Notes from MerriLUG, 20-Mar-2008

[Ted Roche]

Nine people make it to last night's MerriLUG meeting, held on the very 
last night of astronomical winter, in this case the third Thursday of 
March, at Martha's Exchange in Nashua. As was announced, the meeting was 
unstructured, informal, social and general conversations. A good time 
was had by all.

Matt Brodeur mentioned that he'd recently recieved the designation of 
Red Hat Certified Architect [1], currently the top-tier of RH 
certification, requiring quite a bit of studying and passing some 
difficult exams. Congratulations, Matt!

Heather talked about some of the issues with calendaring using Evolution 
and Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning, and that lead to a general 
conversation on the disaster that mankind has made of time zones, 
daylight savings time, expensive telephone systems that can't cope, 
countries that change their minds, and so forth.

Ben was heckled in person, as he showed up. He brought a recent Dell 
lightweight laptop which he obligingly took apart for us to examine the 
various peripherals. An attempt at installing 2 Gb of Live Ubuntu onto a 
1 Gb memory stick was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. He's also been trying 
to get a USB wireless widget to work with Ubuntu. Matt plugged it in and 
showed it would work with Fedora 8, but then Matt's an RHSA <s>.

This lead to a discussion of Network Manager, its strengths and 
weaknesses, new features coming soon.

Conversation roamed all over the placing, including:

- Proper grounding of data center racks.

- Sprinkler systems.

- EPO (Emergency Power Off) switches.

- 50 Hz equipment is not a bargain in 60 Hz countries.

- Proper lacing of cables.

- MythTV, HDHomeRuns, TiV0, podcasts

- the upcoming spam conference at MIT

One fellow, whose name I did not catch (he mentioned he was not good 
with names; me, neither!) brought along an OLPC and we talked about it's 
engineering genius quite a bit. We didn't talk much about it's retail 
disaster, thankfully. Beautiful machines!

Kenta and Kevin and Mike also attended and contributed and participated.

Thanks to all for coming and participating, to Jim for arranging and 
announcing the meeting, to Heather for running the group and to Martha's 
for providing the food and beer and facilities. Next month, we hope to 
have a very exciting meeting, but it's not yet ready for announcement. 
Stay tuned, as Heather gave us some hints last night and it sounds very 
worthwhile!


[1] http://www.redhat.com/certification/

--

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com