I love trivia games. I also love pool and drinking beer. Well, these three vices came together in a perfect storm with Zack’s Bar. Sadly, Zack’s closed and I am now old. For me, in my late 30s, hanging out in bars is downright pathetic. And I hate the smoke, and those days are over. I have not cast my shadow on Bar Trivia kiosks in years. And since I don’t yet speak German, even if I went out to bars in Berlin, I would lose all the trivia games: wrong culture and wrong language. Well, my man CC Chapman hooked me up with Trivya — bar trivia taken to the next level: live competition and real money winnings! In fact, now that I have wasted spent hours on making and losing money on Trivya on Facebook, I think I am going to throw my hat in towards winning a $10,000 trivia tournament in March. Hopefully, I won’t atrophy before the tournament begins. While what Trivya is may be called casual gaming, I call it a night at Zack’s without the hangover, without the credit card debt, and without clothes smelling of smoke.

No matter how much that sounds like a regular trivia game, you’re wrong: this is a for real, this is big bucks, this is hardcore. While you can play Trivya via the web, using TriviaOnNet, the real magic happens when you play it from within Facebook with the Trivya Facebook Application. And, like I said before, when you sign up, they spot you $5. And, once you get going and getting your boat legs, you’re eligible to sign up for the $10,000 trivia tournament in March.I like to portray myself as all intellectual and so forth but it is all a ruse. I hate crosswords and scrabble. My friend David kicks my butt around the block. My real skill is trivia because I am a pop culture garbage can. A real compost heap for TV and Movie trivia. Crew Scrabulous on Facebook I am all about Trivya on Facebook!

What I like about Trivya is that it is a social network of gamers. Like many online games and MMORPGs, you can meet up with your competition well ahead of your competition. Sometimes you need to wait for a couple minutes before the games begin which give you a little time to say hello or even try some trash talk if that’s how you roll.

As part of the outreach that CC is doing at the moment for Trivya, his client, he put together a social media press release about Trivya (which is a really gorgeous SMNR, truth be told) if you want to learn more. Trivya also have some teaser videos that they did before CC got involved with them that have a retro vibe to them.

News Facts from the Social Media News Release from Trivya

• Trivya offers a great way to win money simply by playing and having fun. The game platform is the most advanced software available today on the web. It features crisp graphics, fast pace and exciting competitive environment.
• Trivya hosts a community of over 20,000 trivia fans that communicate with each other using fun networking tools such as blogs, create friend lists, write their own quizzes and take quizzes created by others. Players can also chat and invite each other to games on the game platform itself.
• With their newly launched Facebook application, Trivya is taking it’s unique gaming platform a new arena of consumers looking to play casual online games.
• This March trivia aficionados from across the world will compete for their share of $10,000 in total prize money. All are welcome to go head to head with the best trivia minds in the world. The top 10 players will receive cash rewards.

Look what I found (memories): Thu May 10 05:47:42 CEST 2001 “I wanted to just quickly and with a low-profile, announce the beginning stages of the DC Zope-Python User Group. <http://www.zpug.org> Thanks in Advance, Chris Abraham.”

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to Michael McLay and GWU, we have a place, a time, and a date for the next Zope Python User Group Meeting. The next ZPug will meet on Saturday, 21 September, 2002, at the Tompkins Hall of Engineering on the GW campus. Rejoice!Michael McLay wrote in a recent email:

I confirmed with Tony Stanco that we will have a room available at GWU on September 21st for the ZPUG meeting. The meeting room is in Tompkins Hall of Engineering on 23nd St. A campus map is also available. We can have the room every month on the third Saturday. Tony said if we only use it every other month that the PerlMongers will be using it on the alternate months. (I’m not making this up) Perhaps the move to Saturday morning will have a positive effect on the regularity of our meetings. The Tompkins Hall building is a few blocks from the Kennedy Center and from the Georgetown. If the weather cooperates this would be a great family outing opportunity.

Are there any volunteers to give a status report on the development of Zope3 or Python 2.3? If not, then perhaps a line up of mini-talks would be interesting. Please suggest a python package or module that you found particularly useful and prepare a few slides that describe it’s use and benefits.

I can give a presentation on the PyGtk 2.0 GUI package. James Henstridge has done an incredible amount of work on automating the generation of C code wrappers for the Gtk+ 2.0 and Gnome libraries. The 2.0 release of this package takes avantage of the new features of the C API for Python 2.2. The Gtk wrapper written in Python is gone. The entire GUI module is written in C.

I’ve recently spent some time trying to use ZSI to implement SOAP, in conjunction with the PyGtk GUI interface. Unfortunately ZSI was designed with httplib, which does not share a mainloop well with the Threading module, so I tried replacing httplib in ZSI with asyncore. That was an interested several days effort. Finally I decided to make life much easy on myself so I switched to Pyro instead of SOAP. Harmony has been restored to the Universe. Picking the right tool for the job can save lots of effort.

Another topic for discussion is the upcoming Open Source for E-Government Conference. I been asked to give a presentation at the Conference. I’m interested in gathering examples of government use of Open Source software (Python in particular).

Volunteers for other subjects? And please don’t be shy. about suggesting alternatives. (Chris, I hope you don’t mind my jumping in with a proposal for the meeting.) I’m just trying to get the ball moving again. Hopefully some more interesting subject will be proposed and I can postpone my contribution until October.