Tomorrow's technical meeting for Birmingham Perl Mongers gave me a big headache this morning. The Perl monger who works for QPC, who loan us the boardroom for meetings, informed me he couldn't attend. As I've done a bit of promotion locally for this, I was extremely disappointed. We either had to cancel, reschedule or find another venue. I didn't want to do either of the first two, and although there are at least two other venues we could use, none have a projector. Thankfully, another employee has stepped in and offered to stay behind so we can still hold the meeting at QPC. So problem averted for now.
So ... if you're in Birmingham tomorrow, feel free to drop by. The talk, 'XS Baggage: All at C with Perl', is by Andrew Ford (of refcards.com fame). It will be a 90 minute tutorial on using XS within Perl. Several of us have expressed interest in this side of Perl, so I'm quite pleased that Andrew has agreed to come along and present this. I'm expecting a decent turnout.
It's been a great frustration that we haven't got more companies in the city centre actively supporting Perl. There are companies that use it, but just don't advertise it very well. It would be nice to hook up with them, which could perhaps enable us to hold bigger technical meetings in the future. After all, once John moves on from QPC, we're going to have to find another venue anyway. I'm currently keeping an eye on various eBay auctions for projectors, but so far I've been unsuccessful bidding on anything. Usually they quickly rise to well above ã100. I was hoping to get one when just the bulb had blown, til I discovered that most bulbs cost over ã200. Once we've got one mind, there are 2 pubs that have offered us the use of their function rooms ... for free.
With meetup.com support (not that they really actively promoted) being withdrawn, I was wondering where else I could advertise the group. Most new recruits who have come along in recent years, have found us either through the web site, word of mouth, or via the 2 main Linux user group lists I'm on (Wolves & South Birmingham). I once tried advertising on the birmingham newsgroup, but got nothing. I'm considering advertising in some of the free local papers, as they get into pretty much every home, but there's no guarantee the advert will get spotted. Then again even if only one person spots it and comes along, that'll be a result. But there has to be another place where Perl programmers in Brum could find out about us. I'm always surprised by how often people are surprised to discover we exist and have existed now for nearly 5 years. I think I'm going to have to start regularly hitting the local news sites and get some interest there.
