Posts Tagged ‘event’

Geekazine is proud to present the Madison Tweetup – December 2nd at the Dry Bean. Festivities will start at 7 PM and will go until 10 PM or until we choose. Come on down and talk with other local social mediates.

Frank Busch (MSB) will be providing the music for the evening. We will be giving away some great prizes throughout the night. Second Harvest Food Bank will have a barrel where you can drop a non-perishable food item.

Anyone interested in wanting to help, feel free to contact me at 608-205-4378 or geekazine@gmail.com.

Tweetup – a Social Network event where people meet to talk to other Social Networkers. Tweetup comes from Twitter, where “Tweeters” would get together to meet face – to – face.

Prize sponsors:

• Pegasus Games
• Westfield Comics etc.
• Vitense Golfland
• Raven Computers
• The Dry Bean

Day Off - Sort of
A late Ramblings this week as I decided to stay offline last week. It was a long week and I was playing all weekend. It has been a while since I last took more than 24 hours off a computer, so that is a big feat for me.

HP Tech Forum

I had a fun time talking and working with Andy McCaskey and Kara Karsten with SDRNews. We had such a blast. We also put forward the mobile interview booth rig. We call it the “MacGyver” rig. Nonetheless, it was connected to uStream and we were able to conduct a few interviews for the event. Check out all the info on the Twitter log at #HPTF.

Great to meet some new bloggers: Shane Pitman of Neowin, John Obeto of AbsoluteWindows. We had a great week along with Halley, Tom, Calvin and Rebecca from HP and Buzzcorps.

Fryes at Vegas

Also got to go to Vegas again. While we didn’t run around town as much as with CES (everything was contained in Mandalay Bay), we did venture out to go to Fryes. It’s actually my first time at Fryes and I was pretty impressed. Of course, it was Vegas, so the store has a big slot machine up in it’s store front and stacks of coins as barrier posts. The inside was very big and complete. Andy had to get a new scratch drive since the one he brought died. We got what we needed and headed back to the safe Mandalay Bay

Mandalay Bay

Wow. This is a city contained in a building. That is, if you have the money for it. My room – which I call the “Bob Newhart” room – was decked with all the amenities. TV in the bedroom and the bathroom. You can connect an external device easily and be watching a movie while soaking in the tub.

The casino area was always hoppin. There were bands both on the “Sushi Pop” and “House of Blues” stages. Restaurants all over the building. A small walk and you are at “theHotel”. They even have their own beach – where we watched the Beach Boys play a set. Well, it was a short set for me, since I had a flight to catch.

Podcast on the show floor

I had the unique opportunity to record the show from the HPTF Expo floor. It was great because I didn’t have to set up a rig, do a show, rip it down and go to another area to post. I would also like to thank Simon Calder for helping out with the show notes so I could focus on other things.

What I got out of the show

Of course, there were a lot of things I have learned from this event. I have run server rooms before, but I was a little out of touch with the current technologies. FCoE was the big one I learned about. Also building a server is a lot different than before. Greener, more powerful and reliability were the best parts.

The Keynotes were just amazing. Learning about how these big companies are working on green technologies is amazing. Dr. Michio Kaku and his views for the future were amazing. A “Smart toilet” is definitely something to get excited about.

The Weekend

I got back to Madison at 8 AM on Friday. It was a long trip (5 hours, turned into 7 due to timezone changes). What was worse was on the trip back, I was not really impressed with the airline I flew. The one thing I noticed is they were not really friendly.

An example: We flew through a couple storm fronts during the trip. Most airlines would say “This is the Captain. We are seeing some turbulance, so please remain in your seats and buckle your belts. Thank you.”

The airline I was on? Well: “Please buckle your seatbelts”.

The airline also had screens drop from above. While I would normally invite this, I was in a evening flight. I had difficulties sleeping when something like a video monitor is playing. Of course, I didn’t pack my sleeping mask. Therefore, I was stuck watching “Confessions of a Shopoholic”. While other people loved this movie, I didn’t find it as interesting.

I got home around 9 AM, in which I proceeded to collapse on the bed for a couple hours. Woke up, caught up on some work I missed during the week, then headed off to play a show. Since it was out of town, I had to pack for another night away from home.

Band Gigs

Saturday was a day of playing. We played a friends graduation, then it was up to the Dells for our regular show at the Baja bar. There were 4 different Bachelorette parties that night and they were not in the Baja at the same time. As one party left, the next one showed up. Crazy.

New Guitar

While we were in transit to the Graduation party, we stopped at a local music store. There, I found a used Acoustic / Electric guitar. I picked it up as a spare for future shows. It needs some work to it, but not much to make it ready to play out.

Lazy Sunday? Not.

