CyberChill at alt.coffee
BUZZBUZZBUZZ! IT SEEMS everywhere you turn The Mining Company is in your face. Their “spam wear” (T-shirts), posters, and billboard trucks are everywhere. My most recent sighting was at the 19th Cyberchill meeting at alt.coffee on May 15. This free-form meeting was initially created in reaction to the “boring” Cybersuds. Hmm, yet another happy go-er of early Cybersuds events … Anyway, people began getting together to show off cool stuff. The group was so successful that another stemmed off from it as well–the WWWAC VRML sig. While folks shouldn’t come to these meetings to get jobs, founder DJ Hacker notes that the contacts are valuable. The meeting is very informal: one Bill Gates look-alike was examining a paper airplane fashioned from one of TMC’s posters (haha) with such intensity he could’ve burned a hole in it. Most of the crowd was very Lower East Side-ish (flannel, doc martens, dreds, multiple piercings), there were a large handful of computer looking types (jeans, T-shirts, also in flannel), and one man dressed in a tan suit looking very Clark Kent-ish, tapping away on his laptop. It was mellow and relaxed and coffee coffee everywhere. These events are a cool, low-key, informative alternative for learningg about new technologies and meeting people away from the frenzied party scene in our Alley.