Hawaii Geek Meet

The Hawaii All-Geek Meetup and Potluck is scheduled for Sunday, April 20, 2008. Bring your family, your friends, and your toys. Bring some food and an appetite for good grinds and great conversation.

What is the Hawaii Geek Meet?

The Hawaii Geek Meet is a casual, friendly, open potluck gathering of geeks. And we mean "geek" in a most inclusive, positive way. Do you like technology? Do you have a specialty? Among your friends or coworkers, are you the guru, the go-to person for things that blink or have moving parts? Whether you're passionate about programming, Geocaching, photography, design, HAM radio, model rockets, painting, teaching... we want to meet you.

The idea of the Hawaii Geek Meet is to mix and mingle with other brilliant people, people you might never meet in your own circles, but people with whom (we'd bet) you'd get along smashingly.

Who is invited?

Anyone who is remotely geeky about anything. Web developers, designers, programmers, photographers, videographers, podcasters, bloggers, even artists, teachers, thinkers... Are you knowledgeable and passionate about something? Are you naturally curious and interested in learning about something? Do you want to meet new people, share what you know, and learn a thing or two that you don't? Then you're invited. Bring your friends, your family, your kids... and if you've got geek toys and gadgets, bring them too!

Where and when is it happening?

Sunday, April 20th at Magic Island, in Ala Moana Beach Park, Picnic Area #40 (Ala Wai Side) [Map] from 10 a.m. until... whenever!

Afraid you're going to be the only {x} person there? Check out some of the groups that are joining us.

Curious about who will be there? Check out the list of participants.

Can you bring something? Want to check out the menu? Take a look at the potluck page.

Have questions about how all this will come to pass? We do too! Check out the questions page.


FOR MORE INFORMATION AND DETAILS, CHECK OUT THE WEBPAGE:
http://sites.google.com/a/hawaiigeek.com/hawaii-geek-meet

Hawaii Geek Meet a Success

UPDATE JUNE: MIDWEEK POSTS THEIR ARTICLE COVERING THE GEEK MEET:
Calling All Geeks of All Kinds

------------------------

I just got back from a wonderful time at the first Hawaii Geek Meet at Ala Moana park. There was a great turnout, with lots of food and interesting demos. As my friend Keith said "The collective brainpower gathered at Ala Moana...is staggering!" Ha! I don't know about that (I certainly am no genius) but I did see a large number of people who were interested in the same things I am! "These are my PEEPS!" I told Ryan, who laughed at the word "peeps" coming from my mouth!

I knew I was having fun when early after set up, I was able to contact my South African ham radio friend Dave (ZS4DT) via IRLP (Voice-over-IP technology with radio) and talk with him awhile. During our contact, Chris and Wayne got their ID-1 connected which provided wifi service to our area through their D-STAR amateur radio gear. I then thought it would be totally cool to live-stream video from our location on Ustream.tv/kh6dad and Dave in South Africa was able to see our beautiful park setting while we were still on the radio. THAT WAS COOL!

As the day progressed we got to talk to a lot people about ham radio and the current and coming capabilities of the technology. Talked to nearly as many people about Geocaching too. I got to see a Stirling engine in operation and look at the sun through a special sun telescope. Unfortunately, there were no sun spots to see, but if there were, I'd have seen them!

I got to meet Auntie Lynn Pupule, Peter Kay, Burt Lum(of Bytemarks), Allison Stewart (The Click Chick), a lot of old and new ham radio friends, Midweek reporters (watch for an article) and near the end Neil Abercrombie sat down in our tent and visited with us a while. I got to tell him about ham radio and even about Geocaching! It was totally relaxed and tremendous fun.

I'm so glad to see so many people there. I'm guessing there was 70 people there at the one time I counted, and probably 120 or more that drifted in and out total. There are many of you I had wished were there, especially from my twitter circle, but that's OK... There's always next year!

Wishing you Peace and Love in Geekdom,

Rich

Ham Radio Campout

Bryan, Bradley and I went camping last week from Thursday to Saturday at Kualoa Beach Park in Kahaluu. It was part a beach fun trip, part ham radio geek-fest, and part get-away-from-it-all vacation. We set up the hammocks and tent and helped the 2 participating radio clubs set up antennas and gear for the ARRL field day on Saturday. Lots of photos and stuff at the following link:

http://homepage.mac.com/richfuel/personal/PhotoAlbum114.html

My Journey to Geekdom

I'm trying to figure out what influenced me so strongly toward geekdom.

I suppose it started with being rather unsuccessful at sports. I was fearful of being hit by the pitcher when I played baseball, and I hated running which limited most other sports. I played (and loved) volleyball and tennis in high school, but that faded away after college.

I loved Star Trek as a kid. It appealed to me very deeply, and I'm not sure I could tell you why. I had the Enterprise blueprints and all sorts of inane facts memorized. Star Trek was soon followed by Star Wars and it was all over. Yeah, I had the Star Wars bedsheets, what's it to ya!

