Yesterday’s Cupcake Camp Charleston was another great success judging by the number of people that came and the number of cupcake bakers. The number and variety of cupcakes seemed almost endless, with some very creative cupcakes.
Some creative cupcakesThanksgiving dinner cupcake
This year’s Cupcake Camp was also a fundraiser for Pattison’s Academy, a school for children with multiple disabilities.
I didn’t have too many cupcakes, but the ones I did have were all really good. Would have liked to try them all, but that probably wouldn’t have been too healthy for me.
There were clearly people who had been to last year’s Cupcake Camp. Not content with a mere paper plate, they were the ones that brought their own boxes and large containers to hold their cupcake haul.
You might think being a Cupcake Camp judge would be pretty awesome, but after looking at all the cupcakes they have to sample, I’m thinking maybe not so much (although I still probably wouldn’t say no).
Judging table
Also present was Coastal Coffee Roasters, roasting up some beans and serving some freshly roasted and ground coffees for people to try out.
Another good time was had at this year’s Cupcake Camp Charleston. Next up in April is Cupcake Camp Summerville, in case you haven’t had enough cupcakes yet. That will probably be enough time for people to recover from this year’s cupcake binge.
Feeling somewhat emboldened after this year’s Dragon*Con I decided to wear my Star Trek robe to BarcampCHS this year. I figured it would be a fun thing to do, and if nothing else would probably make everybody’s Barcamp experience just a little more memorable. I think that mission was accomplished.
My friend and fellow photographer Joe Nienstedt took this photo of me in my robe yesterday. The toque (hat) I’m wearing is an awesome Barcamp hat that Vera knitted for the organizers.
Joe also did a great job of people wrangling and got a cool group photo after lunch yesterday.
BFS made it out for its third Barcamp and survived another event
BFS
There were a pretty good number of sessions pitched, although not as many as last year. Voting was done using stickers although there was plenty of room for sessions.
Session voting
Everywhere I went, there were groups of people chatting, networking, sharing tidbits of information and getting to know other people they might not otherwise have met. It’s what Barcamp is all about.
Hanging out between sessions
I think this year’s Barcamp was a little bit smaller than the last couple, although I haven’t seen any attendance numbers yet. There were definitely fewer sessions this year, and a lot of techie/programming related topics this year. It was still a pretty good time. I offered up a couple of session this year, CT Scanners: How do they work and an Ask a Medical Physicist Q&A type session. They went well, but didn’t get as many people as I expected. The Google Q&A (which has a tendency to suck people away from all the other sessions) was at the same time as my CT talk and my Q&A session was in the last time slot of the day. Still had a few people come by for that and had a nice little discussion about the kinds of things that I do for my real job.
Heading up the stairs to the after party on the outside patio at Mellow Mushroom, I heard a bunch of people yelling and shouting. I was wondering what the heck everybody was yelling about, and as I got closer I realized they were shouting “ROBE GUY!” at me.
Epic. Yep, definitely made Barcamp more memorable for people. Unfortunately I had forgotten to put my robe back on before heading out to the party. Having my robe would have made for more epicness.
Thoughts for next year:
try to get more of the creative community out. Even though they already have a lot of other outlets (like Pecha Kucha and other similar events) I think there can be a lot of potential for collaboration between the two
Bacon camp and last year’s Homebrew 101 were pretty popular sessions in previous Barcamps. It might be cool to to have food related sessions.
Maybe Google Q&A needs to be given its own dedicated time slot. The involvement by the local Google data center staff is great and BarcampCHS is very lucky to have their support. Even though they end up getting a lot of questions that can’t be answered (either because it’s not in their area or they’re just not allowed to say), it always seems to be a popular session and it gives people a chance to find out a little bit about the facility. It does tend to drain people away from other sessions though.
although I was only watching the planning from the sidelines this time, it seemed a lot of effort was spent trying to get around the requirement of having lunch provided by the company that provides CofC’s food services. Maybe it would be better to do away with providing lunch and direct people over to some of the many nearby restaurants instead. It would also remove a large expense from the budget.
Registration seemed to flow much better using the classroom rather than having it out in the lobby of Maybank.
The first session of the day offered up to user groups as a meet-and-greet/meeting type thing was a good idea. I got to find out about Makelab Charleston and find out the kinds of things they have and are planning on.
Overall, BarcampCHS was still a great time and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year. Maybe this year’s robe wearing will start a trend and other people will do something costume-y next year. I certainly had a lot of fun with it.
This year’s BarcampCHS also features a poster contest: You Are the Face of BarCamp. Go ahead, submit something.
BarcampCHS can always use more sponsors. Sponsors help make BarcampCHS a great event and it’s a great way to reach out to some of the brightest people in the area. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or know someone who might be interested, contact the organizers.
Spending a long weekend among 50k+ of the geekiest and nerdiest and generally awesome(-est) people around takes a while to recover from, especially for introvert types like me.
This year my friends and I dressed up for the first time. Nothing grand, but my friend said we should wear bathrobes in the grand Hooligan tradition. Then I found these Star Trek bathrobes at ThinkGeek.
They were pretty awesome and got a great reaction from other people. We were the away team in bath robes. People wanted to take photos of us. It’s very interesting to be on that side of DragonCon where people are asking to take photos of you instead of taking photos of others in costume.
We also had some Jedi robes with us, but they didn’t get nearly the reaction that the Star Trek robes got.
DragonCon seemed a lot more crowded this year. One of my friends also seemed to think there were a lot more DragonCon newbies this year too. Registration was orders of magnitude better this year than it was last year. Kudos to the organizers for making changes to improve the registration process. To manage the crowds for panels and sessions, I think organizers moved the lines for the more popular sessions and panels outside, rather than have lines of people snaking around inside. That resulted in really long intimidating looking lines heading outside and around buildings. Made it a little easier to move around inside, but it was a little confusing.
As usual, I spent most of my time in the Space and Science tracks. All the sessions I went to were packed this year with lots of people being turned away once the rooms were full. Didn’t do much autograph seeking this year, and only made one trip through the Walk of Fame.
Lots of photos were taken, lots of cool costumes. It kind of seemed like there weren’t quite as many people in costume this year, although I didn’t spend a lot of time wandering around like I did previous years so I probably just didn’t see them.
My complete collection of photos for DragonCon 2011 and the parade are over in the gallery.
