Google Data

By Brenda Wallace, Catalyst IT and Geek Girl at Large

For our May Girl Geek Coffee event in Wellington, New Zealand, participants had to solve a series of geeky puzzles to uncover the meeting location and receive some awesome loot that arrived from Google's Open Source Team.

The location was hidden in an arbitrarily added e-mail header, which led to a Flickr page with a username and password hidden in the EXIF (meta data) of the photo jpeg. Once obtained, these credentials could be used to log into the Girl Geek Dinner website to retrieve the location of our caffeinated congregating, along with a pass phrase for getting swag.

Loot consisted of Google mini-notebooks in a variety of colours (the red ones went faster), and Google Open Source t-shirts. The consensus was that Google t-shirts are the best fitting women's t-shirts ever found in the technical community.

Approximately 30 people attended the event, most from the Girl Geek Coffee Hunt. Some gate-crashers from the workshops at Webstock also joined us. There was great beer, wine, coffee (of course) and conversation late into the night.

Topics of conversation were the upcoming Girl Geek Dinner in August, news media in New Zealand, tall poppy syndrome, short poppy syndrome, the launch of felt.co.nz, Microformats, finding more of our kind by recruiting would-be geeks, and modern day geek self-identification using the gear on offer at ThinkGeek & threadless. We played with cameras and argued over Compact vs SLR. There was much swapping of Moo cards and in-depth discussion on the use and misuse of Flickr's APIs.

Girl, geeky and in or around Wellington? We would love to see you at our next Girl Geek affair. Keep your eye on our website so you know when you can next join in the fun.