Saturday night, my friends hosted a "grand opening" party for their business. About 35 people showed up -- probably for the free food and a chance at one of the door prizes. That's the main reason I showed up -- I wanted the 19" flat-screen monitor they were giving away. ;-)
I'm really glad I went. It was a great opportunity to catch up with several of my friends that I haven't seen in years. Several of the other guests were former coworkers, too. I ended up spending most of the time I was there catching up with one of my best friends from back in the Vanguard days.
By the time they finished giving away all the door prizes, I didn't win the monitor. I did, however, win one of the prizes -- a gift certificate for a free computer "tune-up". It's probably a cool prize, but not really worth it for me -- and computer tuning that I need to do at home, I can do myself. Besides, with my Mac, I don't tend to have the kinds of problems that Windows users have -- coming over to search for viruses and spyware is pretty useless on my machine. When my buddy drew my number out of the box and realized that I won that prize, he laughed and said "...And the prize goes to probably the most technical person in the room!" I don't think I was the most technical person in the room, but I was close. *shrug* I'll give it to my mandolin teacher, who is always telling me about problems with his computer.
My buddy from Vanguard won a gift certificate, too. We joked about setting up an old 386 computer as poorly as possible, loading it with spyware and viruses, and then complaining that it couldn't do something that it was never able to do in the first place. That would be kinda funny.