OldNews

Annual Holiday Party / Game Night: Thursday December 10th

In the past our holiday party has occurred at Pwned (now closed), Area51, or as a LAN party. This year we're having a board/card game night at Tina's house. We'll play whatever you bring (zombies aka Last Night on Earth, Arkanam Horror, RoboRally, many versions of Munchkin, Fluxx and The Great Space Race have all made previous appearances). There's also a Wii with 2 Wii controlers and 3 GameCube controlers, if you wanted to bring Wii/GameCube games and additional controllers. We also need a couple people to bring folding tables and chairs, and some to bring snack foods/beverages. Please RSVP using the wiki, including what you plan to bring.

-Tina (2) providing the house, the person with the Wii + 2 Wii controllers + 3 GameCube controllers.

-Aaron - games

-Brent

-Jon T (late)

-Will & Sue - diet pop

(Tim cancelled out)

-Your name and stuff here

Lunch: Thursday December 17th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a flock of funny, fanciful, non-ficticious people.

Planned Social: December TBD

Ideas can be found here or invent your own. What would you like to do? Tell Tina.

Social: Monday November 23rd

Walking to work off some of that holiday stress. We'll leave Panera South (next door to HyVee, on Hwy 14) promptly at 6:30 pm and take the walking trail for ~3.5 miles along the river. We'll be back no later than 8:30 pm, and those interested can socialize over a mug of Panera's hot chocolate afterwards.

Lunch: Thursday November 19th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a multitude of miscreants.

Annual Swap/Sale and Vintage Computer/Electronics Sale: Thursday November 12th

RCTC Main Campus, East Hall (EA) room 103

This location is larger than we'd previously been able to get (thanks Jose!), and it's near the parking lot entrance. Set up at 6 pm, festivities begin at 6:30 pm.

Come if you want to Sell Stuff!
Come if you want to show off Stuff! (prizes awarded for crowd favorites)
Come if you want to Buy Stuff! (K-Lug Tee shirts available too)
Come if you want to eat Stuff! (Pizza and Pop available for a donation)

We need volunteers for creating advertising, putting up signs, running the recycling station, and of course everyone should bring their stuff to sell/swap.
We'll make use of volunteer labor to help you get your stuff in and out too, no worries.

Job list - volunteers needed!
-Bring your stuff to sell/swap. Everyone.
In previous years some of the folks higher priced stuff or a lot of stuff have pre-announced their "list of goodies" on the news group or our wiki...that might bring out more customers.

-Bring your stuff to show off in the Vintage Electronics show, and a “hat” if you want to submit an item for viewers choice award. Everyone

-Come up with a Vintage Electronics viewers choice award, be in charge of distributing 1 ticket per customer, tally and award at end of night. _____________

-Create an advertising sales flier that all the people responsible for posting can download and print. Include who, when, where, and what (sale, swap, recycling, vintage, pizza, free CDs). (done) Jon Gullixson, Here it is!

-Print and show this Sale Flyer to friends. Everyone.

-Bring your computer stuff that needs to go to the recycling ($0.30 per pound, rounded up to the nearest dollar for ease of making change). Everyone.

-Help others bring their stuff to the room, down to their cars. Aaron Albertson

-Help others bring their stuff down to their cars afterwards. Pat Spinler

-Bring a bathroom scale that's accurate at low weight ranges, so we can figure out the appropriate recycling fee to charge. Mo Holahan

-Man the recycling area, do the weighing, cost figuring, and providing of change. Brent V

-Bring your truck and be willing to take a load to the recycling during the recycling center's open hours (Mondays-Saturdays, 8-5). Brent V

-Coordinate the pizza fundraiser, buy pizza and pop plus bring paper plates and disposable cups in quantities sufficient for those who show up. Will be reimbursed out of the profits from the fundraiser (charge is a donation). Pizza supply list, from 2008 results: pizza (4), pop (4 2L), paper plates, napkins, plastic cups, ice. We had ~1/2 a pizza and ~2L worth of pop left over in 2008, but we broke even on the donations, so we were good. The "fancier" pizza flavors were the faster movers, such as supreme went much faster than cheese. And root beer and Mt Dew went much faster than Sprite. Set up a sign indicating that the pizza and pop are in this part of the room, that's it's for donation. Also label a cup as the donation collection container. Steve Severson will bring the pizza, Mo Holahan will handle the pop, ice, and cups.

