JUDY

Innoblue (http://innoblue.org/) has been running the Innoblue Garage (http://innoblue.org/pages/garage) since around August of 2011. It's done well as a entrepreneurial meeting place. And the leadership had good intentions about also running it as a hackerspace, as a place where coders, artists, and engineers could hang out and build things.

But my friends in the coding community (and I'll admit, yours truly) had second thoughts about the entrepreneurial side of the operation. We like to create programs and art for their own sake; not necessarily to make money. And making money is the modus operandi of any successful entrepreneur. Hence, the conflict of interest that kept many well-talented people from utilizing the space.

Things have changed. The leadership of Innoblue, like any student-run club, has graduated and shifted hands. From my understanding, the new leadership would prefer to keep their operation on campus, with all of the pros and cons that come with it. I have no qualms here; I'm excited to see Innoblue continue, and I look forward to maintaining a relationship with their group.

I've had some great conversations with the former leadership and other coders in the area, and there's a great deal of interest from everyone in keeping the hackerspace around. I've even heard favorable reports from borough officials who are excited at keeping the operation going for another year, and I will be meeting with them this week. All of us want the place to turn into a "true" hacker/maker space; a community-operated physical place, where people can meet and work on their projects. (http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/) I'm contacting more computer- and engineering-based clubs on campus to see if they have interest in a location downtown. If I can get everyone on board, then our rapidly-forming organization has a much greater chance at success.

We're not just coders. We have friends heavily involved in 3D fabrication, roboticists, philosophers, designers, and other hacker/maker types that want this kind of presence in downtown State College. And if you feel like you belong to any of the above groups, then I hope we can build a place where you'll feel at home.

I'm working on an online wiki to collect everyone's ideas, and an emailing list to make communication easy and efficient. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you're like to get involved.

Thank you for your time.

I wrote this talk for the Ruby Group tonight, but because of the horrible weather, only one other guy was able to show up. (Thanks Hector!) I'll be doing the talk again in March, and hopefully the weather will be much better. In the meanwhile, I'm too excited about how the slideshow turned out, so I'm releasing it now.

zencoding.herokuapp.com

I built the site using ZenCoding (obviously) in Sublime Text 2, and hosted it on Heroku. I used impress.js to put the slideshow together, which was very easy to use.

- C

- Career: Finally become a recognized expert in my field by A) either speaking at one conference about one of my open-source projects, or B) writing a book.
- Home: Create a new home for my daughters and I. This includes getting my finances completely in order, finding a new apartment, and continuing to provide the best education and support I can to my kids.
- Me: Weigh 230 lbs by July 2012. I will become serious about my diet again, and I will sign up for one group athletic activity.

If anyone stumbles upon these commitments later this year, please ping me and ask me if I've made progress. Accountability would be awesome.

1 - Red - Power
2 - White - Button
3 - Black - Ground
4 - Green - Up/Down Axis
5 - Brown - Left/Right Axis

(download)

Click here to download:

TRS-80_Joystick_DIN_Pinouts_ta.zip (10.4 MB)

This is a sub genre of music that I've been enjoying today, and I've been looking for more artists doing it. It's a fusion of classic big band / swing music, and electro house.

I'm really enjoying Google's gradual change into its new redesign. It's becoming apparent that Google has a complete redesign waiting in the wings, and rather than unleashing it on everyone at once, it's slowly changing individual elements so it's not as jarring. It's a very smart move on Google's part.

UPDATE: The GMail team has screenshots of their complete redesign up, and also mentioned that Google Calendar went through a redesign as well. I love it so far.

London and I visited the Summer Solstice Festival. We bid on a few of the Round Barn paintings, and brought home flowers for Mommy. (London requested the arrangement seen above.)