Joe Terranova

The South Jersey meeting went great! Here’s a link to pics.

The North/Central Jersey Meeting will be in New Brunswick, on March 31st, at 3pm.
West End Coffee Bar
152 Easton Ave, New Brunswick, NJ

Google Map

There was a lot of discussion about whether to have the meeting in New Brunswick or Hoboken, so if there’s anyone from Hoboken that can’t make it, let me know and I’ll see what I can work out.

This should be a good compromise for those in Freehold / Red Bank that wanted to have a separate meeting. Once again, Let me know if it’s not.

The South Jersey Meeting for the LoCo Team will be Saturday, March 24th, at 3:00 PM. The location will be Coffee Works

Coffee Works
White Horse Road and Berlin Road, Voorhees, NJ 08043
Google Map
Coffee Works is in Lion’s Head Plaza. It’s in the same location as the Ritz and a Friendly’s, and is in the same strip as Tunes.
Coffee Works has, well, coffee, snacks, power, wireless, and is rather empty during the afternoon. Since this is the first meeting, it will probably be an informal meet-and-greet, as well as preliminary discussion.

Cheers, and hope to see you there

NOTE Address and google map has changed; original led to the middle of nowhere.

Bribing Pro Bloggers with laptops? Bad. Very bad.

Bribing amateur bloggers with scooters/laptops/mp3 players? No problem

From the website:

Enter the Golden Blog Awards to win great prizes

All you have to do is mention the word ‘office’ and the link ‘www.itsnotcheating.com.au’ in your blog. Winner is judged on creativity of the story.

The blog or video with highest number of supporting comments will have the chance to win this fab music pack.

That’s right: the point of the site is to offer Microsoft Office Ultimate at a 93% discount to Australian College students, and bribe them into pimping Microsoft Office on their blogs. I don’t think that needs comment.

From the site:
It’s not cheating if…

• You do it in another postcode
• You use the thesaurus in word
• You drink light beer
• You’re home before midnight
• You don’t get caught

Contrast that with Bill’s response to Gorbachov’s Plea for mercy for a School teacher at a poor Russian school
According to Microsoft, it’s not cheating if you don’t get caught, but if you do get caught, they’re more than happy to send you to Siberia to rot.

It’s reasonable for Microsoft to try to show a friendly, smiling face to the 18-24 age demographic; it shows they’re paying attention, and understand how powerful bloggers really are. That doesn’t, however, change who they are; just below the surface, they’re still a faceless, soulless corporation, the black hole of modern computing, and no amount of hype or jive is going to change that. They’re desperate, and despite their flailing attempts to maintain dominance with FUD and pure brute force, they’re circling the drain. There’ll be a party at my house on the day they fall in. Be sure to save the date.

Oh, btw:

http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au/

I hope I win a scooter.

Pictures up from the Cherry Hill Linux User Group talk: linky.

Overall, it went pretty well. Didn’t convert anyone, but the 4 or so Ubuntu users there said they were on board for the LoCo team.

This Friday, I’ll be giving a presentation on Ubuntu, the Ubuntu community, and LoCo teams to the Cherry Hill Linux User Group. According to their contact, after a Ubuntu install they did at last month’s meeting, they’re hyped and ready to hear more about it. Hopefully I’ll walk away with a few more Ubuntu users and the start of a real LoCo team. This is very exciting for me, as I’ve emailed basically every LUG in the state, so a response from CHLUG is a good sign. Hopefully news will spread to the other LUGs after the meeting.

If anyone wants to attend, the meeting is this Friday (March 2nd), from 7pm-9pm, at the Cherry Hill Public Library (about 2 miles from my house).

On another note, I’ve moved all my hosting to Dreamhost, and I’m fairly satisfied with the result. I’m also quite happy to see that the system for getting LoCo team hosting / dns changes has changed since last time.

When I originally got the domain, the system consisted of “email Matthias”. Unfortunately for me, Matthias happened to be sick and bedridden for around 2 weeks when I wanted it done, so I ended up spending quite a while playing whack-a-mole with the LoCo team project.

While Matthias is, as I’m told, a great guy, the old system failed to follow the golden “bus rule,” as developed by Google: the organization should be set up such that, if any one person were to be hit by a bus, things would continue to run. To my pleasant surprise, the new method is to submit a support request through Launchpad, which means there’s now redundancy, overhead, and quite frankly, people know if I made a request 2 weeks ago and got no response.

Overall, cheers to progress.