-Making some (Ubuntu?) CDs to give away (5?). - Steve Severson

-Get a location - Tina W

-Posting. Volunteers are needed to post the flier to many locations. Please sign up to be the poster for the following (suggestions welcome):
-KLUG mailing list and wiki (done) - Tina W
-IBM Calendar - (done) Tim M
-IBM Social Blue- (done) Tim M
-Ham Radio Club (done) Tim M
-PCIG Website -(done) Tim M
-Mayo classifieds _____________
-Craigslist, Think Bank _____________
-Rochester Freecycle (limited to free pick-up of non-swapped items headed for recycling at the end of the swap) - (this probably won't get done due to posting requirements) _____________
-UCR bulletin boards - in hard copy _____________
-RCTC bulletin boards - in hard copy, bring your own push pins _____________
-IBM Building 107 - post hard copy - Steve Severson
-IBM White Building(664) - post hard copy _____________
-Other IBM buildings - post hard copy _____________
-Venture Computer - send email of flyer, request posting - Steve Severson
-NorLug? _____________
-Area 51? _____________
-Computer Liquidator on 2nd street? _____________
-Other places/ways to advertise? Public access? Would we qualify for free advertising on the radio, newspaper, etc?
-Wherever else you can think of. _____________

-Create illegal wayfinding “Tonight!” signs for posting at UCR on the evening of. ("Tonight!" with arrows in appropriate directions, highlighting of what the event is and the room number, advertise the free linux CDs on our signs, etc) ________________

-Arrive at UCR at 5:45 pm, post illegal wayfinding signs on all entry doors, nearby directional corners, and on the room door. Bring masking tape. Also responsible for taking down at the end of the night. Find a door stop so we can prop the room door open. The masking tape and a pen are also useful for posting a sign above the pizza/pop, saying it's available for donation. And for putting a label on a cup as being the donation collection container. _____________

-Arrive at UCR before 6 pm, write welcome message on the chalk board, also list upcoming KLUG events and dates, K-LUG website address _____________

-People could list what they haven't sold and haven't tossed, post-swap. http://www.k-lug.org/ForSaleorWanted . _____________

-After it seemed like everyone was there and set up, we went around the room and let each seller advertise their highlights and freebies. Let buyers have a chance to ask if anyone had something in particular that hadn't been mentioned. Advertised the recycling, and the food.

Post meeting wrap-up

Last night:

-we ended up in room EA 119 at the last minute, that room worked just fine too. Tim and Brent posted signs to help direct people where they needed to go.

-we had several people bring things to sell/swap, and very little (1 item?) to show. Without Joel we had to entertain ourselves with the sound of our own voices. There was plenty of table space.

-Just after 6:30 pm I gave a run down of what was available and then we went around the room, people who had items they wanted to talk about (showing, selling, hoping to buy) got to mention them.

-Mo brought 5 2L bottles of pop, cups, and ice. For future reference, the ice didn't get used nearly so much this year, and 4 2L would have been enough. Steve S brought 4 pizzas, of which there were only ~2 slices left (cheese) at the end of the night. Donations were less forthcoming however, and we failed to break even even with Tux sitting next to the donation container.

-The Ubuntu CD's didn't seem very popular, maybe this is due to most people having increased bandwidth available compared to several years ago?

-Nobody voted for a viewers choice show item, so we didn't have to worry about tallying votes or giving out a prize.

-Tim sold at least one more K-LUG branded item.

-Mo brought a nice scale, and Brent did brisk business manning the recycling station. I'm not sure what the total was, but we helped Brent haul several loads worth of plastic, metal, and electronics out to his truck at the end of the night.

-I don't have a great estimate for the number of people who stopped in last night, but I'd guess around 40. Most people stayed for more than one brisk walk around the tables, looking around and talking to people. One gentleman specifically mentioned he found out about this event on the IBM calendar, and another from Craigslist.

The general impression I got from talking to people was that the event was enjoyable, even if they only managed to get rid of a power supply or two. Please let me know if you have specific feedback on what was good about this event and/or how we should consider improving it. Thanks to everyone for their work getting a room, creating a flier, posting the fliers, recycling, feeding/eating, showing/selling/swapping/buying, cleaning everything up afterwards, and anything else I forgot to mention.

Socials: October 24th and 28th

Chris Abbey is leading two photowalks. The nature/fall colors photowalk will be at Quarry Hill on Saturday October 24th, 2 pm. The architecture photowalk will be downtown on Wednesday October 28th, 11:30 am. For either/both, please RSVP off-list to Chris.

