSS software is that is translated, and usually very well translated, in our own language. In any case I think I would be great to have a group of Fedora users in Barcelona, which doesn’t exist right now, as far as I know.

    Comment by Jesús Corrius — 2008-05-23 @ 18:01

  2. My Catalan and Spanish would also not be enough to make me survive a LUG. I would love to see some English or mixed Language LUG here. I think I have been using Red Hat since 3.0.3, so a Fedora group would be brilliant.

    Nerd Night sounds like a nice idea too.

    Comment by Christof — 2008-05-24 @ 11:11

  3. […] up on a previous post, I’ve been writing some code to do useful things with my scrolling LED […]

    Pingback by thomas.apestaart.org » Scrolling LED Marquee part two — 2009-02-06 @ 10:39

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