Photo Credit: Bret Ancowitz, M.D.

Wednesday, January 16, 2007, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

This coming Wednesday we’ll be kicking off the new year, by checking in with an “old” friend of Providence Geeks – Investment Instruments Corporation (IIC).

Owen Johnson, co-founder of the local-global web company that creates happy tenants and happy landlords, will be sharing the low-down on the company’s impressive progress in 2007. He’ll also give a quick demo of IIC’s latest offering, Rentomatic, an update on the popular Rentometer, and an overview of the significant technical improvements made to both systems over the past year. Owen will be joined by Nick Kishfy, IIC’s manager of operations.

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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• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose 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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• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar
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• There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.
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John Duksta posted the details about next Monday’s DC401 meetup, and it’s going to be a blast. Mitch Altman, inventor of TV-B-Gone and many other cool things, will be showing people how to make a trippy RGB light from some easily obtainable parts. This will be a lot of fun!

Date/Time: 14 Jan 2008 – 1700-1900
Location: AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence. Directions

We totally lucked out! Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone, will be passing through RI and has agreed to come by and do a workshop and a talk. Big thanks go out to Brian Jepson for swinging Mitch in our direction.

The Trippy RGB Light is made from hacking a MiniPOV kit. It’s quick to build, which is good given our short window at AS220. It’s also versatile. When you take it home, you can re-hack it into a Brain Machine, a Solar Bug Bot or an open source TV-B-Gone.

Mitch gave us a variety of topics on which he could speak. We’re getting our geek on with the workshop, so I figured something non-technical might be a nice foil. Mitch will be talking on Community Building, something we’ll need to do a fair amount of if we want the hacker space to get off the ground and prosper.

Since we’ll be doing a workshop, we’ll need get started a little earlier, so be at AS220 at 1700 if you want to take part in the workshop. We’ll get the talk going sometime around 1800, as usual. If you want to do the workshop, post a comment on the site and include your email so I can send you a confirmation. I’ll do a bulk buy of the MiniPOV kits and extra LEDs and you all can pay me back at the meeting.

DC401 January 2008 meetup – Link