status: PARTY !!! planning utec monks festival IRS
WATER FESTIVAL
PARTY For now, "Alumni" is defined as "anyone reading this message" and "any special friend of anyone reading this message." We're having a Alumni reunion: This Friday (Aug 04). 7pm @ the brewery [1] Rumor has it that April C and Chris S will be there. [1] http://www.thebreweryexchange.com/ I'll probably leave the lab about 6:30, if anyone finds it easier to find the lab than the brewery exchange Lab is buying food. You are on your own for Booze. PLANNING MEETING To build a thirst for the reunion, we're having a planning meeting Friday @ 2pm. Goals are: 1) Consensus on projects needed to serve 100 organizations. 2) Understanding and (ideally) consensus on budget. All are welcome. LUNCH (canceled) Lunch out was also scheduled on Friday, but that seems like a lot of work for one day. We'll do lunch on a less busy day. ALUMNI SIGHTING Chuck McCallum was up for the folk festival. We didn't talk much at all. While he had a few quirks that didn't match with my many quirks, in his 6 months with us he did a ***lot*** of good work. I'm happy to see he seems to be doing ok. UTEC Bargaining with Gregg is kinda fun, He makes these little coughing sounds, clutches his chest, staggers around and cries out "You are KILLING me, just KILLING ME." I think we did ok, The contract [2] pays us less than $10 an hour. However we can collect a $100 fine if a UTEC person blows off a meeting and require Gregg to turn off his cell phone. [2] http://thecsl.org/sys/finance.d/detail.d/contracts.d/utec.d/utec_csl_2006_contract.doc PERL MONKS Manny [3] and Matt [4] have joined me[5] on perlmonks.[6] [3] http://perlmonks.org/?node=dark314 [4] http://perlmonks.org/?node=mfo62786 [5] http://perlmonks.org/?node=mandog [6] http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=5938 For the uninitiated, perlmonks employees a nice reputation system [7] to reward people for seeking and sharing Perl knowledge. A good algorithm for avoiding being sucked in is to read the weekly best and worst nodes and all time best and worst. [7] http://blog.jonnay.net/plugin/tag/reputation For what it is worth, people who build some levels get my vote for doing more coding. I'm going to spend more time on the monks and less on Slashdot. IRS The IRS sent us a third request for additional information concerning our application for non profit status. Unless I missed something, If we do as we ask they'll give us 501c3 tax exempt status. I'd conservatively guess by the end of September, but I've been wrong before. WATER FESTIVAL We've picked up some work updating the water festival's [8] website. After a few years of Frontpage, it got pretty twisted. For example, the previous maintainers didn't understand server side includes [9] so they eliminated them. It's still ugly but it is better. [8] http://lowellwaterfestival.org [9] http://www.katsueydesignworks.com/cgi_server_includes.htm I think it would have been quicker if we'd ignored Joel [10] and created fresh, clean pages with the text of the old pages. [10] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html POWER Upside: On Monday, our (now) friends in physical plant called and ***ASKED*** if it would be ok to turn the power off for a couple hours on Wednesday and scheduled it for minimal disruption. Downside: Anyone want to get up @ 4:00am to keep me company, while I turn off servers?