For anyone who was or was not able to attend OSCON for Ruby and Rails related things, FreeGeek (think through the PDXLUG) sponsored some of the ruby/rails speakers from OSCON to come down and give a talk. This was very cool.

I arrived a few minutes late and DHH was speaking about rails. Very cool, especially because it was not one of the talks he had given so far at OSCON (atleast that I had seen).

Also there was Vanerburg speaking about metaprogramming in Ruby. The material he presented was pretty interesting. His talk plus Dave Thomas’ talk at the beginning of the week really gets me excited about Ruby. WOW! It is such an incredible language. it has so much more to offer than what you can get out of the Pickaxe book (Book is excellent, just does not push all the boundaries of Ruby. That may have require another 500 pages.)

West spoke about recreating the NextStep API for flash called ActiveStep and integrating it with Rails. Pretty interesting, although I did not get some of what he was talking about when it was flash specific. I have never done anything w/ flash. Very interesting.

And lastly there was White Lucky Stiff. They were slightly beyond description. Two guys and a girl showing homemade artsy computer animations, playing music and telling jokes. All material, w/ the exception of a couple of jokes, was about… Ruby. And most of it was funny. Definitely not politically correct, but that’s what made it so fun.

Met Robby Russell and talked to him for a bit. Great guy.

FreeGeek rocks. Turns out FreeGeek is a non-profit that recycles computer and teaches people how to build computers and run linux (job training) in the Portland area. Their location is very cool. Kinda like a computer garage. I was very comfortable there. It was a good fit.

Also in attendance was Matz – He did not give a presentation but accepted a gift from FreeGeek. A Japanese to English Dictionary.

Update Phil corrected me. Sorry for the misinformation. Rich Kilmer talked about the ActiveStep Flash API. Why the lucky stuff rather than “White Luck Stiff”. And Matz was given a dictionary of American idioms.

Don’t trust my memory!