Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
The Pioneer Valley Web Summit is Here!
(Saturday, April 9th, 2011)
Pioneer Valley Web Summit is Western Massachusetts’ first annual web conference. It will be held on Saturday, April 9th, starting at 10:00 AM, in Seelye Hall at Smith College in Northampton, MA. Registration begins at 9:30 AM.
There is no specific focus of this conference, making it accessible to all. We plan on having three rooms active, one of which will be an “unconference” (so bring your session ideas with you!)
Some broad topics you can expect to encounter include: web design, social media, SEO, web development, discussion of CMSs… and anything else web-related! See the “Speakers” page to see who will be presenting, and the Schedule page to track which sessions you would like to attend.
Sponsors include:
- Skytemple
- common media
- Communicate Health
- Scout Moderation
- Hearth.com
- Midnight Son Designs
- Sarah Meikle – Consultant
Additionally, you can follow notices from the organizers via the @ValleySummit Twitter Account as well as follow commentary from attendees (and organizers) via the #valleysummit Twitter “Hash Tag”
We look forward to seeing you there!
Happy Valley Showdown: Week Three
One of my pasttimes living in the valley is “drinking and drawing,” which has all the fun of drinking and driving, but usually doesn’t end up in multi-vehicle collisions. Usually. And when me and a friend were looking to do a bit of that, we weighed our options and decided the third week of the Happy Valley Showdown, at the Elevens in Northampton, was where to go.
The Happy Valley Showdown is a Battle of the Bands for people who hate to have to see Bands Battling. I hadn’t been to a traditional one, because it took this long to kick my young adulthood habit of playing Final Fantasy games all the time, but it offered stuff that I like. A whole range of performers, from Pinter Moment, a talented fellow plinking away sad songs on a guitar to great effect, to the campily dramatic new wave showboating of Daniel Ouellette, to the Robert-DeNiro-from-Taxi-Driver-mohawk-sporting Idiot Savant who put together some wonderful synth music by himself, and played in two other bands.
The rules are simple: a band has to play four original songs and one cover, in whatever way they please, and like any good democracy, the people who were there vote for their favorites.
LOLFM did a cover of the Beach Boys.
It’s the same song, but no one would mistake this for the Beach Boys.
The grand prize, over time, is to win some precious recording time at Slaughterhouse Recording, as well engineering and mastering, but there’s still a ways to go for that: there are two more rounds with different bands on Sunday the 23rd and Sunday the 30th. The finale on the 13th is going to determine the winner, and if the performances are as strong as the ones I’ve seen, it will blow minds.
For more information, check out the Showdown Facebook fan page.
We Like the Moon
‘Cause it is close to us. (Be careful not to have your speakers up too loud when you click that!)
All silliness and Spongmonkeys aside, we also like the moon because there is going to be a spectacular total lunar eclipse on the morning of Tuesday, December 21st! In the Eastern Standard Time zone it is all going to start around 1:30 am, be totally eclipsed at 3:17 am, and finish up at 5:01 am.
An eclipse like this doesn’t happen all that often, the last one was on February 21, 2008, and those of us in North America and parts of western Europe are in the absolute perfect area for viewing. So if you can drag yourself out of bed, it should be a spectacular sight!
Happy Thanksgiving!
We here at Skytemple want to wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving! May your holiday be full of things to be thankful for!
