Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

SeattleWireless has been graciously granted access to one of the highest radio towers in Seattle. This is a great step for the project and will facilitate connecting many other nodes to each other advancing the idea of an open city wide wireless network.

In order to make this happen $2500 needs to be raised to pay for some gear and the largest expense of paying a bonded tower climber to mount the gear for us. Once the gear is installed there will be no recurring costs to keep the node up there. Since the projects inception there has never been a campaign for raising money. All the Seattlewireless work and expense has always been handled by the volunteers involved. Over the years many people have asked if they could help financially, well this your chance. Go check out the fundraiser page for more info.

“The health benefits of being married are so large that single men are at greater risk of dying than smokers, says a study.”

Article

Getting married is better than quitting smoking? How about getting divorced vs taking up cigarettes, “honestly honey, lets just take up smoking and work things out, for our health!”. Are eggs good or bad for you this week?

Next month I will be starting a new job as a Security Engineer for one the major wireless carriers. I am very excited but I am going to miss all the great people at Serials Solutions, you guys rock!.

Towards the end of the summer I started working with a few other people on a book for Syngress Publishing titled OS X for Hackers at Heart. Looks like it should be going to publishing any day now. I authored one chapter for the book that focused primarily on using OS X in windows centric corporate environments. Being a newbie to writing for books, it took a while for me to get into of groove of things. But now thats all over with, I am pretty excited to work on more book projects.

Links:
• O’reilly catalog book page
• O’rielly catalog bio page
• Larger book cover image

I spent most this weekend at Mind Camp. A 24 hour geek oriented event inspired by FooCamp and BarCamp. 140 or so people with a wide degree of skills and focuses showed up with laptops, gadgets, and sleeping bags in hand.

The format of the event is very ad-hoc. Session tracks were ironed out on large pieces of paper taped to the walls. Rooms outfitted with entire whiteboard walls
were available to sketch out ideas and explanations. Anyone could and were encouraged to hold sessions. Topics included things like Space Elevators, AJAX, Coffee Hacks, lock picking 101, and Municipal Wireless Networks.

Sessions were interactive and discussion based, less talking head or powerpointy (new slang?). This made for a lot of really good sessions and follow up break out sessions in the hallways and various empty offices. Most people in the feedback sessions agreed that the hallway conversations they had were some of the most memorable moments of the event.

I think my only criticism of the event is that at least half the participants went home in the evening instead of camping out at the event or staying up all night with those of us who did.

I met a ton of people, saw a lot of old friends, and all in all had a great time. A couple of the fun things that come to mind:

• Hanging out in the kitchen making espresso talking about storing data on the wire, and OPN (Other Peoples Networks)
• Playing Werewolf for almost 4 hours straight. Its a variation of Mafia, a group game that is a highly addictive experiment in physchology.
• Driving around the robot from the Titan Robotics Club.

Links:

My Pictures

MindCamp tagged photos on Flickr

Mind Camp Website