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A Fun Slashdot 15th Anniversary Get-Together in St. Petersburg, FL (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the let-loose-the-model-helicopters-of-war! dept.

A lot of people in a lot of places celebrated Slashdot's 15th anniversary by getting together with other Slashdot readers in person. In the Tampa Bay part of Florida, a small and humble meeting was sponsored by an open source company called Fextel at their St. Petersburg HQ. The catering was excellent, and it was a fun group of 12 or so who showed up, about half of whom knew each other from the Suncoast Linux Users Group (SLUG). So we had good food and good people. What else did we need? Remote control helicopter battles, of course! In retrospect, we now believe remote helicopters crashing into each other should be required at any event with a Slashdot theme. We may may just be saying this because we live someplace where the NFL won't let us watch any home games, so we are more entertainment-deprived than most Americans. Then again, maybe helicopter wars are just plain cooler than watching football, and the USA should have fewer NFL games and more Slashdot-based parties.

23 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. St. Petersburg by PoopManners · · Score: 2

    What's up with Americans stealing other countries city names?

    And only good food and people? No booze? What kind of party is that?

    1. Re:St. Petersburg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Tell me about it. I went to the San Diego CSE party, nobody was there, then I find that the venue was changed at the last minute after the fact to the Intuit complex in San Diego.

        So I show up there piss drunk on Sunday with a fat chick, and there's only one guy there for the Slashdot "party". He explains a bunch of nonsense why nobody else there, I don't listen, then I explain to him that I was banned from posting because I trolled the fuck out of Slashdot and that trolling rocks. The guy said that trolling is annoying, but he was nice enough to give me 4 Slashdot T-shirts. I now use them as bate rags. Maybe they all just hid from me because I'm an asshole. Needless to say, I predict that there won't be a 20th to celebrate.

      -- Ethanol-fueled

    2. Re:St. Petersburg by interkin3tic · · Score: 1

      I can't speak for Florida, but in the Midwest it was probably to pretend they don't live in the middle of nowhere.

      They certainly didn't name Mexico Missouri after Mexico because they really like hispanic immigrants. And Versailles Missouri wasn't named because of their love of French words: the correct pronunciation is exactly as you would read phonetically in English. If you say "ver-SAI" Missouri, that's wrong. It's "Ver-say-lez."

    3. Re:St. Petersburg by solardiesel · · Score: 2

      This is not the greatest city in the world. This is just a tribute.

    4. Re:St. Petersburg by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      They were mostly founded by former residents of the cities whose names they "stole". But who was the original Springfield? There is one in almost every state in the union, there's one in Australia and one in Canada. There are probably more elsewhere.

      You have to remember that the US had no cities 200 years ago. And Glasgow sounds suspiciously Russian...

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    5. Re:St. Petersburg by DylanQuixote · · Score: 3, Informative

      The city was named St. Petersburg by a Russian immigrant and railroad tycoon, Peter Demens (Pyotr Alexeyevitch Dementyev, cyrillic: slashdot won't display)

    6. Re:St. Petersburg by sa1lnr · · Score: 1

      I kid you not, but for ages I wondered what all the fuss was about a hotel in Paris. :)

    7. Re:St. Petersburg by SleazyRidr · · Score: 1

      I like Paris, Texas. They have a replica of the Eifell tower, but with a cowboy hat on top. ;)

      --
      Is 1563649 a prime number?
  2. Buccaneers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I have seen every Buccaneers game for the last 10 years, because I don't live in Florida any more.

    1. Re:Buccaneers by kiwimate · · Score: 1

      I have seen every Buccaneers game for the last 10 years

      Loser.

  3. 8 showed up at Denvers 10/13 anniversary by peter303 · · Score: 1

    It was fun

  4. send more coffee by wordsnyc · · Score: 1

    Maybe it was the FL dateline that did it, but I initially read the summary as "getting together with other Slashdot readers in prison."

    --
    Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
  5. Meetup? by DudeTheMath · · Score: 1

    I know I was subscribed to /. meetups (even went to a couple, one in St. Pete, one in Carrollwood) once upon a time, but I didn't get a notice. Glad it was fun.

    --
    You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
    1. Re:Meetup? by DylanQuixote · · Score: 1

      You should come to one of the SLUG meetings or hacking sessions. We have talks ranging from programming languages (especially new/interesting ones), robotics, war stories, etc. We have had some guest speakers in the past, including the first person to setup a webserver in North America. Disclosure: I've been a member for the last decade; and I'm also the president and meeting coordinator for the Pinellas meetings.

    2. Re:Meetup? by DudeTheMath · · Score: 1

      I've bookmarked the SLUG site, but I'm already pretty time-constrained (Sunday's one thing, Tuesday's another, Wednesday's a third, etc.): the perils of having both a family and hobbies besides computers.

      --
      You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
  6. I missed it! by Pat+Attack · · Score: 1

    Seriously, how did I not know this was happening? I'm just south of Orlando and I would have loved to make it. Awell. Maybe for the 20th anniversary.

  7. 40 People Attended in San Francisco by Naso540 · · Score: 1

    We had a good turnout in San Francisco. About 40 people there and yes there was pizza, beer and wine!

  8. Snarky NFL Comment by mistapotta · · Score: 1

    The NFL won't let you buy tickets to home games? How droll!

  9. Re:Can't get the video to play... by RocketRabbit · · Score: 1

    This is probably a net benefit - keeps the spread of CyberAIDS to a minimum.

  10. Better than Vancouver's party by Maow · · Score: 1

    In Vancouver, a medium-sized city with about 2 million in surrounding area, there was exactly one person show up, and he was the single most boring person in Vancouver.

    Shitty "party".

    What's the population of St Petersburg? Fuck, it appears there are about 250,000 people in St Petersburg, 600,000 in Vancouver. Lame...

    1. Re:Better than Vancouver's party by DylanQuixote · · Score: 2

      St. Petersburg is the second largest city in the metro area, which is called Tampa Bay

      From Wikipedia: "The Census Bureau currently estimates the population for the CMSA at 4,228,855 as of 2010 during consolidation.[3] as of July 1, 2008, making it the second most populous metropolitan area in Florida and fourth in the Southeast."

  11. Re:OMG by Ol+Biscuitbarrel · · Score: 1

    Spring Break! Woo Hoo!

  12. Don't forget old and new York by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 1

    Don't forget the big example of the city so nice that they named it twice: NYNY is New York named for the York in England, and before that, the southern tip of Manhattan was Nieuw-Amsterdam and was the captial city of New Netherland. If they weren't naming colonies after rulers, e.g. Virginia and Georgia, they were naming them after familiar territories back home, e.g. New Hampshire.