So, are there enough people in Santa Cruz and environs that it would be worth getting together on this side of the hill? I could definitely spend an evening talking about stuff over beers sometime.
I'm located in Santa Cruz county and interested in getting together if we can reach critical mass. Would be interesting to bring together a group to share ideas, leverage each other's talents, and work on collaborative projects.
My areas of expertise include custom electronics design (PCB design, digital ASIC design, CPLD/FPGA programming, analog circuit design), firmware development (assembly, C), embedded Linux, web applications (SOAP, XML, ClearSilver, sqlite), web design, and misc scripting languages.
Cool. I'm professionally a unix admin, and I've done a lot of perl, a little python, even less php, mysql stuff, and so on. II've done some arduino things-- I added more sliders to the pocket piano shield and built a fairly nasty-sounding synth for it, and I wrote MeggySeq for the MeggyJr. I'm currently working on a larger RGB LED matrix, but I think I need to use a PC board rather than just stuffing everything into perfboard and wiring it up. (I also just moved house, so it's been going slowly lately.)
We don't even necessarily need a huge crowd of people, like a dorkbot or whatever, just enough to bounce ideas off each other and ask questions and so on. From what I've seen there are a bunch of Santa Cruz people around, but some of them are UCSC students and go home for the summer or are harder to get in touch with in general. But searching the forums here, there's more than just you and me!