Been a busy summer, but given that LunchGeeks is in the Wall Street Journal today, we’d better not let August slip by without a geek-fest. 
Here’s the Upcoming event, it’s tomorrow (August 30th) at 1pm at La Fiesta in Mountain View. Add your name to Upcoming so I know how many people to get the table(s) for.
See ya there!
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Had a great lunch at La Fiesta (man, Grandma’s Sauce, or enjococado, is amazing) with some fellow geeks yesterday. We talked about all sorts of stuff, from Cambrian House, to Wordpress, branding and naming new companies, PHP vs Ruby on Rails, etc. Once again, we had someone who was just starting a brand-new company, this time related to building a market for services, which was really cool. I love hearing about new stuff.
We got to play with an awesome new pocket camera, too, an Olympus Stylus 770 SW. The thing is waterproof (to 33ft!), and shockproof (the owner had dropped it on hard cement, no problems). It has digital image stabilization, which I’m always leery of (I prefer optical), but the rest of the camera was so cool, I definitely need to play with one more. We’ve been so focused on SLRs here at the office lately (our latest favorite? The Fuji S5 paired up with a Nikon 18-200mm VR lens) that I’ve gotten behind on small cameras. We took some photos with it, but since the camera isn’t mine, I don’t know where they’ll end up. I’ll link them if I find out.
Oh, and one girl had a great Darth Vader t-shirt I’d love to get my hands on. Unfortunately, I’m so bad with names, I’ve forgotten it already. If you’re reading this, can you email me or comment where you got it?
I’ll pick a date for the June one ASAP so people have a little more time to prepare. Sorry for the late notice last time.
New to LunchGeeks? Read this.
Sorry for the late notice, I realize this may limit the # of attendees. Let’s meet at La Fiesta again just for simplicity’s sake since I’m so lagged this month.
We had a great time last month, so come on over. Look for me in my red SmugMug hat.
It’s the day after the Lunch 2.0 LinkedIn event. Do try to RSVP in the comments if you can.
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Lunch 2.0, sorta a sister event to LunchGeeks, has a bunch of upcoming events:
Looks like fun! I’m gonna try to make the LinkedIn one this week if I can . They’ll be added to the Google Calendar momentarily.
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I was afraid I’d be eating enchiladas all by my self, but some geeks showed up to keep me company.
Five other geeks showed up, ranging from startups to consultants and companies like Yahoo and Box.net. We talked about S3, EC2, SQLite, Sitemaps, Yahoo’s crawler, servers, storage, Box.net’s neat new widgets, Sun vs Dell vs Rackable vs HP, “wtf do VARs do”, and all sorts of other goodness. Great to meet new people and talk tech.
I’ll announce the May date soon, so subscribe to the feed or the calendars and tell your friends.
All the details on the original post. Cya there!
I realize most of you wanting to see Grindhouse probably went opening night. Lucky ducks. Since we were busy, we’re going tomorrow night (Wednesday the 11th) at 7pm at Century 16 in Mountain View.
Haven’t seen it yet? Come! Let us know in the comments so we can look for you (I’ll have my red SmugMug hat on).
Just created a public Google Calendar for LunchGeeks. So if subscribing to the feed isn’t your thing, or you want lunches to show on your photo automagically or whatever, here ya go:
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First event! Even if it’s just me, it’ll be tasty Mexican!
La Fiesta is near downtown Mountain View and has fantastic enchiladas and such. I’ll be there around 1pm, wearing a red SmugMug hat, and will just grab a table with the first handful of people who show up.
Please comment if you’re planning on coming so we can give La Fiesta a heads up if, by some miracle, it’s a large # of people.
See ya there! Tell your friends.
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So this idea is sorta half-baked still, but bear with me. Oh, and “me” = “Don MacAskill, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug”. Here’s the deal:
Some friends of mine run the already successful Lunch 2.0 events, and this isn’t a replacement. Instead of corporate sponsorship with presentations to the group, the whole point of this event (theoretically) is just to meet and discuss whatever you think is cool with whoever is at your table. Think “micro foo camp” and you’ll be in the right ballpark.
If one of the big guys (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) wants to host this at their corporate cafeteria, awesome, drop me a line. But still no presentations or anything - so your bang for the buck is much lower than something like Lunch 2.0. You don’t get to sell us directly. There won’t be any SmugMug pimping, either.
So who’s a geek? I’ll leave that up to you. If you code, blog, do systems or networking, etc, you clearly qualify. It’s definitely not limited to the internet space, either. Do genetics research? Robotics? You’re in. You get the point.
If you’re a geek AND VC or media, and can check your VC/media identity at the door, you’re welcome to attend. But please don’t come looking for your next investment or story - that’s not the spirit of the event. Everyone’s on the honor system to rat out any VC or press not abiding by the rules. 
Live somewhere other than the Silicon Valley and want to have sister events? Drop me a line, I’ll give you an account and you can post your own locations & times.
Finally, sorry about the stock WordPress Theme. I’ll dig around for something better, and you’re welcome to suggest one in the comments.