Entconnect 2005

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We had another successful Entconnect meeting in Denver this year thanks to all the hard work by John Gaudio. You can see me in the photo, one of several photos taken by Dave Shaver of Corepoint Health, looking at a project that Mark Pelletier and I are working on that is related to aircraft instrumentation. I’ll post about it later when we are further along. Entcon was originally started back around 1992 and was affiliated with Midnight Engineering magazine. This magazine was founded by William E. Gates, not to be confused with the Bill Gates of Microsoft, and focused on starting and running small companies, usually related to technology. Unfortunately, Midnight Engineering is no longer in print, but John and a loyal group of enthusiasts continued having the meetings and gave it a slightly different name, just to make sure we didn’t abscond with the original name of the meeting, Entcon.

I’ve been taking a young friend, Court Rye to Entconnect for the past several years. Court was a summer intern at HP and so I became somewhat of a mentor to him and invited him to Entcon in 2002 and we’ve been attending it ever since. Court is quite experienced in web design and he won a coveted door prize, a Gold blog site from Myst Technologies (a $3500 value) and so he’ll get a chance to learn about this impressive platform. This year, I also brought along Mark Pelletier, and he put together a great little display case for our project, and gave a nice presentation and demo of it.

There were about 25 people there, including about 5 or 6 who were attending for their very first time. The keynote speaker was Bill French, co-founder of MyST Technology. We also got to meet Bill’s son, Loren, and Bill’s dad, Gerry, who gave us a presentation on submarine development for the U.S. Navy, where he spent a 35-year career during the height of the Cold War and nuclear submarine development. It was great to get some feedback on our project from Loren since he is a very experienced pilot with virtually every rating imaginable.

It was good catching up with old friends and making some new ones and I very much look forward to going back next year.