So two days ago there was the Israeli Blogger dinner, it was a blast. 16 bloggers and a single localhost blogger showed up, which was more than I thought there were, as a matter of fact.

Highlights of the evening:

• Getting to tell jokes about the value of Heaps Of Meat vs. Stacks of Meat.
• Waiting for the meat.
• Trying to participate in three very interesting conversation at once.
• Hearing quite a lot about the community in Israel and abroad.

I am definately going to be at the next one, and it should defianately be a regular occurance. You can get some pictures here (look for the goofy looking fellow, that is me).

The dinner itself was great, but the end was soured by the place - Papagaio Azrieli - trying to scam us. I wouldn't have anything good to say on the service, cost or the quality of food, but the last part was over the top (charging for drinks that we thought were supposed to be part of the meal).

Next time, we are going to do it some place else (still a meat-joint, fear not), and it is definately going to need bigger tables, I think that I missed about 50% of the interesting talk because I was too far away.

Chears for Omer for organizing it.

Omer has just posted the details, it is going to be on Monday, 20/11/2006, in Tel Aviv or nearby at 21:00. Someplace kosher, of course.

I am certainly going to be there, you are welcome as well.

Omer had a great idea yesterday in the user group meeting, we really should resume the blogger dinners around here.

Any takers? If so, please head to Omer's post and leave a comment.

Justin was sick and couldn't make it, but Roy filled in for him with a lecture about Regexes. My lecture was the second one, and I think it went very well. I managed to show everything that I planned to (although not all that I wanted), and actually got to the last slide on time, which was a major worry for me.

Things to improve:

• This is supposed to be an entry level user group - but I feel that I had answered too many questions at a higher level than may have been appropriate. This was probably because those were good questions, but I probably should have saved
• It is probably not a good idea to show the SQL code from NHibernate when the dialect is set to SQL 2005 - when you start to use paging scray stuff with CTE are starting to happen, which just confuses people.
• I noticed mid way that I sometimes get stuck in the middle of explaining a complex concept. This is because to understand the concept you need to understand a whole lot of stuff behind it, which I simply can't explain in a short time frame. As a result, there were several cases where I started a sentence, paused with an "Ah..." and then had to bail out by saying it is too complex.

On October 30, I am going to give a lecture in the Tapuz User Group meeting.  The topic of the lecture is "Active Record: How to write less code."

This is a 101 (introductory) talk, showing what you can do with Active Record and how much more productive it makes you.

There are a couple of nice tools for code generation that I have reviewed recently, but I don't think that I am going to go for the flashy screens and the wizards and reams of generated code.

I am going to give a RAD talk without a single wizard...

If you are in Israel, come and tell me how spectacular a failure this is going to be... :-)

P.S: Some poor guy actually asked to reserve two hours of my time to talk about OR/M. I'm not sure if I should pity him or not...

P.S.S: I'll make the slides / code avialable after the lecture.