Skippy and Ryan in Hershey

Skippy and Ryan at Your Place

I've been complacent in my posting this week. Too much to do between Riley's birthday and work and not sleeping properly. I totally forgot to mention that I met with Skippy and Ryan this past Saturday.

I met Skippy and Ryan both through WordPress, primarily by talking with them via IRC, and they're both into WordPress and blogging enough that they beat me to the web to talk about our meeting.

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"Your Place" was a strangely named place to get together. I was very confused when Ryan first mentioned it. Also weird was that after my hour+ drive out there, the bardenter had me use the ladies' room. It smelled of flowers and had no discolored puddles on the floor. Odd indeed.

The company was quite cool. We discussed some WordPress things, of course, along with some other web technology stuff. We exchanged job descriptions, the typical first-meeting stuff. And there was beer, which is always good.

I learned that Ryan's getting married tomorrow, so stop by his site and wish him well. Yeah, I'll drive an hour to meet with a guy and not even realize before I get there that he's getting married in a week. I feel like a sap!

Skippy game me a cool Skippy.net bumpersticker. I haven't decided what to do with it yet. Maybe stick it to my computer case. Surely I won't be applying Skippy's mug to my bumper.

Anyhow, I had a good retreat to chocolate country, and it was great to finally meet in person with these two guys I talk to all the time.

This might be the last WordPress meetup for me this year, since the Philly meetup folks have the next meetup on Thanskgiving weekend, and I'll be out of town. And December's meetup is on Christmas eve, when I doubt I will find a blogger to hang with. So January's meetup should offer my return to real-life appearances, if that means anything to you. I'm looking forward to catching up with masquerade from #wordpress IRC at that one. I'll have to remind him to show.

Someone needs to print #wordpress trading cards so we can collect them. I think Skippy's ahead in the race so far.

Andrea

Dec 31, 1969 07:00pm

Owen! You're the organizer! You can change the dates/times of the meetups. I wouldn't mind getting together for another WP gathering before the year's end; I've got a few things to talk about. Aw, come on. Please?

Owen

Hmm. As I've tried to explain a couple of times and ended up arguing against my own position:

The day is selected because it's "United WordPress Meetup Day" and other WordPress meetup groups meet on that day too. The benefit being that if you're in a city on that date, you would know there should be a meetup around.

Of course, there are only two other WordPress meetup groups that actually have met, according to Meetup.com at least. So what do we care? Should we change it? I wonder if we can change United WordPress Meetup Day, too.

Personally, I like the Saturday date and time, but maybe not the 4th week. Another thing that bugs me is the location - we should really have WiFi. I really like Fergie's but it's not very computer-friendly. Unfortunately, although I'm the organizer, I don't actually live in the city, so I would need help choosing a new place.

And more research shows that whatever day the most people meet for a certain topic is the day that United Meetup Day takes place. So if we have more members and they all meet on the day we choose, we could have the day moved anyway. What a coup that would be!

Maybe this whole topic deserves a top-level post?