Joel's humanistic blog

This Wednesday, December 1, dorkbot-nyc is having its 10th anniversary meeting with a special extra party : The 37.8.4-th dorkbot-nyc meeting and 10th ANNIVERSARY PARTY will take place from 7-10pm on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at Location One in SoHo. THIS IS OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY! COME HELP US CELEBRATE! Wear a homemade suit! Wear a crazy dress! Wear your jeans and a t-shirt! DOESN'T MATTER! Come hear three old-timey dorkbot pals rant and rave! Eat some pizza and drink some beer. Bring a cake?!? Bring some blinky lights! Just bring yourself?!? WHATEVER YOU WANT! It'll be a semi-normal dorkbot meeting that morphs into a casual party/celebration of 10 years of world-wide dorkbot nerd-on-geek action. Meeting starts at 7pm, party continues until 10pm.

Last Thursday, the NPR show The Bryant Park Project did a nine minute segment on dorkbot-nyc 's meeting the previous day. Segment producer Ian Chillag interviewed me at the meeting, and a small snippet from me made it into the very end of the segment; I quote William Gibson's "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." (which I misattribute to Bruce Sterling) as a way of explaining the way ideas show up at dorkbot before they percolate to the larger culture. The quote, and a mention of me, also made its way into the online summary of the segment. (When Rocketboom covered dorkbot in 2006, a small portion of my head could kinda-sorta be made out for a few frames of a crowd shot; not quite as good.) Also, the presenters and Douglas Repetto are also interviewed; and some of the theme songs also appear.

Next Wednesday evening, dorkbot-nyc will have its May 2007 meeting (the last until next fall). Douglas Irving Repetto has put up a flyer I made for the occasion. Also, he's posted photos I took at the December 2006 and January 2007 meetings. I'm also using this occasion to kick off something I've been meaning to add to this blog for a while: an "upcoming events" section in the sidebar. For now, I'll be maintaining this manually (let's hope it stays reasonably current), but if I figure out a way to automate it, I'll do so.

Last month, dorkbot-nyc got off on a roll with its first meeting after the summer hiatus. Bret Doar showed his hybrid roboticized musical instruments including the Huffyphonic Gyrobanshee 1000 , a combination of a bicycle wheel and a guitar. Jon Lippincott demonstrated Vis Virtual Universe , which displays and navigates through a surreal 3D animated solar system, which he wrote from the ground up in C++ (which fit in with my blenderheaded fascination with all things related to 3D computer graphics). David Kareve explained his exhibit which uses freaked-out crash test dummies to explore the culture of fear reinforced by the terror alert system; I was tickled to see that his presentation of the various spoofs of the terror alert system included the Sesame Street one that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning of the blog (which I got from freeman, libertarian critter ): The next day's installment of the popular video blog Rocketboom did a segment covering t...

Steve Baldwin's Ghost Sites project tracks the underbelly of the Internet, documenting dot-com busts, defunct websites, and "Forgotten Web Celebrities" , and collecting such ephemera as ancient banner ads . Many posts highlight outdated websites that give ample evidence of not being updated in an inordinately long time, whether they're sites whose "Last Updated" date is more than a decade ago , which explain that they are meant to be viewed with Netscape 2.0 (or even older versions of the then-predominant browser), or which are just plain old . In this vein, the site recently posted my "foresnic notes" about a Looney Tunes website, the Non-Stick Looney Page , which has been inactive for so long that the latest addition is a group of desktop themes for Windows 95/98, and still has web buttons from 1996.

Once again, my promotional flyer for next month's dorkbot-nyc meeting (May 3) is up on the dorkbot website. See also: my post on dorkbot's fifth anniversary , dorkbotters map .

A flyer (PDF) that I made promoting this month's dorkbot-nyc meeting on the 5th is up on the dorkbot website. See also: my post on dorkbot's fifth anniversary , dorkbotters map .

Sagan was, simply speaking, sexy, in a sense that transcends mere sexuality. —Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life , p. 264 In perusing the Wired News list of "2005's 10 Sexiest Geeks" , I noticed that my friend and dorkbot instigator douglas irving repetto was on the list! Some people say the term "sexy geek" is an oxymoron. Here at Wired News, we say it's redundant. I don't know who nominated doug, but my guess is Xeni Jardin ( herself a pretty sexy geek), who's listed as a suggester for the article, based on the boingboing team's contact with dorkbot (such as David Pescovitz's MAKE article and several bb posts ). See also my previous post about dorkbot's 5th anniversary . The dorkbot map (which I started) is growing at a rapid rate, with 45 members so far.

This month, New York City's monthly watering hole for techies, artists, and hackers, dorkbot-nyc , had its fifth anniversary meeting. Founded by artist and Columbia University Computer Music Center professor douglas irving repetto , its motto, "People doing strange things with electricity", gives the impression of what to (un)expect. Its dorky arena includes almost anything within the wide bounds of electronics, including both hardware and software, with a square emphasis on low-budget, do-it-yourself, personal projects. The results are geeky, goofy, technical, off-beat, and as wacky as the presenters' personal interests; the three presentations of a typical session will have almost nothing in common. The first meeting I attended, when dorkbot had been around for less that two full years, was in April 2002 , featuring a video by Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis, who together with their children, the musical prodigy Rama (who's already composed a theme song for do...