puzzle solving meeting?

Welcome!

On Jun 22, 2007, at 12:10 PM, Webb Sprague wrote:

> Hi pdxpug
>
> (I have been lurking, and I plan on attending at least some meetings
> once my wife and I move up to Eugene. She will be getting a masters
> in architectural history and planning, and I will be doing field
> research in sociology in the Willamette valley for my PhD...

Neat! Enjoy Eugene. I lived there for five years and have visited
recently to go to a sysadmin's user group they started there last year.

> I think this would be really interesting. I wonder if it might be
> experiment with meetings structured around some puzzles/problems
> members are trying to solve.

I like it! I've seen this done at OSCON.. I wouldn't feel great
about leading this discussion, but I think we have several people
(Mark, David, James, Rafael, Vassilis?) who could. Or if a few of
those folks would just agree to be there for the meeting.

> I would be willing to be one of the guineau pigs on this (though I
> don't want to go solo :) ). I will be collecting field data in
> Postgres: life histories, genealogies, transcripts for qualitative
> analysis, as well as public data like Census, economic time series,
> and property shapefiles. I will be doing some analysis in R and
> Postgis and maybe some fancy text processing, and I would love some
> good advice.

That sounds very interesting. I certainly learned a few things from
Bill's schema (from the Oceanography presentation).

Well, it looks like we have 3-4 ideas out there for the next few
meetings. I'll write them up and assign months to them.

-selena