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Las Vegas tech events on the rise!

July 12, 2011 1 Comment

When I organized the first WordCamp Las Vegas event back in January 2009, I was really hoping to parlay the excitement in to an ongoing series of tech events. It worked for a while. We started up a Beer n Blog event that went strong for a while, but then turned in to Beer, hold the Blog.

Aside from BnB, we’ve had quite a few Tweetups. The bulk of which are focused on socializing/networking. Many of these have been excellent events and have connected us with a lot of new people and companies, but these aren’t the types of events that I’m really excited about about.

I have toyed around with ideas for meetup groups and other events that have all fallen apart usually due to a lack of interest at the organizational level. Which makes what has taken place over the past few weeks/months all the more exciting! Here is just a sample of what is going on in the Las Vegas tech scene.

Startup Weekend: A 54 hour event focused on building a web/mobile application bringing together developers, designers and business people to build applications and business case around them. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend this event last month and I’m really hoping another gets scheduled for Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Jelly: Casual coworking, every other Thursday at a coffeehouse in downtown Las Vegas from 7pm to midnight. Bring a laptop and something to work on.

Ignite Vegas: An evening filled with 5-minute talks by people who have an idea they want to share.

WordCamp Las Vegas: A 1 or 2 day event focused on anything and everything WordPress. I should have a bunch of new information on this one in the next couple weeks.

I’ve also been in discussions with a couple of people regarding two other events we’d like to get rolling; The Las Vegas WordPress users group and a WordPress Hack Weekend. You can expect to hear more about those two events starting in August. If you are interested in helping out with either, drop me a line or leave a comment.

As you can see, the Vegas Tech scene is definitely picking up steam. I’m sure there are other tech events going on that I’m not even aware of. If you know of any, drop a link in the comments.

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Filed Under: Conferences, Social Media Tagged With: ,

But it's a dry heat

August 17, 2009
dryheat

I’m not from Las Vegas originally. I grew up in Southern California and spent most of my team in the beach cities. If you’ve ever spent a summer on the coast you know just how humid it can get. 95 degree weather in Redondo Beach with high humidity can feel like it’s own form of torture.

Then you meet these people who live in Las Vegas. You ask them how it’s possible to survive in heat that regularly hits the 110 during the summer and you will undoubtedly get the following response; “But it’s a dry heat.” Before I lived here, I really wanted to smack these people in the head. Dry heat my ass. An oven is still an oven.

Fast forward to today. It’s been 7 years since we moved to Las Vegas. I think by many standards that makes us natives. I can say now that I have become one of those people who, before, I wanted to smack. I’ve told so many people about how dry the heat is out here, you’d almost think I invented the phrase.

Don’t get me wrong, when summer first rolls around each year, I bitch and moan just like everybody else. You see, we really only get 2-3 weeks of comfortable “Spring Time” weather. Then, as if somebody has flipped a switch, it’s flippin’ hot. But, we are now reaching that point in the summer where the locals have once again become accustomed to the heat. For example… The other day as I was leaving my office and walking to my truck I thought to myself, “It is -really- nice out right now.” When I got in my truck the outside temperature gauge told me it was 108. I actually laughed OUT LOUD when I realized what had just happened.

So, it’s true that Las Vegas does, in fact, have a dry heat. I am way more comfortable here in 110 degree weather than in Redondo with 95 degree plus 90 percent humidity. But still, we did come up with a rule. You are only allowed to say “It’s a dry heat” until it reaches 115. After that, you’re just an asshole.

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First Friday in Las Vegas

November 9, 2008
Break Dance

Yesterday was another first for our family. We headed on down to Downtown Las Vegas to check out First Friday, an art & music festival that takes place on the… wait for it… First Friday of every month.

From the First Friday website:

First Friday is produced by Whirlygig, Inc., a Nevada non-profit arts organization founded in October 2002. First Friday has grown from 300 attendees in 2002 to today’s monthly attendance of 5-10,000. The event now encompasses more than 20 city blocks with five blocks closed to vehicular traffic to create a pedestrian area for the outdoor festivities. This grassroots community festival has become “Las Vegas’ favorite community art event” with gallery hopping, free exhibition spaces for artists, live entertainment, street entertainers, shopping food, beverages, and more. More than 80 galleries, restaurants and retail businesses work together to make the First Friday experience unique to the Las Vegas downtown arts district. Volunteers currently jury the art, work the information tables, set up and tear down parts of the event, place the trolley signs, coordinate the trolley guides, and sell soda and water to benefit First Friday. As Mayor Oscar Goodman says, “First Friday is the best thing that has ever happened to Las Vegas.”

Since we had never been, we thought there was a possibility that there were many others who had never been as well. So, we scheduled a last minute meetup for our Tweetup Las Vegas group. Big thanks to Jake & Nate from Black Diamond Digital for letting us use their office as a meeting place. They are only a block and a half from the festivities, so it worked out really well.

We met at BDD around 5:15 and had a chat with a couple people who had heard of Twitter, but had never used it. I gave them a quick tutorial and they both seemed very interested in using it. A few more from our group showed up and we hung out and talked about photography, social networking and hockey until around 6:15. We then headed down to First Friday and walked around checking out the different artists. There were painters, jewelry makers, musicians and even some break dancers. I had a great time taking a bunch of photos, especially of the break dancers.

As we were heading back to BDD we stopped by the Art Factory. This place was absolutely awesome. It’s a two story building with SEVERAL room inside. Each room was taken up by a different artist showing off there work. All types, all genres, all styles and all of them cool. Even though the place looked pretty busy to us, we were told that this was one of the slower nights. Yikes, makes me wonder what it’s like when it’s busy!

