[Wellington-pm] Roundup of Monday night's meeting

[Grant McLean]

Hi all

If you weren't at Monday night's meeting, you missed a good one.  

Peter did an excellent job of introducing Tk and this was especially
noteworthy since he alleges he knew virtually nothing about the subject
when he originally volunteered to speak.  We had a good turnout too,
with lively questions and plenty of willing hands to point out what I'd
forgotten in my Gtk/Glade demo.

Looking to the future:

* Next meeting is February 21st.  We have two speakers lined up, 
  Srdjan will talk on testing and someone volunteered to talk on
  Parse::RecDescent - was that you Finlay?

* The following meeting will be three weeks later on March 14th.  
  The plan for the March meeting is to line up an evening of 
  lightning talks.  The primary aim of lightning talks is to have
  fun.  Mark-Jason Dominus explains the concept here:

    http://perl.plover.com/lt/lightning-talks.html

  This is an excellent opportunity for first-time speakers to get
  up and have a go.  Each talk will be all over in 5 minutes so
  the worst case scenario for embarrassment and pain is not too bad.

  At Wellington.pm it will work like this:

  - you will need to 'sign-up' in advance - we'll have a sheet
    available at the February meeting, so get your thinking caps
    on now
  - one person can sign up for more than one talk so sign up
    early and often
  - slides are definitely not mandatory, it's probably more
    important that you practise what you're going to say
  - if you are going to use slides, bear in mind that there is no
    time between talks for messing around unplugging laptops etc,
    so your slides *must* be provided to me in advance in either
    HTML format (will be viewed via Mozilla Firefox) or the
    OpenOffice.org 'Impress' format
  - do not turn up on the night with a whizzy demo program on your
    laptop expecting to plug it in
  - if you have something that's going to take longer than 5 minutes,
    great!  You can do that one another evening :-)

There are ton's of good ideas at MJD's page linked above, you've got
three months to get yourself organised and you only have to speak for 5
minutes so there are absolutely no excuses.

Cheers
Grant