PLUG chairman

A big round of thanks to Dennis for organizing the Phoenix event for Software Freedom Day 07. Thanks also to the volunteers who helped him organize and run the event and those who did recon on possible event locations.

Dennis has posted a short wrapup with pictures.

Hopefully PLUG will follow Software Freedom Day up with a picnic in October.

Last week's interesting presentation on screen brought in several new people. We also had several new people show up at last month's west side meeting.

It's up to us to make PLUG interesting enough for them to come back.

Thanks to Colin for his presentation. Thanks also to Dierk and Joe for their impromptu mini-presentations.

James over at Rhino Equipment mentioned that he was planning on starting a local Asterisk user group. He's setup a web site saying that it'll kick off in September.

September is also the Phoenix AstriCon.

Amanda from Rhino Equipment has been out to help at the InstallFest.

PLUG recently moved its web site to new hardware. With the change we also moved to Drupal from Joomla!.

With the change we've been getting more participation in maintaining the web site, which it great. Some of that is due to us doing a better job of getting people access to make updates. Some is we seem to have more people familiar with Drupal.

Once again Kevin is updating the user map to work with the new environment. As usual, he's also adding features.

Noel Gorelick of the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University will be discussing ASU's participation in the robotic exploration of the planet Mars, and how linux plays a part in that work.

Noel did a great job with his last presentation for PLUG. Lots of really cool pictures of Mars and stories behind what was going on. He was also a great presenter as well as having really, really cool materials. This might be the last chance to catch the talk as Noel is leaving the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU to work for Google.

Wednesday, 2007May23, starting at 19:00.

Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics

Recently attendance to PLUG meetings has been growing. We're back up to 30 to 40 people at the east side meeting. Having a lot of good presentations has helped there. Not only have we been getting good Free Software presentations ( including JJ's great, spontaneous presentation about his homemade wireless router ), but we've been getting some excellent presentations that aren't directly about Free Software.

We had two presentations on NASA projects ( thanks Noel and Mike! ), plus an excellent presentation on resume writing ( thanks Don! ). Mike even talked with us afterwards about his experiences on the MythBusters.

We have a Town Hall meeting tonight in IRC and I'm planning on giving out the first PLUG award by posting an image here.

PLUG east side meeting tonight. We have presentations on IRC, gNewSense and GIMP tricks.

We also have a good turnout tonight.

We had a great turnout at last month's east side meeting as well. For that one we had Noel in from the ASU Mars project talking about his work with satellites and the mars rovers.

That was a great presentation. Lots of cool pictures and stories! He mentioned that his group asked for rocks to be mailed in and they'll examine them with the same instruments that are on the rovers. That's pretty cool. He says they've gotten 3,000 rocks ( and a few other things ) mailed in.

Talked to Brian to make sure we'll be set for the west side meeting at the new location. He'll get the cheesecake from me Friday night. He'll make sure food is arranged somehow.

Posted a reminder about the meeting to the discuss list.

Updated the meeting entry on the web site to have a description of the topic and info on the new location.

Added an article for the meeting. I don't see how to do links in the articles, so the links to the school and map don't work. Sent mail to the webdev list saying there's a problem.

Sent mail to the webdev list thanking Alan and Jared for the new banner ads.

The west side meeting is moving to the Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics near I-17 and Bell.

We will be meeting in a computer classroom with 60 boxen running GNU/Linux!

The initial class will be on using Blender and we will have food and drinks on hand for the 'grand opening'.

Being just off the freeway should make the meetings much more accessable.

I'm also starting a series named "How I use Free Software". Just a few minutes from someone on how they use Free Software. Doesn't matter if it's work or personal.