Last night I had the opportunity to attend a Portland nerd dinner for the first time.  Jim Blizzard has been coordinating these for a bit and the idea appears to be catching on.  We probably had about 15 people there.  The noise from the ice rink made it difficult to hear people at the other end of the table.  If you attend one of these sometime make sure to get a good seat in the middle of the group.  It was nice to meet some of Portland's geeks.  Rory Blyth, Scott Hanselman, and Paul Murphy were the bloggers I met there.  I hope to have opportunity to meet some of the others tonight at the ASP.NET Roadshow.

It was great to meet Paul.  He came down from Seattle and works as a community evangelist for Microsoft.  He knows the Borg (Steve Borg - Dude needs a blog or site to link to).  Paul hooked me up with some good stuff for the Boise .NET developer's user group.  I have a handful of the Visual Studio 2003 development kits for Office ($499 package that even includes VB.NET standard), some MSDN article archive CD's and a bunch of ASP.NET CD's with Web Matrix and a few other misc. items.

Another note about Paul that was I had discovered his Blog earlier in the day and he mentioned working on an NNTP class for .NET.  It was wild to end up sitting next to him and discovering that he was the author of something I had read just a few hours earlier.