Paul Lockwood really stepped up for this meeting.  He used his extensive network of contacts to secure us a room in TechDiscovery's offices.  Big thanks to the guys at TechDiscovery for hosting us (some of them even sat in on the meeting).

We had about 10 people show up for the meeting (13 if you add in the guys from TechDiscovery), all of whom were developers.  We were especially pleased to welcome Michael Earls back to the Atlanta (Geek) Scene.  Michael just came back from San Francisco and he brought with him a Creative Portable MediaPlayer.  Badass!  What more could you ask for - a 20 Gb drive capable of playing infinite music and movies.  He's recently been using it in conjunction with RSS Enclosures (podcasting) to autoload the device with all his training videos.  If I hadn't just bought a tablet I'd be out in stores looking for one of these.

Paul kicked off our meeting and introduced our hosts to the group.  The guy from TechDiscovery (I apologize, but I forgot his name) said that they were hiring!  They're looking for a few good .Net men.  And women.

After the intro, I gave a presentation on Tablet PCs.  I wanted to focus on the usability rather than the programming side of things at the first meeting.  Get people to see what's already out there and why tablets are so cool.  I showed off OneNote, Speech Input, MS Journal, some of the power toys, and ArtRage.  Got some great comments from the guests, especially when I passed my tablet around for some hands on time.  I did spend a bit of time showing them the InkEdit and InkPicture controls.  Microsoft has just outdone themselves.  It's so easy to create Ink Aware applications, I'm almost embarrassed.  Fantastic!

We wrapped up the meeting early with some general comments about the upcoming meetings. We've got Keith and Shawn coming up in January and February.  Should be great stuff and I'm looking forward to both.

Michael, Brendon, Paul Lockwood, Paul SomebodyElse (can't remember the last name at the moment) and I went to 5 Seasons for some tasty beverages and a bit of a chat.  We had a great conversation about how DRM was both the greatest thing and the worst thing simultaneously.  The gist of the conversation was that DRM enabled content providers to feel safe releasing media content online while at the same time it invites tracking and potential abuse snowballing into an Orwellian fascist state run by the big pigs.  Good stuff.  That and we talked about batteries.  Man, sometimes I'm just stunned by the geekiness.  Good stuff!

-- Matt Ranlett