More details about Saturday:
It's looking like we'll hit a good 75-80% color by then, plus there's a chance for fresh snow the night before. We'll meet at the 9th St NE entrance to Quarry Hill Park. Hopefully no one will have the picnic pavilion reserved and we can meet up there. If not we'll be at sign post 17. Plan is we'll probably chat for 10 to 15 minutes then take off along the following sequence of sign posts: 17, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 7, 6, 3. There are a couple of variations along there, from 10 to 6 there are two ways to go, and after 6 there's a loop tht can be taken that will bring you back to the same point, but take you to a scenic overlook along the way. That will get us pretty much to the end of the wooded trails. From there you can take the most direct route back to where we started via points 5, 24/23, 18. Which will take you through both the pond/marsh and prairie areas... OR you can take a less direct route through the mine via 2, 4, 28, insanity, 21, 20, 18. If we time it right and we're heading out near sunset, the view from the scenic point between 25 and 27 should be stellar. I've been wanting to shoot the sunset from there for a while, and might take advantage of it. (After climbing up the hill from point 28, bear RIGHT when you hit the mine wall and bear right at all trail forks until you hit the end.) Weather forecast is for highs in the 40s Saturday, so expect it to be brisk. it looks to be about 2 miles. Post walk social gathering somewhere with hot chocolate, coffee, and/or soup I think. We can figure it out while we walk. Maybe great harvest? RSVP.

Map to make sense of all those numbers

Bad weather makeup will be 24 hours later, 2pm Sunday.

More details about Wednesday:
DOWNTOWN/URBAN WALK: Wednesday October 28, 11:30am? Meet up in the foyer of the mall/university/shoppes formerly known as the galleria mall. I'm thinking around the area of where Z Pizza is... the chairs near the stairs coming down from the U of M (Why? because I plan to be there at about 11am to have a couple slices for lunch before heading off on this excursion. Feel free to join me.) Again we'll meet up and chat for a few minutes then head out. Rough route would be: S on Broadway to 3rd St S, W on 3rd to 1st ave, N on 1st ave to 2nd St, W on 2nd to 2nd Ave, N on 2nd ave to 1st St, E on 1st st (through pease plaza) back to where we started. An alternate, longer route if folks want to is to keep going W on 2nd down to 3rd or 4th Ave, then take either of them N to Center and come back S on 2nd to the entrance to peace plaza. If you're looking for buildings, this might get you more of the older ones. This route gives us a nice mix of buildings and architecture, plus people heading out for lunch and errands. Hopefully the weather will be nice enough for some folks to eat lunch in the plaza. I'm trying to hold this one to a shorter timeframe so folks can get away with a "long lunch" and participate... don't feel you have to stick around to the end, if you want to break off part way through and head back to work, go for it. RSVP.

Bad weather makeup will be TBD. Maybe 24 hours later on Thursday... have to play this one by ear.

Lunch: Thursday October 15th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a swarm of smartypants.

Technical Meeting: Thursday October 8th

Jean Barmash has volunteered to speak on Grails, and has provded the following description and bio.

Grails - High Productivity Web Framework for the Java Platform.

Grails in a high-productivity framework that espouses convention over configuration and takes a lot of good ideas from Ruby on Rails framework. It is based on Groovy Language, a dynamic language designed for easy integration with Java (Groovy is a super-set of Java). Grails is a high-productivity framework by following the "coding by convention" paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer. Grails is built on top of proven Java frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. In November 2008, G2One, the company behind Groovy and Grails, was aqcuired by SpringSource, which in turn was acquired by VMWare just a few weeks ago. (For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grails_(framework) ).

In this presentation, you will get a brief overview of Groovy's capabilities, and then we'll learn about the key concepts behind Grails, and its plugin system, and how it can be used to rapidly prototype applications, and how it enables you to be much more productive programming web applications.

Jean Barmash is the CTO of EnergyScoreCards, a startup company that helps benchmark energy efficiency of multi-family buildings, where he is responsible for architecture and implementation of the SaaS software using the Grails framework. To his role, Jean brings a wealth of experience in different areas of technology creation. Most recently, he was Director of Technical Services at Alfresco Software, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company, where his responsibilities included architecture and hands-on development of content centric solutions, training, and working with open source community. He also worked as Sr. Consultant and Trainer at several Wall Street Firms. Well-versed in both .NET and Java, he is interested in the innovation going on in Web 2.0 and bringing it into the Enterprise. He is a frequent speaker on technology and architecture topics at various user groups and industry conferences such as Software Development Practices, Enterprise 2.0, Atlanta DevNexus, and others.

Here are the slides from Jean's presentation, PDF format.

Lunch: Thursday September 17th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a gathering of geeks.

Technical Meeting: Thursday September 10th

Jon Tollefson will present an intro to iPhone app development.

-6 pm

-RCTC Heintz Center

1926 Collegeview Drive SE - Googlemaps link

Room HA107 or there abouts.

