ClubJuggler

For the last three years I’ve had a lot of fun attending and presenting at BarCampRDU. BarCamp is what’s known as an “unconference” where the entire content of the conference is organized the day of the event. Imagine, if you will, a conference crossed with a wiki and you’ve basically got BarCamp. The first two years of BarCampRDU I taught Juggling. Last year I simply attended. This year I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I’d like to present something. We’ll see. I’ve got three months to think about it. If you might be interested in attending BarCampRDU 2009, go register here. Unlike previous years, registration this year is not on the wiki. Instead, we’re using EventBrite this year. Registration is still free, but make sure to get in early before all 200 spots are gone!

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

So, this year I signed up to help organize BarCampRDU 2007. In looking over the jobs, I volunteered to handle catering lunch. So, back on July 13, I went over to Neomonde Deli in Raleigh and negotiated with them an almost $1200 order for lunch. Lunch today.

Fast forward to today, the date of BarCampRDU 2007. As a novice organizer, I neglected to call Neomonde this past week, thinking that, as a professional organization, they would remember our order. Bzztt! At 11:45 am this morning, when they hadn't showed up, I called them. I talked to Andy Montroy, who I had talked with originally and who I had worked out the order with and discovered that he had completely forgotten about our order!!! Luckily, I had the list of what we had ordered with me, because I had to dictate it to him over the phone again. He promised it would be here by 12:30 (lunch was scheduled for noon). Fred, the overall person in charge of BarCampRDU, talked to him on the phone trying to figure out if they could actually make the 12:30 time frame or if we should just cancel the order and send people out. They said they could, so what we're doing is we moved the 3rd session of talks, originally schedule for 1:30-2:20 back to 12-12:50 and moved lunch from 12-1:30 to 1-2:30. We have yet to see if they'll make it. I'll update later.

Update: After saying they would be here at 12:30, with lunch scheduled for 1pm, Andy and Mike (who I think is his boss) drove up at exactly 12:59pm. They rushed the food in and got everything set up and everyone managed to get lunch. I didn't actually verify that they brought what we ordered, but, it looks like almost everyone got something to eat (everyone that wanted something). When it came time to pay, they offered us 10% off. So, in the end, we got lunch an hour later than normal, but we were able to adjust our schedule to accommodate. It's very good that we weren't a wedding or a rehearsal dinner, because that's how lawsuits are born. (Note: We are not thinking of suing.)

So, I guess "all's well that ends well."

If you're local to the Triangle area and into tech, keep August 11 open for Barcamp RDU 2007. I went to Barcamp RDU 2006 last year and had a blast. This "unconference" is basically organized in a wiki fashion with people going up to the podium at the beginning of the day to give a quick synopsis of the class they'd like to present and then going over to a large grid on the wall and figuring out the schedule by fitting your presentation into the global schedule. I taught juggling last year and will probably do that again, but I may also look into something else too. Any suggestions?