I have to admit, I’ve never sat in a coffee shop and worked on anything with a laptop before today. It’s a pretty great thing. Fresh coffee, semi-fresh food, good access (not the cheapest), etc. I’ve been working on a side contract and this was a convenient spot to meet with the other person working on the project, have some face time and get started on the project tasks list and timelines.

A friend of mine sent this around. From: Arnold XXXXXXXXX arnold.xxxxxxx@xxx To: Engineering Staff engineeringstaff@xxx Subject: cable management Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:55:11 -0400 Hi All, Thought I would share a tip I just thought of… In pursuing the contract here at yyy, I got a mitt full of fibre yesterday..lots of pretty single and multi-mode 6’-10’ cables. Annoyingly, I realised these would end up a tangled mess as there are no twisties to be had (the metal wires in the “garbagebag” variety are not something you want around exposed circuit boards, obviously!

Well, I guess the better question is what’s in it for me? In my case, I get a book from O’Reilly for each of their banners. Most of their conferences and their magazines have this deal. So, having a banner for an event of magazine on the web page for a couple of months in return for one of their books is very nice. The other items I may place on the site from time to time are local events or conferences.

Bruce sent me a reference just after the last meeting to a new Holographic Storage media developed by Maxell. It looks promising, and it says that it will be available in late 2006. Given that it’s the end of the first quarter of 2007, I have to wonder. I haven’t seen it advertised anywhere, but then again, it may be quite expensive. The capacity of the first generation media (it looks a lot like standard magneto-optical) will hold approximately 300GB, a nice hard drive of today’s capacities.

Highlights We had 6 attendees which is pretty good given our recent dry run. We have photos (candid shots, need to do better) After the usual social session, we got around to talking about the LPI certification and the training course we are going to be doing for those who need it. Some discussion of directory services ( this would make a good item for a future meeting) Announced our affiliation with LOPSA Other Tim has offered us the use of the training site at Kuzink to provide the training platform and to create content.