Directions to Campus

Heintz Center Building Map

Social: Geocaching canoe trip, August 22nd

The social this month is a canoeing/kayaking geocaching event. Yes, I'm again piggybacking off activities organized by other people. You can paddle, or paddle+geocache, but you can't just geocache. Follow the link for the event details. It's a most of the day affair up in Cannon Falls.

Lunch: Thursday August 20th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a gathering of geeks.

Technical Meeting: Thursday August 13th Demo of Windows 7

-> When: Thursday August 13th

-> 6pm - 7:30pm

-> Where:RCTC Heintz Center

1926 Collegeview Drive SE - Googlemaps link

Room HA107

Directions to Campus

Heintz Center Building Map

Microsoft has Windows 7 Betas available for free download and the product will be delivered in Oct 2009. So we thought it was high time the PC Club condense all the hype down and take a look at what is new. Bill Hanson and Tim Massaro will give an intro to Windows 7 and demo some of the features.

Social: Free comedy show, Wednesday July 29th, 7 pm

We're going to a free comedy show, it starts at 7 pm in the Peace Plaza. Several other activities going on down there that evening (4:30 pm Music by Royal T, 6:30-8 pm Vikings Cheerleaders, 7 pm Comedians Bob Zany, Scott Hansen, and Jeff Gerbino), details on the Autism Awareness website. Add for Comedy Nite

Lunch: Thursday July 16th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a gathering of geeks.

Technical Meeting: Thursday July 9th Demo of Socialbrowse by Zack Garbo

When: Thursday July 9th, 6pm - 7:30pm

Heintz Center Building Map

Socialbrowse was conceived by co-founders Zachary Garbow and David Fowler as part of Silicon Valley's Y Combinator startup program. Socialbrowse aims to change the “static, individual” experience of browsing the Web into a more social and dynamic one. The first version of the product allows people who use the Firefox browser to install a program that creates a real-time sidebar of links and comments shared by their friends. After recently closing a seed stage round of funding, they will soon be launching an ambitious new version of Socialbrowse that serves as a platform for social browsing applications, which run on any web browser without any installation.

Zachary will provide a sneak peek of this new version, currently under development. He'll demonstrate how anyone can develop and deploy custom collaborative applications quickly and easily using the next generation of http://Socialbrowse.com

Lunch: Thursday June 18th

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a convocation of geeks.

Technical Meeting: Thursday June 11th Tour of the Digital and Analog Projection Booth's at Wehrenberg Theaters

-> When: Thursday June 11th

-> 6pm - 7pm

-> Where:Wehrenberg Theaters Rochester <- Note, not our normal meeting location

K-LUG has an "in" at the local Wehrenberg theater and a few members attended an impromptu tour of the projection booth there a few weeks ago. It was so much fun we've decided to offer it for everyone this month as our main meeting topic. Let's meet at 6PM in the "drive-in" feature of the lobby. The tour will take 30mins to an hour. After the tour people can choose to stay and watch a movie or not. We are recommending the group attend the new animated 3D movie Up which is getting great reviews and is rated PG.

Other movies available too...see their website here http://www.wehrenberg.com/theatres.aspx#6

Prices are as follows. ADULT Price: $10.50 /ticket

CHILD Price: $7.50 /ticket

SENIOR (over 60) Price: $8.50 /ticket

We'd like to let the theater know how many people to expect, so please email Tina if you plan to attend.

Thanks!

Lunch: Thursday May 21st

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a convocation of geeks.

Technical Meeting: Thursday May 21st

NOTE DATE AND LOCATION CHANGE
A field trip to see this year's Studio Academy FIRST Robotics League robot, we'll be at Studio Academy for their presentation, 6 pm.

Studio Academy is located at 415 16th St SW, Rochester, MN 55902 Our meeting and demo will be in the auditorium.

In town social: Thursday May 14th

Since we aren't having a technical meeting on our regular night, come socialize with your favorite geeks. We're going to see the new Star Trek movie! Exact time, theater, and screen size yet TBD.

In Town Social: Wednesday April 22nd, 2009

6:30 pm at Quarry Hill, park and roadside cleanup. We have areas #127 and #140 on this map. I'm coordinating us with another group of people that tends to overlap, so all of the details can be found here. Bring your own gloves; bags and disposal will be provided because we're doing this as part of Rochester's Litter Bit Better campaign. Headcounts to Tina would be appreciated.

Lunch: Thursday April 16th, 2009

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. I hope we're not like crows, a murder of geeks doesn't sound very good.

Technical Meeting: Thursday April 9th, 2009

Mike Bleimeyer, aircrack-ng and Kismet demonstration. Usual place and time, 6 pm at RCTC's Heintz Center room HA107.