The event was really cool and I’m glad we finally made it out. Hopefully I can talk Jake and Nate in to letting us use that as a starting point each month for our twitter meetups. That would be very cool.

See you there next month.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Music, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

WordCamp:Las Vegas, January 10-11, 2009

September 12, 2008
WordCamp

Last month I was really bummed out when I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp:San Francisco. I’ve been using WordPress for a number of years and have always told anybody who would listen that if they plan on blogging, WordPress is the way to go. Last month’s wasn’t the first WordCamp I had heard about, but it was the first one that was taking place at a location and at a time where I should have been able to attend. Unfortunately, sometimes life happens and you just can’t do what you wanted to do.

After the disappointment I started looking for another WordCamp that I’d be able to attend. Everything that was coming up was either too far away to cheaply fly to, or it was on a weekend where I already have plans. It didn’t take long for me to add it all up and realize it’s time to put together a WordCamp right here in Las Vegas. With one little domain name purchase and an email to the nice folks at WordPress, WordCamp:Las Vegas was born!

I’ve already been very lucky and have had some great responses to my initial announcement of the upcoming convention. I’ve also been extremely lucky to receive confirmation from Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer (and fellow Dvorak keyboard user, I might add) that he’ll attend and speak at our conference. I have another WordPress developer by the name of Joseph Scott who has also confirmed that he’ll be joining us and will also give a talk on the inner workings of WordPress.

Now is when the hard work starts. There are a 1000 things I need to figure out between now and January 10th & 11th. There are probably just as many things that I don’t know I don’t know. I already have the help of some key people behind me who I will be looking to for help in a number of areas. I will definitely be looking for volunteers to help with different aspects of the show. If you are interested in being a volunteer, please let me know. Free entry to the show, a staff t-shirt and my eternal gratitude will be your reward.

The registration for the event is now open. Space is limited, so register early!

See you all there!

Filed Under: WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: , , ,

Grand Opening, Casino Style

September 1, 2008
cannery.jpg

When it comes to Las Vegas, everything is done in extremes. Hell, even when they demolish a casino, they pull out all the stops. So this weekend when the Eastside Cannery was set to have their grand opening Thursday night, I was expecting an “over the top” spectacle. Since this was my first time attending the grand opening of any casino, I didn’t really know what to expect. In my mind I was seeing fireworks, laser lights, fog machines and a chorus line of show girls a mile long. Much to my surprise, there was none of that. Honestly, I didn’t miss any of it. The low key approach was much more to my taste!

cannery_small 

I’m not normally the kind of guy who’s going to rush out to a casino the night of their grand opening. But, since my wife is an employee of the new Cannery, we figured we’d go and check it out. They were set to open at 8PM. We made the mistake of showing up at about 7:50. The parking lot was filled to MAX capacity. The line to get in the building was wrapped around the building. We ended up parking down the street and walking a 1/4 mile back to the casino. We nearly got a jaywalking ticket when we chose the exact wrong spot to try to cross the street while the place was littered with cops directing traffic. By the time we got to the doors, everybody had filtered inside and the place was packed. The line to get a player’s card was a mile long. We skipped that line and went right to the poker room.

We sat down at an empty poker table, bought some chips and within a few minutes we had enough players to start a game. I’ll put it on record that my first ever hand at the Cannery casino was playing $2/$4 limit poker and I was dealt a 2 of spades and a 4 of hearts. I folded. We played for a couple hours. The poker room filled up and at one point I believe all 8 of their tables were full or close to it. I finished with a $45 profit and we headed home.

Sunday morning I planned to drop my wife off at work since the employees were not allowed to park at the casino during the opening weekend. They all had to park up the street at Wal-Mart and be shuttled to the casino. I decided to go in and play poker for about an hour. 5 hours later I cashed out and headed home. I pretty much broke even.

On Monday morning they held their first poker tournament. A $25 buy-in, 4 table, No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament. They start you out with only $1000 in chips, but they give you bonus chips if you play live poker for 1 or 2 hours prior to the tournament. $500 tournament chips per hour, maximum of $1000 in bonus chips. I was there for an hour before so I I started the tourney with $1500 in chips. I busted a few people out early and built up a nice chip stack. I then played some aggressive poker to continue building my stack. When all was said and done, I ended up chopping the pot with 2 other players. I had a chip lead on both other guys, but the blinds were so high it wouldn’t have taken but one unlucky hand to knock me out in 3rd place. Splitting the pot 3 ways guaranteed us each better than 2nd place money.

So far I haven’t eaten anything at the casino, so I can’t tell you how the food is. Though I heard several people talking about how great the chicken noodle soup is. Next time I go I’ll try out the diner. Plus I plan on getting some more information about their concert venue which apparently is going to host MMA matches. I’ll keep you posted on what I find.

More info to come later.

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WordCamp Las Vegas. You interested?

August 28, 2008

I’ve been a long time user of WordPress and could probably be considered a glorified fanboy at this point. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make it to any of the WordCamp events as they have all taken place a little too far away. I was lucky enough to attend the first Blog World Expo here in Las Vegas and am registered to attend again next month. Even still, I think it would be a great learning experience (not to mention a lot of fun) to hang out with a bunch of WordPress users geeks for a weekend.

After watching Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” speech from WordCamp San Francisco, that got the wheels turning. “Why not organize a WordCamp here in Las Vegas?” I asked myself. I can’t come up with enough compelling reasons not to.

So I ask you, are you interested in coming to a WordCamp held in Las Vegas? Would you be interested in volunteering some time to help organize? Are you interested in being a sponsor? Would you want to be a guest speaker?

Leave me a comment or drop me a line at John [at] JohnHawkinsUnrated.com and let me know what level of involvement you are interested in.

Viva Las Vegas!

Filed Under: WordCamp, WordPress Tagged With: , ,