The impression I had, and received in speaking with many of the almost 200 attendees was that this first installment of Mid-Atlantic CodeCamp was a huge success.  Thanks to all the volunteers, speakers and Andrew for their hard work.

The speakers list read as a who’s who among the Mid-Atlantic Area and it was great to finally put faces with blogs.  Among the notable: Darrell Norton, Sahil Malik, Vishwas Lele, Frank La Vigne and even Julie Lerman who was just a bit away from home in Vermont.  There were loads of other people including about a dozen usergroup leaders in the mid atlantic region. 

To that end www.ugmidatlantic.com was born, a centralized location for information on usergroups and their events in the Mid-Atlantic region.

CodeCamp was fun, I was looking forward to seeing Vishwas’ presentation on Ajax.NET but I was presenting on Regex in that same slot.  The Regex presentation went well, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas how to tweak it to make it more effective.  Thanks to everyone at my session, after 10 hours and just having pizza I still managed to work in a few jokes and didn’t have any sleepers.

Seems like we’ll certainly do another Code Camp in the area, the question will be when, where and how do we get more people…

One final thing, if you know anything about me you know I’ve had a serious case of tablet envy/fever since their initial announcement.  I’ve never been able to convince myself that they’d be a good investment, mainly because I was under the impression that I wouldn’t be able to use it as a daily driver.  Let’s get some things straight, all I’d do is write code, read and post blogs, collect digicam pics and not much else, I’m not heavy into graphics and certainly not a gamer on the PC (I’ll leave that to XBox and PS2 — God Of War rocks!).  Thankfully Julie and Frank cleared that misconception, that it’ll be horribly painful to run VS.NET on it.  Sort of pushing that to an extreme Andrew says he’s got a VPC set up on his Protege and runs the 2005 beta bits on the VPC, and he hasn’t killed himself yet…  So, seems I’m out of excuses and having just bought Danielle a bedroom set for mothers day I shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing her I need a new tablet even though my current one is less than 7 months old….  It’s a Compaq Presario R3something, Best Buy model P4 3Ghz with 1.25GB RAM and an 80GB drive, so it might show up on Ebay in the very near future.