On Sunday I officially (if unceremoniously) took over the reins for PLUG. I fumbled my first meeting announcement by being victim of a speaker canceling. I should have confirmed with the speaker before I sent out the announce, as the scrambling to find another speaker and getting the word out about the change before the meeting happened was a chore. I learned my lesson, and made sure to confirm with the speaker before I sent out the announcement for the second meeting of the month.
The second meeting of the month was a great presentation on Erlang presented by Toby DiPasquale. We had a logistics snafu, our previous Unisys host provided a projector, but that was lacking this time so our presenter ended up doing his entire talk on the conference room white board. Lucky for us it worked out and he enjoyed doing the talk on the white board, as it gave some more spice to the talk (which he’d done 2 times previously). Slides and other details are available on the PLUG Previous Meeting Information page. Afterwards we ended up heading over to Capone’s over in Norristown for some beers and food. It was a great place for an after meeting gathering, not crowded, good selection of beers from around the world, it’ll probably become our default after meeting place.
I haven’t spoken much lately about the activity of the PA US team. Assuming I’m properly keeping up with statewide events, we have no fewer than 5 engagements this month:
Saturday September 15: Philly & SE PA: Software Freedom Day @ PACS – Following the presenter, David A Harding (who has recently been hanging around with our team), we’ll be in the lobby handing out CDs and working with PLUG to give demos of Ubuntu and other free software. In preparation for this event, Jim and his wife have been doing a great deal of promotional work, printing up fliers, doing the legwork to post them and contacting dozens of local University CompSci departments in the area.
Saturday September 15: Lehigh Valley: Software Freedom Day 2007 – One of our members even purchased a domain name for the event! They’ll be working with the area LUG and Linux SIG to show off and share free software. Way to go guys!
Monday September 17: Philly & SE PA: Nonprofit Technology Resources Training Session – This is now a monthly event, on the 3rd Monday of each month from 10AM-2PM. This month they’ll be handling and teaching NTR staff to handle software updates, showing staff where to find help aside from our team and in general answering Ubuntu questions. Big cheers for the folks heading this up, doing such a volunteer project during “normal working hours” is not possible for so many of us, and your dedication is admirable.
Saturday September 22: Philly & SE PA: MythTV Seminar – The ATS Group, a local technology company, has graciously offered space on a Saturday for this event (thanks again Jonathan!). During this 5 hour session, Matt Mossholder will be presenting the basics of how to get a MythTV set-up running with Mythbuntu and helping folks who bring their computers with setting it up for themselves. Publicity for this event has been in the form of discussion on the local LUG list and at meetings, forum postings and mailing lists. We’ll also be promoting it at the Software Freedom Day event on the 15th, where Matt will have a live demo as a bit of a teaser. This is the only project this month that I can actually claim to have contributed a lot too, which is ashame because I now have a scheduling conflict and might not actually be able to attend the Seminar!
Wednesday September 26: Philly & SE PA: Mt Airy Learning Tree Computer Volunteer Group LTSP Project – We’ve teamed up with MALT, an organization focused on a variety of classes for adults to set up LTS on donated thin clients to provide a “classroom” environment, and teach the MALT volunteers how to administrate it. This is another project that is now scheduled to be monthly, taking place on the last Wednesday of each month. This month our volunteers will be be focusing on teaching MALT volunteers how to use the thin clients to preform tasks that they may have previously been doing on Windows or Mac.
Finally, it looks like some of our Western folks might be attending WPLUG’s Software Freedom Day event, which we’re hoping will be the catalyst needed to get things going on that half of the state.
Phew! What a month! In case I don’t say it enough, I’m very proud to be part of such a fantastic LoCo team.