Welcome back Maggie! I suggest you guys talk about sex, the latest New York fashions, and flower arranging, I've heard that programmers are really interested in that. :-) Seriously, how about childhood? Where people grew up, a favorite memory, a cherished toy, I find that everyone has a childhood thing that they want to share. It's also a great way to get to know someone. Another one might be food, favorite dishes and how to make them. Politics is dicey when you're probably going to have different cultures sitting down together (and the Quebec factor). What people do in their free time, vacations are really good for conversation as well as some hobbies.

Gold star Dina - One of the things that I'm doing at my new job is helping the research director turn a very informal power point presentation on software development into a focused training document. It's in Word, not my strongest program, but I took a standard Word manual template and made a few quick modifications so that it looks decent. The hardest part was editing the content. Well, the director just came over to my desk to set up a meeting this afternoon and he said that he was "very pleased" with the result. Yay!