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. It’s interesting acting as project manager for something you know portions of and have to depend on others to provide the missing expertise.

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!) and tie-wraps are too permanent to use on delicate fibre in a lab environment. Sooo, in typical “Band-aid engineering” fashion, I walked out to the garden shed at home last night and snagged the roll of green “tomato tape” that LeeValley sells (basically a low-grade velcro in tape form). I have already discovered it is the cat’s meow for cable management; cut to length, easy to (re)open/close. Not nearly as strong as velcro in the perpendicular/peel direction(very low peel cohesion), but at least half the strength as typical velcro in the lateral loading direction. Wrapped around itself twice, it even holds the 100’ lawnmower extension cord bundled to keep it tidy while hanging on a hook (note: not hung by the tape itself though).
More than strong enough for wire bundling and perfect for fibre cable management! Keeps the stuff in nice tidy coils on the bench and more importantly is non-conductive and reusable and bright green! : - )

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. I get nothing for that, except satisfaction that I am promoting local events and proving that there is a real high-tech environment in Ottawa, no matter how underground it has gotten in the past few years.

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. The data transfer rate is also pretty zippy - 160Mbps. That’s hope inducing, as this may be the media of choice for backups. Expected life is ~50 years.

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. I’ll be creating content as well as Andrea. Others are welcome to assist, as it can’t hurt to have at least seen some of this while entering it. We will be using moodle as the framework, so that should be interesting at the very least. Exposure to multiple web based systems isn’t gong to hurt and who knows, we may even have talent for this.