Paintball, The "Other" Planet Eclipse, and A Humble Request

The other day a bunch of us here in the lab went out paintballing as a sort of team-building event. Little did the poor saps know that I used to play every single weekend, have all my own gear, etc. Needless to say the other team was frequently punished by the steady rain of purple paint from my tricked out Classic Automag .68 hammering down upon them. Muwahahah.

Oddly enough, going out with my co-workers has bitten me with the paintball bug again, so when waiting on a build I was checking around online to see how much some of the new markers I like cost. While looking around, I saw for sale a "Planet Eclipse 07 Ego" paintball marker. "There's an Eclipse paintball marker? COOL!!!" Intrigued, I Googled further, and it seems that http://www.planeteclipse.com is the website for the paintball company called (you guessed it) Eclipse that makes this particular marker.

They even have a marker that comes in a cool purplish-blue colour that sort of fits with the theme of our favourite IDE...



So instead of giving away Eclipse mountain bikes this year, how about some cool Eclipse paintball swag? This is way cooler than a mountain bike...

Here's hoping anyway :-)

BeerClipse Meetings?

I just read Ian's blog about demo camps.

An interesting thought.

In addition to this sort of one-time thing, perhaps we could do something like the 2600 meetings. Set a standard time, like the second Friday of the month or something like that, to be the standard day for meetings. Then, people could locally organize their own meetings at that time at their local foodcourt/pub/whatever.

The 2600 meetings range from organized events with actual agendas and presentations, to informal "let's show up and shoot the breeze about hacking" meetings. The nature of the meeting is up to the organizers.

I think you could do something similar for Eclipse and have it be pretty successful. If nothing else. the promise that committers will be there will definitely draw in the user and contributer community because they'll want to corner us and ask questions. And if they don't show, there would always be stuff that we committer folk could talk about amongst ourselves over some frosty beverages.

What do people think about this idea? Would you participate on a regular basis?