Photo Copyright 2008 Nathaniel R. Walker

Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

The July Geek Dinner is the last one of the summer (we take “analog” August off). So be sure to join us for what promises to be an excellent evening.

Next week’s Geek Dinner will feature a very new, and super promising Providence-based startup – MoFuse, MoFuse lives where mobile devices meet blogs. From Asian news blogs to American politics and mobile gamers, MoFuse is seeing tremendous traction. They pride themselves at being first to market with features that bloggers and their readers really love. Earlier this year they were the first to launch a mobile blog version for the iPhone. Their approach is gaining them tremendous visibility with some of the best known bloggers including Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Political Wire. Join Founder and Chief Architect, David Berube and CEO Annette Tonti as they discuss their bootstrapping approach to early development and plans to address a rapidly growing international base of users. And as a special early scoop only for Providence Geeks, they will talk about their upcoming embedded video launch. Free mobile blogs for all who attend! :-)

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

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• The event itself is FREE! Beverages and food are for sale at the adjoining bar and Taqueria Pacifica (delicious and cheap)
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• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and take off whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great)
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• Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
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• There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.
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One of the questions I get at Geek Dinners is to explain what AS220 is all about. Here’s a little background on AS220, how it crisscrosses with Providence Geeks, and how you can help AS220 grow (disclaimer: I’m the secretary of AS220’s board). AS220 is a non-profit arts center, founded in 1985, that provides an uncensored and unjuried venue for Rhode Island artists: gallery space, performance space, live/work space, and more. AS220 owns two buildings in downtown Providence: AS220 (the Empire Street building where we meet) and the AS220 Dreyfus Hotel. AS220 also runs the Broad Street Studio, a transitional arts program for youth who have been in foster homes, group homes, or the state’s juvenile detention facility.

AS220 has always been a little bit geeky. Its web site, as220.org, has grown into a server hosting not only AS220, but local area artists and arts organizations. For years,there was a public access Linux terminal in AS220 (unfortunately gone due to space constraints). Currently, an electronics lab is being developed on the second floor, and the plan is to use that as a workshop not only for the Broad Street Studio youth, but for the public and for groups like Providence Geeks and DC401. Additionally, AS220, Providence Geeks, and the Steel Yard had a summit on fabrication technology (3d printing, laser cutters, etc.) some time back, and one goal is to provide access to this technology using a model similar to AS220’s darkroom. (For more on the fabrication topic, be sure to check out the upcoming RI-Nexus event on next-generation working environments and fab labs).

Now, here’s how you can help. AS220 recently revamped its membership program. Instead of the original tiered membership, there’s a flat yearly membership contribution of $50 (note that you don’t have to be a member to visit, exhibit at, or enjoy AS220—it is open to all). To get into NPR mode here for a moment, you get some cool stuff (pictured above) with that: a limited edition print, a bumper sticker, a subscription to the monthly calendar/newsletter, and a member card offering discounts or special offers at local merchants, including the AS220 galleries, the RISD Store, Jerry’s Artarama, Abar, Eastern Art and Frame, Adler’s Hardware, Picture This, Perishable Theatre, Books on the Square, and Myopic Books. And like any good geek, AS220 lets you join online.

September 7th – Chad Jenkins and his students are demonstrating a variety of robotic and data visualization experiments at the CIT.

On offer:
DLR Hand
smURV
AIBO Soccer
Teaching Robots
ChemPad
MathPad
Diagramming Tool
and Pizza!

Robotics & Graphics Open House
Interactive Demos – Free Pizza
Friday, September 7, 2007 at 12:00 Noon
CIT 4th Floor

Congrats to Jack Templin, who appears on the front page of the current Providence Business News with coverage of the Information Technology & Digital Media Center that he’s pulling together:

... the center would operate on a membership model and seek to become a physical, cultural and virtual nexus for the entire sector, said Providence Geeks co-founder Jack Templin, who is consulting on the project.

In addition to providing space for several companies that show potential to grow substantially, the center would provide meeting space and offer workshops, training and other programming for everyone in the sector, Templin said.

I came across a mention of this exhibit of rediscovered maps on the excellent blog The Map Room.

The collection represents the world throughout the time these maps were collected by Brown University. Two-thirds of the maps are from the 1800s and early 1900s, with a major focus on the United States and Europe. The local collection for southern New England is also noteworthy. Some of the more exceptional maps are a Nazi tourism map, a map cited by Herman Melville in writing Moby Dick, and an anti-slavery map donated to the Library by the family of an abolitionist who graduated from Brown in 1831.

There is a talk on April 5th, but the show runs though April 25th 2007 at Brown University’s John Hay Library.