Grails was so electric, it brought down the power grid

Last nite's AJUG started off great. Burr, our venerable AJUG leader, started with a discussion on what stuff people wanted to see covered in AJUG in 2010. Next on deck was my Grails presentation. I purposely had the first half of it at a basic level, for the Grails newb's in the crowd. Based on the feedback and attention level, I was rockin' and rollin' - people were asking questions, nodding heads during the basic Grails create-a-project-create-a-domain-gen-a-controller-and-views-demo. Demo'd the RichUI plugin and also some of the features of STS and the Eclipse-Grails plugin. Was on the home stretch, 30 mins left, and was about to demo G-Func and some other cool plugins and start to dive real deep into Grails goodness, when POOF. Lights went on and off.

No problem, gave the projector a couple of mins to restart and starting yapping again. Then POOF, power flickered on-and-off. The torrential rain that had been hammering Atlanta had subsided a week earlier, so we were all wondering what was going on. I figured that the Amway rally that was going on next door was sucking all our electricity. So again I wait for the projector to restart, and again, BANG, power is gone. And it doesn't come back on this time. Burr runs to the hotel manager, comes back and says the power was out on the whole city block. 

Funny thing is that people were so engaged in the Grails world by this time that I continued to answer questions for the next 15 mins in the near total dark - a surreal experience. Room full of 80+ people, only light is my laptop's screen. Finally, people sensed that the power wasn't coming back so the meeting came to an unceremonious end. I threw out the t-shirts I had "acquired" from SpringOne. We didn't have time (or lighting) to raffle off the Grails books that Keegan Kettering, our local SpringSource sales guy, had sent for the meeting. We'll do that at the beginning of next month's meeting. I'm hoping I get to finish off the last 20 or so mins of my Grails presentation also.