Nine people make it to Thursday’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 mentioned that he’d recently received the designation of Red Hat Certified Architect, 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 RHCA 
.
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 its engineering genius quite a bit. We didn’t talk much about its 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!
