HeresTomWithTheWeather

Tonight at Tech Night at MonkeyWrench Books, there was a conversation about Twitter which drifted into a conversation about the more decentralized open-source identi.ca done by Evan Prodromou. My mis-pronounciation of Evan's name sounded familiar enough to Brandon Wiley, the original coder of Freenet, that he recognized him from the early days of Freenet. A funny story about their first meeting which was at the O'Reilly P2P Conference was followed by an interesting conversation started by Donald about a decentralized urban farm in San Francisco called myFarm.

After the meeting, Brandon reminded us about Startup Camp Austin and I asked Brandon if I could get him to do a PSA for the event and he agreed.



Brandon, who is a regular at Austin Jelly, has a new startup called Ringlight. Brandon introduced StartupCampAustin at his blog a week ago.

Labels: austin, freenet, jelly, startup

An interesting thing happened on Friday. I showed up for the weekly Jelly at 10. The wireless router was on its last legs. I twittered a heads up. At 10:25, I decided I would be more productive at my client's site. It wasn't a wasted trip as I got to talk shop with a few people before I left.

Back at Cafe Caffeine, Jelly was still happening but without wi-fi and wi-fi is the sine qua non. So, after weighing alternatives, Stephen Gutknecht and Sarah Vela chose a plan of action. Since the manager of the coffeehouse was away, Stephen assumed the risk of the purchase of an Airport Extreme which Sarah picked up from the nearby Apple Store at Barton Creek. By noon, Jelly had wi-fi.

Soon afterwards, the manager arrived and Stephen emphasized that it was his choice to do it and wasn't looking to force them into buying a particularly expensive router. Management appreciated the grassroots energy and reimbursed Stephen for the router.

Chalk up another win for local independent coffee.

Labels: austin, cafecaffeine, jelly