BCSD3 was flat out the biggest best BarCamp in San Diego ever.

I’d like to point out that I outgrew a subnet. That in of itself sort of makes me have to sit down. I heard word that we broke 200 attendees - we only had 150 badges and we ran out of them, and we went through 1.75 kegs of beer, and over the food budget by more than 500 dollars.

Holy shit, I’ll say that again for all the networking people out there: WE OUTGREW A SUBNET. Wow.

If we didn’t hit critical mass this time, then we’re certainly going to next time - but I’m fairly certain we hit critical mass this time around.

We had Chris Messina, one of the founders of BarCamp come visit as well! That was most excellent!

Defcamp went off AWESOME this time as well. The challenge boxes took a pretty fair amount of time, and so did the other challenges.

heres a quick rundown of the challenges:

1) 9 ‘trees’ of 2 challenges, each challenge being multi-staged. When contestants got to the end of a challenge tree they were given a letter, and when all the letters were combined they formed the word ‘izzard’. There were three dead ends.
2) Boxes - Just look at the pictures! They had magnetic ‘read’ switches in them so that we could ‘arm’ the boxes by removing a magnet, 37 nails (in a row :D) on top as ‘leads’, where 31 of them were not correct and 6 of them were. The contestants were supposed to take the aligator clip leads and connect them to the correct nails, and green lights would turn on, signaling them to cut the ‘breaker cable’ that was holding the box shut. Once inside, they had to pick a lock to remove the tray, then they were given a MiniPOV kit and a usb to serial converter.
3) Soldering - teams then were supposed to assemble a miniPOV kit and make it say something clever

It was glorious.

There was a twitter scavenger hunt put on by GirlGamer.com, a Wii Bowling contest and Boogah setup a four-square area and got a cherryball from the store across the street.

Best BarCamp Evar. Here are some pics!

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SO much new stuff.

Startupsd.net - The place for all things startup-related
lightbending.net - IT LIVES! Finally! Anybody need a photographer?
atensyndicate.com - New look, New feel, same awesome guys.
barcampsd.org - New look, new feel, new contest, May 3rd and 4th

Defcamp - new, improved, you’re going to hate us. Bring a soldering iron, a multimeter, some whiskey, and a lockpick set.

I’ve gone freelance, under the atensyndicate name and I’ve landed my first contract. I’ll post more as more develops.

I’m heading up to the Web2.0 expo next week, so expect the usual writeup and pictures from that.

be excellent to eachother
– Bill and Ted

So now that I’m not completely buried with the meta for all these events since they pretty much happened in that exact order, one week after the other I’ve been innandated with networking, organizing, planning, drilling, screenprinting, photo handling/uploading and a sleu of other verbs. Rather than make a detailed post about each event, I thought I’d do a ‘lightning round’ it, so to speak.

Read on for the juicy bits, otherwise have a breadcrab!