Out of town Social: Saturday April 4th, 8 am, 2009

A field trip to the Cities to watch the FIRST Robotics League Regional competition. Carpools will depart at 8 am, see the Social page for more details and to sign up. More info from the PB.

Games mailing list

We've started a new mailing list for people who are interested in (non-video) gaming. Currently we've been playing Munchkin and RoboRally. See the link in the site navigation menu to join the mailing list if you're interested in joining us.

Want a K-Lug Shirt?

Our first batch of shirts came out rather nice, especially for the price. We have folk who didn't get in on the first order. Please browse the deals here, and contact Tim if interested. (We need a minimum order of 4) We can now order screen printed tees from this company as well

Lunch: Thursday March 19th, 2009

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a convocation of geeks.

Social: Tuesday March 17th, 2009

We're celebrating Irish Heritage Day with potatoes, specifically potato guns! We'll also be constructing a Rube Goldberg device (including things like diet Coke and Mentos). People need to bring a contribution to make this social a success, more details and sign ups on the Social page.

Technical Meeting: Thursday March 12th, 2009

Mo Holahan will present Processing an Image Processing Programming language and development environment. Location: The usual place: RCTC's Heintz Center , Room HA107 , and time (6 pm).

Details on the Processing Presentation

http://processing.org/

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is also used in connection with Arduino (which was the subject of our Feb meeting)

We'll also be celebrating Pi day a little early.

Lunch: Thursday February 19th, 2009

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Look for a gaggle of gregarious geeks.

Social: February 13th, 2009 6:30 pm

Make DVD episodes 1-4 will be shown at Tim M's house. Also available for viewing will be the Hackers R Peeps 2 video Kevin A brought us back from DefCon, and gaming for those who prefer it. Directions here. It'd be nice if some people brought snacks/beverages to contribute. If you have allergies, beware they do have pets.

Technical Meeting: Thursday February 12th, 2009

Dennis DeLorme will present on Arduino. The usual place: RCTC's Heintz Center , Room HA107 , and time (6 pm).

Details on the Arduino Presentation

Arduino is an open source hardware and software project designed to make microcontrollers easy to use. It is based on the Atmel ATmega168, consisting of a defined hardware implementation with several form factors for different applications. The software development system is based on a C subset with predefined functions to take advantage of the hardware features. The intent is to provide an easy to use system for people to use in their creative endeavors - rather than worrying about low level details. See the http://www.arduino.cc homepage for more information.

Dennis DeLorme spent the majority of his career working on data base and file system implementation on the S/38, AS/400, and iSeries. Most recently he has been involved with the Roadrunner and Blue Gene supercomputing systems. For relaxation he enjoys the simplicity of working with microcontrollers. He has implemented a variety of projects using processors from Intel, Motorola, Microchip and now the Atmel AVR based Arduino.

Also on the agenda will be a mini-presentation by Jon Tollefson on syncing Google Calendar (where we've got Linux and social activities posted), which was originally scheduled for January but delayed due to a full agenda.

PCIG nominations

Social: Saturday January 17th, 2009

You are invited to a gaming afternoon and potluck dinner at Tina's on Saturday January 17th. 2 pm gaming, with dinner at approximately 6 pm, feel free to join us for either or both. We'll play some Munchkin Bites, and have a garlic-laden dinner. RSVP.

Technical Meeting: Thursday January 15th, 2009 Hardcore computers

NOTE DATE CHANGE

Daren Klum, president of Rochester based, Hardcore Computers will demonstrate their "Reactor" liquid cooled personal computers (that's right, think Cray 2)

An intro to the Reactor: Every computer you've ever used has been limited by heat—until now. First-of-its-kind submersion technology allows for the maximum, most reliable and most sustainable component over-clocking. Submersion cooling provides benefits such as maximum performance, a superior gaming experience and extended service life

Mini-presentation by Ben Joslin and some students from Studio Academy on the FIRST Robotics League, in hopes of recruiting some of us as volunteers and mentors. They'll show the video of the 2009 game, show what parts they have to work with and what they have built so far.

Mini-presentation by Jon Tollefson on syncing Google Calendar (where we've got Linux and social activities posted). (held over until a future meeting due to a full agenda)

Also, elections

The usual place: RCTC's Heintz Center , Room HA107 , 6 pm.

Lunch: Thursday January 15th, 2009

11:30 am, at the Apache Mall food court near B&N. Just for Steve F we'll sit right near the main door and hope it's -20 ;) (It ended up being wind chills of -50 below that day, just in case anyone was curious)

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