Keith, it would be cool to have someone (other than me) talk about managing large amounts of data. Drop a line to your friend and see if they'd be willing to do a talk.
I talked a bit about hadoop as well since I've been working with that. I could with some prep give a talk about hadoop if people were interested. I've also been playing with the parallel python stuff as well.
My plan is to send out a reminder that the meeting is going to be next Thursday. It's a bit too soon to get anything put together on either of these topics, but we should talk them through next Thursday and see if anybody has more ideas as well.
Tim.