What an awesome gathering! Thanks to Wayan for pulling it together.
I was really impressed with the great bunch of folks in attendance.

Howdy Mike-d. here,

O.K. so, I went to the Lucky Lab Northwest Meet-up in PDX last nite. I almost went to the Lucky Lab in south east Portland, Oregon till I double checked the address on the Tri-met bus website, and saw that it was actually in Northwest PDX.

So any way, about the event. It was cool. I didn't know if anybody else in the city had gotten one of these cute little green & white laptop(headtop) computers.(XO) I was hoping so. I haven't actually gotten mine yet. (G1G1=G0)

They(I think John Negroponte's brother Nicholas Negroponte sent it himself, o.k. maybe not) sent me the 30-45-60 day e-mail recently saying the program was so successful they needed to make more of them(XO)s. So it was cool to see them in action. O.k. so it seemed like people were still learning how to use some of the stuff on them, like sharing and chatting, but who has all those skills perfected anyway.

I did get to play with a few different people(s) XO(s). Pretty neat that someone(s) would let me, a stranger to the group, (actually, I think a lot of us were new, one guy even driving from some far away place in Oregon to get there and Mesh-It-Up.) I guess, what would you expect from a group of people that were willing to buy a little laptop experience(XO) by having(I mean getting) to give one to a young deserving child in a (Third?) World country first.

I met some cool people, learned a little about the personal telco project , N-Ten , and Humaninet and a few other groups .

I also met a suntanned Wayan, some geeks, nerds, and wanna-bees as some described themselves, also a fellow Beaverton High schooler from years ago; I saw like maybe 20 of the XOs around the room, and maybe like 40 people or more there, talking and trying to Mesh central and hack the local metro-fi and the personal telco wi-fi (actually, by hacking, I really mean like log-on-in and try to surf the web before it crashed and went down again and again.)

I saw the XO P.I.P. (picture-in-picture) video in a inch square window while displaying a window with a still picture taken and sent over by the Oregon long-distance traveler guy sitting like 12 feet away, taken with his XO built-in video camera, while showing my goofy mug and the people behind me at the same time. I met a cute girl, (oops, I mean a smart young intelligent woman, with brains and skills), it is Valentine's Day you know.

I even got a ride home from a fellow XOer. I even heard rumor about small developing PDX XO user group type thing, or maybe it's been going for awhile, that was not quite clear. There is supposed to be some link to it on the website somewhere. (oh, yeah thanks>.

I saw the latest in video game technology displayed on the XO it was the like Pre-1980's version of Pong (Ping-Pong), . I saw a random defraging looking screen, really small text of background operations, and wire-less mice hooked up to the XOs, making it a lot easier to control the glide-point-type-mouse pointer.

Heard complaints about people getting a computer with a bad keyboard, that the keyboard was too small, that the battery doesn't last very long. I also heard that the battery does great, and someone even took their battery off to answer my question about which battery the XO OLPC people were sending out; the Lithum-Ion or the Fe-something, since I had read they they would send out one of the two. The answer was the FE-something one which was more eco-friendly and lasted longer.

Oh yeah, and to the young lady I was talking to about wanting to turn my XO into a Video phone, along with developing things and troubleshooting bugs and crashes. I am also interested in the eco-human-sun power-part of this system, which I saw no one with either a crank, a yo-yo or even a solar panel to power their XO. I was glad I went.

Can't wait to get mine, and load other Operating Systems, upgrade firmware, report bugs and crashes, and wishlist items, and hand it to a little kind to watch how they use it and such. The Python button(the code behind the program was not functional yet.) Some people instead Opera, because they didn't like the built in web-browser. The Tam-Tam-type music program was not saving property for another.

I'm sure I forgot something and still missed a bunch of other stuff going on. O.k. enough from me, if you were not there you missed it. But I am sure it will happen again sometime soon.

Thanks. Mike-d. out

Just in case... here is the link the the User group within this site:

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?board=15.0