Monthly Dinners, North and South
We’re having geek dinners twice a month, now!
On the first Thursday of every month, we meet in Medford at 4 Daughters Irish Pub. There are typically between 10 and 30 attendees these days.
Beginning on January 19th 2012, we are also meeting on the third Thursday of every month up in Grants Pass. We’ll probably try a few different restaurants while we figure out what works best.
All dinners are quite casual, and open to anyone interested! Announcements and reminders are always sent to the mailing list; if you’re not already on it, you probably should be :)
There will be another Hackathon in the spring, and the next Show & Tell in the summer. Details will show up here and, of course, on the list!
December 2011 Show & Tell
The fourth Southern Oregon geek “show & tell” night will be on Thursday, December 8th, 2011. Please join us for this free event. Share some food and learn about the cool projects local folks are working on!
The show and tell presentations will be:
- Logan Bell: Let’s talk about Lucy, DBIC, Perl, why I love it, and why you should too! I’ll walk through an interesting DBIC (a Perl ORM) component I’ve been working on and using Lucy to index objects and retrieve them. Because it’s always nicer to have an indexer instead of a DB query!
- Dick Sweet: The founders of Oregon Stage Tech have been producing computer based technology (hardware and software) for the Shakespeare Festival the last 8 years. Now they are developing commercial quality versions to sell to other theatres. The talk will show off the latest products and talk about the joys/challenges of programming “in the small” where you might be using a computer with a total data memory of 1536 bytes. We will show how a slightly larger processor (that still costs around $6) can run a rather sophisticated website and dim LEDs using built-in PWM capabilities.
- Emile Snyder: A typing/writing/reading game for younger users. Focus on design motivations/challenges and rapid prototyping using pygame. Also, collaborative development with primary user demographic (ie. Larkin, age 6.)
- Dave Hendrix: I plan to talk about using services like Dropbox and Evernote (via APIs) to save time and provide advanced functionality in mobile and desktop applications. I have some examples to show, and some warnings about corners you might be backing yourself into.
There will also be two shorter presentations:
- David Lowe: A demo of the ‘juggle’ software produced during the soggy Hack-a-thon in September.
- Codi Spodnik, Steve Vincent and Alex Pawlowski: An introduction to the resources SOREDI (Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc.) makes available to local entrepreneurs.
The meeting will be from 6:00pm to 9:30pm at the office of Folium Partners, in Ashland. The address is 258 A Street. The office is upstairs, above Lela’s.
This is a free event. There will be homemade pie for everyone! We’ll also have some pizzas delivered, but we will ask you to pitch in a few dollars if you plan to eat it.
Presentations will begin at 7:00pm.
Please let me know by email (j.david.lowe@gmail.com) or via lanyrd if you plan to attend.
See you soon!
Harvest Moon Hack-a-thon
Come one, come all for a weekend of hacking in the company of others! The date is set: September 3rd & 4th, at the Folium office in Ashland.
What are we hacking on? There have been lots of great ideas tossed around, and the current plan is just to show up and decide what to work on at the start of the weekend. We may well end up with multiple projects in progress, and that’s just fine :)
There will be network, table space, whiteboards, and folding metal chairs. If you want something more comfy to sit on, you’re welcome to bring your own chair. There will be coffee and snacky foods, but no centrally organized meals: you should bring food, or some cash for food.
If you’re interested in providing or consuming crash space in or around Ashland, ride-sharing from elsewhere in the region, organizing a meal in advance, trying to choose a project in advance, or anything else you can imagine, please pipe up on the mailing list!
Monthly Dinners, Hackathon and Stuff
We’re back to quietly getting together on the first Thursday of every month for dinner in Medford. These get-togethers are organized and announced on the mailing list; I don’t usually post here about each one. So if you haven’t subscribed, you should!
Later this summer we’ll have our first “hackathon”. That organization is also happening on the mailing list. Details, once they emerge, will be posted here as well.
Finally, the next “show & tell” will most likely be in the winter of 2011. Keep an eye out! And please, get in touch with me if you’re interested in presenting.
June Show & Tell
The third Southern Oregon geek “show & tell” night will be on Thursday, June 2nd. Please join us for this free event. Share some food and learn about some of the cool projects local folks are working on!
The presenters will be:
- Kevin (Folium Partners): Folium Partners will present an update on its ModernBookFactory project, including it’s newest cool tool to join the factory, the Awesome Book Processor. Time allowing, we’ll walk through recent major updates to our Catalog workflow system, making it a central project management tool for one of our largest clients.
- Hunter Greer (FundSense): Hunter will present his project, an investment algorithm for everyone — a consumer’s hedge fund.
- Peter Warren (seekspeak): SeekSpeak is a way to connect people who share common interests, basically IM built around search topics. Peter will be talking about SeekSpeak, the Google Web Toolkit used to build it, and time permitting, a brief comparison of add-on development for 4 major browsers.
- David Lowe (pootpoot): The long and sordid history of the pootifier.
Monthly Dinners
There are no special events being planned at the moment, but we are meeting for regular, informal dinners on the first Thursday of every month. Announcements and planning for these dinners happen on this mailing list, so please subscribe if you haven’t already!
There will be another show & tell event sometime in the spring of 2011. Watch this space (or the mailing list) for details, and please get in touch with me if you’re interested in presenting your work.
December Show & Tell Details
This Thursday, December 2nd, I hope you’ll join us for the second Southern Oregon geek “show & tell” night, to learn about some of the projects local techies are working on.
The presenters will be:
- Bruce Rawles (Geometry Code): A demo of some some remarkably accurate geometric models of the solar system using POV-Ray, an open-source ray-tracing graphics program (now MegaPOV) and PhotoShop; still imagery and a few other geometric animations.
- Kevin (Folium Partners): How jQuery, AJAX, and JSON are used to quickly create database-driven interfaces. He’ll show bits from Folium’s work flow (“Catalog”) as well as the upcoming Modern Book Factory.
- Brandon Kirkland (Epic Flowers): An introduction to the online floral industry, its problems, and how he plans to solve them.
- Ben Ford (Independent iPhone developer): Demonstrating what he’s learned and done with the iPhone game framework Cocos2D, and making and using sprite-sheets.
(Time and attention spans permitting, there may be a top-secret fifth presentation.)
The meeting will be from 6:30pm to 9:30pm at the office of Folium Partners, in Ashland. The address is 258 A Street. The office is upstairs, above Lela’s.
This is a free event. There will be sweets for everyone: drinking chocolate from the Enchanted Florist, and homemade pies from me. We’ll also have some pizzas delivered, but we will ask you to pitch in a few dollars if you plan to eat it.
Starting a little bit earlier, at 6pm, Jay Tapp is offering a tasting of wines made from the grapes he grows. At the same time, John Lee will be demoing the Balsamiq mockup tool, after which he’ll do a drawing for a free Balsamiq license.
Please let me know by email (j.david.lowe@gmail.com) if you plan to attend, and please specify if you’d like some pizza.
Hope to see you there!
