So I planned to go to the Refresh Austin website to leave a comment to the effect of “Hey, what’s up with this bunk wiki that’s been outdated for four months?” and what did I find? A lovely, revamped website! Very cool. If you are looking to meet up with a diverse group of tech professionals in the Austin area, I suggest checking it out. You will see the calendar of all upcoming events as well as photos from previous ones. If you are too lazy to periodically check the site, there is this lovely tool called the RSS feed that will allow you to keep up with Refresh Austin without even trying.
This just in from Jeff Smith: On behalf of the Austin area chapter of the Association of IT Professionals (or AITP) and the InnoTech CIO Summit, I would like to invite you to nominate the senior IT executive, technology executive, or both for the 2006 IT Executive of the Year Awards from your company or another firm you feel deserves recognition (such as a client, colleague in the field, etc.).
This is the 9th annual IT Executive Awards. Prior winners have included executives from DejaNews/Google [GOOG], Dell [DELL], Hoover’s/Dun & Bradstreet [DNB], Vignette [VIGN], Whole Security/Symantec [SYMC], Activant, Austin-Bergstrom Airport, Collective Technologies, the City of Austin, the State of Texas, Texas Mutual Insurance, Texas Medical Liability Trust, Triactive, Travis County, and United Devices,
Finalists and award recipients will be recognized at a CIO Summit reception at the InnoTech conference on November 2, at the Austin convention center. Nominations are open for: CTO of the Year, Public sector IT Executive / CIO of the Year (for local, state, or other public agencies), Private sector IT Executive / CIO of the Year (both private and publicly traded companies are eligible). Nomination forms and additional information are available here
NOMINATIONS close on September 30, so please act soon. If you have any questions regarding the event, the selection process, or other issues, contact: Steve Guengerich,Chairman at 512/507-4646, mobile or 512/437-7912, direct
When I growing up in Detroit, there was this store called Allied Radio. It was about the twice the size of a Walgreen’s store, and it was all electronics gear. They had aisles of resistors, capacitors, TTL (and later, CMOS) chips, vacuum tubes, Heathkit parts, soldering irons, oscilliscopes, and a bunch of other stuff for which I didn’t yet know the name. On Saturdays, I would ride my bike there, with a fresh schematic from Popular Electronics magazine, and make whatever the thing of the month was. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes I wasn’t. I remember blowing the fuse to the basement multiple times, blowing out perfectly working electronic devices, and even starting a small fire in a radio that my father gave me for Christmas. I sure did have a lot of fun. In the process, I learned about all sorts of nifty things like impedance, which came in handy when I was trying to tweak the reverb and preamp circuits on my guitar amp — or when I lived in the Ambassador and was trying to figure out how to bridge my neighbor’s circuit to get more amperage.
In the mid seventies,I bought a Yamaha mixing console. When it broke, I discovered that the whole mixer was on a single IC chip. Nothing to fix. You take it to the Yamaha repair shop, and the replace the chip. I began to notice that more and more of the objects I bought were built the same way. It breaks, you throw it away. The opportunities to take something apart, learn how it worked, fix it, or maybe just make it better were becoming less frequent.
When I first saw Make magazine, I knew something was afoot. If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Yeah, that’s exactly what I felt.
With the emergance of the first Dorkbot events, it’s appears that this philosphy is becoming a movement. I couldn’t be happier. For those of you in Austin, we have some of the biggest dorkbot events right here.
The next one is Saturday, March 10th. If you’re downtown (and you should be), and need a break from Barcamp, you’ve got to check out the Dorkbot event in Brush Park.
Dorkbot
Saturday, March 10, 2007
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Brush Square Park
5th and Neches
Austin, Texas
If you have got the creativity, then SXSW has the hardware! SXSW has secured several high-end video phones for use during this year’s event. Getting the phones was relatively easy. Now comes the really difficult part — finding people who can make use of these phones to capture some of the coolest things that happen in Austin during the March 10-14 timeframe. If you are a SXSW Interactive, Gold or Platinum registrant and you think that you are up to this task, send them an e-mail and tell them about it (100 words or less)
To be eligible for consideration, you need to e-mail inter@sxsw.com by 5:00 pm CST on Monday, March 6. Content captured on these video phones will be posted on the SXSW website, along with a photo, bio, and link to the website for the emerging artists behind this footage.
