Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Random fun things
Another successful Barcamp Charleston is over and done with.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
My old Netcom home page has been around since the late 90s and has been largely neglected for the better part of the last decade. I keep it around for posterity, but there’s a lot of linkrot there. I had moved some pages over to my blog, but not others. This is one of the last few remaining pages that haven’t been migrated over. The last time this page was touched was back in 2003 for some minor link editing, but most of the content dates back to around 1995 or 1996
Ok, so you’ve been out shopping or running errands all day. If you’re anything like me, you’ve managed to accumulate a pocket full of change from spending money you shouldn’t have. What do you do with it? Well, if you’re like most other people, you dig it all out, dump it into the change jar and don’t give it a second thought. My change jar happens to be a yellow piggy bank.
But, if you look closely, you’ll be surprised at what you can find in loose pocket change. Here are some of the coins I’ve found in mine. The unusualness mileage may vary for you, but for around here these are fairly unique. Well, for me anyway. I’ve buffed them up a bit so they look nice and shiny for you.
Coins are not shown at their actual or relative sizes
 |  | Here’s one from Barbados. This was one of my first acquisitions. I discovered it quite by accident when I was cleaning out my pig and rolling coins to take to the bank. |
 |  | A 10 cent piece from the Netherlands. I stumbled onto this one as I was rummaging for quarters for laundry. It’s a pretty small coin too, 1.5 cm in diameter (0.59 inches for you non-metric people). The date on the coin is 1957, so I would imagine they might look a bit different now. According to Psylocke_, I might be able to get a stick of gum with this… |
 |  | A small 25 øre piece from Denmark. Found it while I was dumping the change out of my pocket. |
 |  | Here’s a real live Susan B Anthony dollar coin that I acquired on a recent trip to NYC. This was in the change that I got from a machine when I was purchasing a ticket for the Long Island Railroad. I can see why nobody likes them…they’re a lot like quarters. |
 |  | This is a coin that I found while rummaging through my pocket looking for change to pay for a muffin at work. I’ve been told that it comes from England. |
 |  | This coin is my first find since moving to the US 3 years ago. Stumbled upon this one while counting and rolling the contents of my change jar to take to the bank. |
This is a series of quarters that was minted to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Canada as a country. Each of the 10 provinces and 2 territories had their own coin. Each coin depicts a small scene which represents the culture and land in each province/territory. On the loonie are a some people in front of the Peace Tower, located at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.
When they first came out, people would buy rolls and rolls of quarters and hoard them, so nowadays it’s pretty rare to find one in your pocket. I’ve only managed to acquire 9 of the 12 province coins, plus a couple of loonies ($1 coins for those of you not in the know). I’ve also included links to the closest thing I could find for a home page for each province, just in case you wanted to do some touring.
| British Columbia | Saskatchewan | Ontario | Nova Scotia | New Brunswick |
 |  |  |  |  |
| Prince Edward Island | Newfoundland | Northwest Territories | The Yukon | |
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and the loonie.
 | This one is the RCMP quarter, minted to celebrate 100 years of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It’s kind of an old coin, minted back in 1973 I think. |
 |  | This one is a subway token for the New York City subway system. I just happened to have one left over from a trip I made to New York in June 94. |
 | This goes waaay back (entirely too far back) to my days as a mall rat and arcade junkie. It’s an arcade token from somewhere. I forget where it came from. |
Tickets for BarcampCHS the Third just went on sale through Eventbrite.
There are three levels of tickets available: attendee ($10), individual sponsor ($25) and generous sponsor (>$25).
Go get your tickets now while they’re hot!
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.