Asymptomatic

My mom got tickets for me, Berta, and the kids to see A Year With Frog and Toad today at the Arden theater on 2nd street in Philadelphia.

It's primarily a kid's show, a musical about two friends, Frog and Toad, who live in houses next door to each other. The show consisted of a series of short stories. In one, Toad bakes cookies, and he and Frog can't stop eating them. They go through great lengths to prevent themselves from eating the cookies, but end up eating them anyway.

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Over the weekend, skippy flew in to hang out with me at BarCamp Philly. This was not my first unconference, but it was my first official "BarCamp" experience.

I would like to say up front that the BarCamp Philly organizers did a great job at building this event. Of the many free events I've attended over the past few years, this one was the best run of its style. Kudos to them and thanks for the wonderful effort. I want to spend a little time in this post going over not just what I think they did well, but also where I think all events of this type could stand to improve, either by following their example or doing just a little bit more.

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Starting in September, which is right around the corner in case you hadn't noticed, there is a series of conferences that have entered my radar as something that might be edifying for me to attend. There may just be too many of them.

Podcamp Philly is the first of these, on September 6th and 7th. Like each of these conferences, this one has a theme. Being that this is a podcamp, the topic is "new media". I've been following the PANMA list for a year and a half and I'm still not sure what anyone really means when they say "new media", but I think it has something to do with blogging and podcasting and stuff like that.

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I've been doing a lot of things lately. Getting out of the house is becoming more common for me. And as I look forward to presentations at the PHP meetup at the end of April and PodCamp Ohio at the end of June, I've been attending little gatherings here and there as time allows. There are a couple trips in particular that require more elucidation than what effort I want to put into this seating, but I did want to write about something simple that strikes me every time I venture into the city for an event or meeting or whatever.

As I've observed in the past, you always take something with you when you visit somewhere like a major city, even if you're mostly retracing your steps. I've gotten in the habit of taking the R5 from Malvern to Market East on the instructions of folks whose company I enjoy but much less frequently these days than I like. On that route, I manage to walk through a good chunk of the Gallery, a kind of "train station meets three story mall". It is in this place that I've encountered one of my favorite Philly oddities.

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Berta and I went to IndyHall's movie night on Saturday to hang out in the city and to watch the first of the two films in the double-feature, "Office Space". We got to talk to a few of the folks down there, both some people we knew and some people we met for the first time.

The event was sponsored by Philly Car Share, which is an interesting organization that offers shared vehicles to city-dwellers. You basically make a reservation, and you get a car for a few hours. It's kind of like renting, I suppose, but it's a more comfortable plan. The cars are where you might need them to be, parked in nearby lots, rather than centrally at a rental place. And they have all different kinds of cars, so if you needed a trunk or a van, they've got that, or for a night out on the town, a convertible or BMW is obtainable. Neat idea for folks that live downtown, especially.

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