May 2006

The next Exploit Boston Game Night is happening tonight at the Common Ground in my neighborhood of Allston. It’s the perfect weather to play some board games. Things start up around 7pm and we’re there until 11pm. There’s usually a group or two that stays later — the bar is open until 2am and the kitchen (with *really* good food) is open until 11pm. I usually tell people to get there at 7 for dinner and then stick around for the games. It’s 21+ and free admission.

Starting in June, the summer schedule will be the first Tuesday of the month at the Common Ground in Allston and the third Wednesday of the month at True Grounds in Somerville. The board game night came to life last summer at True Grounds so it’s great that it will be returning there after a six month haitus.

If you’ve got a copy of today’s Boston Metro, there’s a little interview I did talking about board game night. It’s on page 24. Here’s the PDF, too.

I attended my first TypeCon last summer. This year, as luck would have it, the conference is happening August 9-13th at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Boston. They’ve got an interim website up (by Boston’s Stolze Design) with more in the works for later this month.

I took a few notes at the Boston Web Innovators meeting #6 (at Hotel@MIT) during the brief “main dish” presentations. I was surprised there was no Q&A at the end of each presentation. Next time I’ll spend more time talking to people before the presentations. I didn’t realize the talks this time around would be shorter than the last event I attended (#3 or #4).

Main Dishes

• Julian Bourne, ProxPro

An application for your mobile phone to help facilitate “chance meetings” by researching and locating people.

• Margaret Olson, Plum

“My Plum”:

lists collections of stuff of interest to you

Collect something using the desktop app or with a bookmarklet:
Scrapes the page you were at and adds into a collection

Plummer app:
collect through your desktop
It knows what you’ve focused on in iPhoto to prepopulate, etc.

Collaborations:

“only friends”, “group of people”, etc.

Connections:
Other collections that might be related based on how individual items in other collections are related to each other

Side Dishes

• Dan Zarrella, bvine
• Erik Fantasia, Calorie Count
• Andy Singleton, Assembla
• Matthew McNeely, FindFreeTime

There are a lot of really great bands in the Boston area; but The Casual Lean are my current favorite.

They’re playing a show at Great Scott in my neighborhood of Allston Tuesday, May 9th. Doors open at 9pm and tickets are $8. And of course they’ve got a few tunes up at MySpace.

Bostonist likes The Casual Lean, too.

I gave Exploit Boston a bit of a makeover recently. It’s been a work-in-progress for a long, long time — but I’m definitely much happier with the way it looks now. I’m not a web designer but I have enjoyed tinkering with it. If you’re using an ancient browser such as IE 5, it won’t look good (and you really should upgrade to Firefox!)

Since the event photo group at Flickr has been doing so well, I thought I’d try to incorporate contributor photos into Exploit Boston’s website more. As always, you can see the latest five photos on EB’s homepage and in a Flash badge at Bostonist. I also started up an event photo spotlight featuring one contributors photos of a particular event. Here are the first three spotlights: Day Without Immigrants from Sushiesque, 2006 Boston Marathon Photos from Andy Carvin, and Zombies in Davis Square from Aero Racer E.

The next board game night at the Common Ground in Allston is 7pm (tomorrow) Tuesday, May 2nd. It’s biweekly throughout May so it’ll also be happening on the 16th and 30th.