I think the first real computer I saw was during a field trip to the National Weather Service. Buttons, lights, satellites, faxes, radios, meters, dials,... I was in geek heaven. It was on that day I decided I wanted to work with "buttons and lights". That's exactly how I phrased it!

At the time, the biggest job involving buttons and lights was at Houston's Mission Control for NASA. That seemed like the dream job to me!

I think my future geekdom was set in concrete though, when my parents sent me to Computer Summer School at JAIMS (Japan American Institute of Management Science) in Hawaii Kai with my best friend, David. It was also the first time I learned how to ride the bus by myself! We had 3 weeks of BASIC training on TRS-80s, and 3 weeks of FORTRAN on the schools giant mainframe computer! The computer guys wore lab coats! It filled a large room and required using a card punch to program! I am so glad I had that experience, even though I never again touched FORTRAN.

David's dad was a lawyer, and they had a WANG computer! He invited us over on a weekend once and we logged onto "The Well" (an early Compuserve-like service) and played a rudimentary Star Trek like game in all it's green monochrome text-based goodness. All resistance was futile from that point on!

TRS-80s, Apple ]['s, our family's first Mac (512k Fat mac) and the story continues on to today, as I sit in a Starbucks, reminiscing with you via my iPhone, about to go to work as a computer graphics artist. Amazing!

Peace, love, and dreams which come true,

Rich

Power To Spare!!

llz=21.302509, -157.852196

Power To Spare!!
Originally uploaded by RichFuel

Hi Everyone!

I have great friends! I went to my buddy Hank (KH6HAK) here at work
to try to help me think through a power solution so I could keep my
iPhone on all day as a GPS tracker. He surprised me instead my
offering to let me use this Innergy Power IP15B which is rated at 15
watts at 10 volts in direct sunlight. I tested it with my ham radio
and it worked great! I still need to test it with my iPhone but I am
missing my 12v iPhone charging cable, and it looks like I'll have to
pick up a new one tomorrow.

Without having to worry about power during the day, I can leave the
iPhone on to track our GPS progress, upload photos, navigate, and just
be the happy hiking geek that I want to be.

I am so looking forward to this trip, but there is still so much to
do! Tomorrow is payday, and I have a lot of last minute outfitting to
gather up. I'll be visiting Gary tonight and we're going to have a
backpack packing party.

Peace, Live and Preparation,

Rich

"Eh, Your pikcha in da papah"

I keep getting comments from people who saw my photo and article in the Midweek. It was about the Geek Meet which happened quite some time ago! Here's a link to the article:

MidWeek: Calling All Geeks of All Kinds

More Geek Meet Photos

Keith took some excellent photos and posted them on Flickr. Check 'em out!

Here are just a few proving that Bryan and I were there:

More Geotagging Testing

This is a geotagged blog entry. Theoretically I can search for it by location. We'll give it a shot. Testing continues. The tag code looks like this:

meta name="geo.placename" content="KITV, Honolulu, HI 96814, USA"

meta name="geo.position" content="21.290389;-157.840000"

meta name="geo.region" content=""

meta name="ICBM" content="21.290389, -157.840000"

But the real code is embedded in the HTML of this post. I derived this meta-tag from this really cool website:

http://mygeoposition.com/

It's a little late to be working on all of this, and I hear cell phone coverage in the crater is sketchy at best, but the geek inside me is driven to find a solution to have a hike map with all the blogs and photos in position where they occurred on the hike, along with a track of our actual route. Might be a bit too much to accomplish without ruining the "outdoors" experience. If I could at least record the data for later assemblage, that might work better.

Peace, Love and Cyber-hiking

Rich

The entire expanse of the human experience...itty bitty living space

I'm a bit of a space geek. Yes I loved Star Trek, I camped out for opening night of the "Empire Strikes Back". I regularly check on the progress of the Nasa Mars rovers and the Cassini mission (among others).

This week the Cassini probe was going to be in the shadow of Saturn for an unusually long time (12 hours). This allowed them to take some rather remarkable pictures toward the sun, something they can not usually do in order to protect the equipment. They found a new ring around Saturn, but what I find much more facinating in the pale blue dot. See it there? Upper right quadrant?

That is a picture of you, and me, and everyone else in the world. That dot is just a few pixels wide. On this magnified image you can just make out the "lump" of the moon. That lump represents the farthest man has ever traveled.

All my life has existed within those pixels. Everything I know, everything I've heard, every person I've met or will ever meet,...within those pixels. All of human history, from the 2006 elections back to the invention of fire,...within those pixels. Our vast libraries, containing volumes and volumes of resources, the "bottomless" internet, every noble act ever done or shameful thing hidden, is hidden within those pixels. All life as we know it, whether animal, botanical, bacterial or even viral, as far as we have been able to determine, is reserved for this dot in the expanse.

We are unique, and precious, and we should start seeing everything around us as unique and precious too.

Peace, Love and Precious Pixels,

Rich