Of course, the day started out with this post. A quick breakfast, then it’s getting things ready for the week. Have to work on “Week in Tech History”, then I have to figure out how to put together the new video studio. Lots of soundproofing to do.

I suppose I should get to it. Thanks again to everyone for a great week. How do you top that?

Avast thinks Hulu is a Malicious Site

I went to Hulu this afternoon to catch up on my HEROES. I didn’t get to see it on Monday, so I knew that I could go up there and watch the show without issue. Or COULD I?

Turns out Avast won’t have it. It is blocking the SWF from playing and saying “Malicious Code”. Tried a few times in Firefox and IE. Every show or movie I try to play comes up with the same thing.

Here’s the kicker – neither Avast nor the Event viewer is showing any more info. In fact, it’s not even logging the event!

Could this be a malicious code? Could it be that Avasts’ database is off? Maybe Hulu changed some stuff to thwart Boxee from going through the RSS backdoor?

Well, there is a way around that. I went to NBC.com and watched the episode. I hope it’s not a real issue on Hulu…

**Update – Avast has posted an update to allow the Hulu SWF through. There was still no Event log on what it blocked**

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You’ve been working at your job for years. You’ve made lots of money for the company and are the most loyal employee they know of. Yet, tough times are ahead and the company decides you are one of the 10% they have to let go to stay afloat. It’s a frustrating thing to have happen, but what are you gonna do?

Now let’s flip that: You are at your job and survive the cut, but now you are in the position to take up a part of that person who was laid off.

As companies like Intel and Google are looking at trimming the fat, it makes the average consumer wonder – what will our customer experience be without 10% of the workforce?

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We are back on the wagon, it was a tough WITH to produce because of this cough.Nonetheless, we found some great history and are reporting to you.

December 16th 1988, Kevin Mitnick is charged for breaking into and stealing software from DEC. He also gained control of MCI codes in England and LA. Mitnick became a martr for some computer geeks as he bucked the system in ways people were unsuseptable to .  My personal favorite is how he got free pizza.

Other events that happened this week – Suspenders were patented by Mark Twain. Microsoft stops supporting IE for the Mac. The Altair 8800 kit is first released, Symantec and Veritas merge and a lot more. Of course to get all the events, you’ll have to listen to the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (9.4MB)

This week we have a lot of great history, including the event on Oct. 28th, 1955. William Gates III came into this world. Of course we all know him as the funny man in those Seinfeld commercials. However, he ran a little ole company we like to call “Micro.. Micro..” Wait. What is that called again?

Interestingly enough 30 years later (1985), Bill Gates put Microsoft up for IPO. Other cool history notes – the DMCA is signed, the first Ball Point Pen becomes available and OpenSocial.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.7MB)

Firstly, we are changing the name of the show to Week in Tech History, or WITH.On the Weekend edition of WITH, we got two interesting events. First of all, it’s Pac Man Fever and It’s driving me crazy! 1979, Pac Man was introduced in Japan and in 1980 was introduced in the US. Of course, Pac Man was created by Namco, has over 30 spinoff games and even has a board game version.

There are a lot of other cool items in the weekend edition like IBM releases, XP SP1 and it’s officially Tom Cruise day.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.6MB)

Apple’s at it again – another event and another secret product that everyone is wasting bandwidth guessing what it is. “The Brick” as it was called in the early stages is actually going to be something with laptops. There are some that say multi-touch screens, others saying it’s a new type of Aluminum case.

Whatever it is it will debut on Oct 14th. So in homage, here is this weeks’ bitstrips.

Web Apps.  Can we live without them anymore? What did we ever do without them? Webware put out it’s top 100 and we’re going to go through them and see what was good, what was bad, and what was… well, you know..

Webware is a site dedicated to watching what is popping up out on the internet. Any application that a web developer puts out will be checked out and reported on by this organization. It’s a good thing, too. There are so many out there, it’s tough to keep up.

On April 21^st, Webware put out the list of the top 100 apps. There were ten categories, each with ten winners. There were 5000 nominees, and 300 apps were chosen as finalists. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to dwindle this list down to 100.

According to Webware, most of the winners were also winners last year. There were a couple apps that pushed their way onto the list. This might not be as easy next year as Web Apps are expected to be more widely used within 2008.

So here are the top picks:

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.3MB)

Podcast (quickcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:01 — 2.3MB)

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Events covered:

First Blu-Ray Player
IBM 360
First SpaceShuttle Spacewalk
Atari Opens it’s doors
Synthetic Rubber

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.6MB)

Podcast (quickcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:02 — 4.6MB)

Show is found HERE

Firefox 3 Ready
A Star Exploded
Verizon Wins FCC Auction
Why Gibson, Why?
Extra Segment
Featured Content:
Go to the funeral, or see it on a web cam?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.3MB)