Many of you will remember Symbiot as the lead sponsor for the Linux Top Gun events. If you’ve checked the Symbiot website recently, you see a digital countdown, and the tagline: On March 31st, the rules of information warfare will change forever. Talk about throwing down the gauntlet! So what’s this all about?
Symbiot’s March 4, Press Release entitled “Symbiot Security Announces World’s First Solution to Strike Back Against Network-Based Attackers” gives the brief outline. Michael Erwin, President of Symbiot, says, “Until today, security solutions have been totally passive in nature.”. The best defense is a good offence, eh? Release the countermeasures! For those of you who want more details, Symbiot has a white paper on the new product.
It’s always good to see an Austin company create some excitement. Best wishes to Symbiot for a successful rollout.
Your Mind Belongs to the State writes “Don’t miss Your Mind Belongs to the State from 7:00-7:30pm every Tuesday night on kvrx.org 91.7fm. YMBTTS is a informal call-in talk show on technology issues that matter in Austin and all those other places.
This weeks topic is yet to be decided, but if you write in and suggest
one that gets chosen you can win something! Email state@kvrx.org.”
Sirius writes “I am all about non comercial feeding of the masses. A local pirate station to note is Free Radio Austin. I belive them to be operating on 300w, in the UT/Central part of town. 97.1 on the fm dial, and now livecast on the web. http://www.pirateradio.org/fra/“
I’m really glad to see the new offerings on the dial. I’ve been listening to both 97.1 and 94.3 in my car, while driving to work in the West Austin Themepark. I seem to be able to pick up 94.3 on the north side of town, and 97.1 in the campus- South Congress area. These stations, along with KVRX and KOOP, really expand the radio horizons. Unfortunately, I can’t pick up any stations in the concrete-and-steel bunker that is my apartment/network operations center.
I know most of you have cd players in the car, but I only have a tuner. A decent CD player would be worth more than my car — and I’m going to buy a couple more Linux boxen, an AIX, and SunUltra, before I replace my chevy POS.
Any of you listen to these stations? work at these stations?
Well, the SXSW 2001 site is now up. So the countdown begins. The music portion has been overrun by coked-up record execs, but I had a blast at the SXSW interactive last time. Don’t go for one of those cut rate day passes. All the cool stuff goes on at the panels — on the second floor. Just charge it to your company.
Did you go last year? Are you going this year?
We had the mail server configs quasi-b0rked on geekaustin.org. So if you signed up it wasn’t mailing you the initial random password, preventing you from logging in the first time, even though we did get your information. But it’s fixed now, so if you’re a new user all will work par for the course. If you already have an account, just go to the user login box to your right, and enter your username, hit mailpassword, blah blah. Pretty simple… Thanks for shopping geekaustin…
I was reading the Daily Texan today, and in the “look how cool we are, show your parents so they’ll donate money and maybe we’ll name a building after them” part they describe a recent achievement by Dr. Barbara (a member of the Analytical division of the UT Chem and Biochem dept.), whereby a new class of selectively light emitting polymeric compounds was discovered…
These new guys are neat in that they’re brighter and more flexible than previous LED polymers. Potentially, if the compound continues to be promising as it is worked up to a larger scale (right now they’re at the use-a-microscope level) and is commercialized, this could mean lighter, brighter, and more flexible moniters for both desktop and portable use.
The article describing their findings was published in the Aug. 25 issue of Science. (As a side note, you can actually take a class form this guy if you’re an undergraduate. He teaches CH 376K Adv. Analytical in the spring.)
CNET Investor has a Bloomberg article on Dr. Koop laying off some more people. Firing some people helped raise the stock 6 cents. This article cites “losing money” as a reason for 41 layoffs. And with such an excellent product, DrKoop.com wasn’t able to turn a profit ;-p. Anyway, DrKoop.com says they recently got 27.5 million.
The same story with more info is on Austin Business Journal.
