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3D Printers at NIWeek 2012
LAVA and OpenG BBQ #10
LAVA is the largest community-based support forum for LabVIEW in the world. OpenG is a community-maintained, free-for-everyone set of VIs to augment vi.lib. Wholly independent of NI, these two web sites serve as repositories for a wealth of LabVIEW wisdom. Each year for the last 10 years, on the Tuesday of NI Week, LAVA and OpenG have hosted a BBQ dinner to give users who only know each other online a chance to put a face with a user handle and socialize. A record-setting 115 people attended this year's event.
This year's venue was Sholtz Garden. Because of the large crowd, the event was held outdoors. Yes, that's right... these 115 people like LabVIEW and each other so much that they enjoyed hot BBQ outside in the 100+ degree evening. Lucky thing there was shade and big blowing fans. The sit-down meal is a unique chance at NI Week for users to talk to each other -- and those of us from NI are there as users, not as NI reps. The event is much less business-oriented that most of NI Week, and it generally turns into a bull session for every topic under the (very sweltering) sun. After the meal, famous LAVA users Jim Kring, Justin Gores and Chris Relf gave brief speeches about the history and future of LAVA, and then they ran the raffle. The raffle of door prizes is a tradition at LAVA BBQ, where the prizes are donated by a wide range of people. This year's haul included a bottle of wine from the Truchard winery (yes, that Truchard), an Android tablet, a thumb drive containing a working version of a LabVIEW 1.0 emulator, mouse pads, silly putty, and other items related to LabVIEW and/or computer programming.
The event cost $30 a ticket, which is expensive for a BBQ dinner, until you realize that ticket sales are a major source of fund raising to keep the LAVA web site up and running. When you think of it as the subscription fee for the content of the LAVA Code Repository and the instant online help that LAVA users provide to anyone who posts questions, $30 starts to look like a real bargain.
The evening concluded with a selection of limericks about famous LV users from Darren Nattinger -- he of Darren's Nuggets fame. I will leave those to your imagination, though there is a standing challenge to complete "There once was a node from the palettes..."
Until next year...
