Ruby Ireland was very well represented. And, we might have encouraged
a few new people and mailing list lurkers (hello, lurkers!) to stop by
the next meeting. Paul gave a presentation on Rails which, from what I
hear, was very well received. Unfortunately, I had to miss it to
attend John Ward's presentation on his new finance web application
which is being developed in Rails - John, please do join our meetups!

Congrats to the organisers of Barcamp who did a fantastic job. The
venue was ideal. I am absolutely amazed that the straightjacket photos
aren't up on flickr yet! But maybe that's because the wireless access
was a bit of a washout. That was the only hiccup, and not much of one
since the point of the day was to talk to real people. ;-)

New Services I Learned About:

fon.com is a worldwide network of people who share their home wireless
connection with other registered users and in return when you travel
you can take advantage of other people's wireless connections. They
provide a special wireless router which handles everything - and is
less expensive than most wireless routers anyway.

lecayla.com is an Irish company which provides billing services for
web-based software companies. Potentially of interest to us all, and
Conor Halpin's soon-to-be infamous straightjacket presentation will be
remembered for a very long time by all who saw it.

mysay.com (from rococosoft.com) lets teenagers, ahem, people of all
ages record voice messages which can be played back online.