Manda QoP

I've uploaded the presentation from tonight's talk at CodeMania after dark.    It was great fun showing everyone how easy it is to create your own Google map, and it was quite interesting the number of people afterwards who said they'd always thought it was something difficult to do.   Lots of people are hopefully now going away to play with customising their own Google maps and with any luck creating loads of funky fun things to play with online.    I can't quite name the overall highlight of the evening for me, but it's a close run thing between the great diversity of topics covered by the other amazing speakers, Corey's disco ball hoodie and Zak the Cat!

Someone raised an interesting point on Monday night at a GGD dinner and I feel they have missed the entire point of Girl Geek Dinners and have also, with their comments, seriously undermined other women who are looking to come out of their shell and interact with other 'geeks'. If you don't agree with what we're doing then don't come to a Girl GEEK dinner, and certainly don't turn up and throw cold water on people, make belittling comments and then moan that it was too technical and you didn't enjoy it. So what is a geek? There seemed to be some confusion. These women throwing around the derogatory comments seem especially confused. So let's refresh everyones' minds. You don't need to be in IT to be a geek folks! It's not an exclusive club limited to women who don't baulk at the thought of writing code. We're a diverse crowd and we celebrate each others geekiness, even if it isn't something we're into. We certainly

After pulling an all nighter at the weekend my TechEd talk has been submitted to TechEd for peer review - WOO HOO! All I need now is a fantastic SaaS or S+S case study and feedback from the peer reviews to get it closed off. It feels so great to finally get that completed and means that I can spend the weekend concentrating on making sure the next Girl Geek Dinner is a fantastic success, preparing the GGD slides for TechEd and maybe fit in some shoe shopping as well. :-) PS: http://www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ if you want to buy tickets to the GGD event on the 28th. ;-)

I have just deleted my entire Hotmail account by accident. Nngggggnnnnhhhh!! Let this be a lesson to everyone, if you set up Outlook Connector in Outlook 2003, don't delete it so that you can reset it from scratch as it also deletes all your Hotmail emails and you can't get them back. It is also possible that the monster amounts of pain killers I'm taking had something to do with this monstrous debarcle. Ah well, it's one way of tidying up the emails. Hope there was nothing important in there.

Here's an alternative sponsorship request for you! Microsoft & Girl Geek Dinners are hosting a special Girl Geek Dinner at Tech Ed this year on Monday the 1st September. There will be around 300 women at this event at Sky City in Auckland. As a novel form of advertising, NZ Girl Geek Dinners are going to hand out free t-shirts during the Girl Geek Dinner at TechEd and at the TechEd conference itself. This is as an alternative to handing out flyers. The t-shirts will also be available from the Microsoft Stand and any other company stands who will let us cadge some space - hint hint. We are looking for sponsors to help cover the costs of making the t-shirts. Sponsorship for t-shirts will cost $500 per business. In return for sponsoring us you'd get your logo on the back of the t-shirt and on our National and Wellington websites. I am keen to give our existing and previous sponsors first dibs at this and will be limiting the number of sponsors so that the t-shirt does

We've got another Girl Geek Dinner coming up in August in Auckland. This time we'll be holding it in a Chinese Restaurant, so there will be lots of lovely food, a speaker, a quiz, some prizes. The ladies who came to the last event got pretty lucky with the prizes as Microsoft gave us some fantastic goodies to give away. For more information on the next event go to: www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz See you there.

HARDWARE GEEKERY When: Wednesday 28th May 2008 @ 6pm Where: Microsoft House, Level 5, 22 Viaduct Harbour Ave, Auckland Central Cost: $30 from www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz The theme for this event will be hardware development, including designing modern home entertainment systems (codecs/coding/firmware) and building homemade game console interfaces. These speakers know which end of a soldering iron to hold. J We have Cherie Carbines and Steven Ellis from OpenMedia who will be demonstrating MediaCentres and explaining the technical nitty gritty that goes into building them, plus we have a young lady called Tamara Olliver as a speaker. When Tamara was 15 she rebuilt the playstation dance mat to make it more robust then open sourced the code and hardware designs. There will be a quiz and maybe some other fun things to get everyone talking and mingling. Tickets are available from the website: http://girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ and I will need to limit them to 50 because of the venue size, so firs

The NZ Branch of Girl Geek Dinners have their first dinner arranged. When: 22nd November 2007 Where: The Komodo Rooms, Parnell, Auckland Speaker: No-one yet but I'm hoping to get something good for the first dinner. Cost: $30 per head - this goes towards covering the cost of food and venue hire. Drinks: You will be able to purchase drinks from a bar all night. For more information about NZ Girl Geek Dinners go to: www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz