Web414 - Milwaukee's Web Community

Here's last night's Barcamp Promotion Phase document in a fancy iPaper format.

Lets all take a moment away from griping about our future for a minute and look at this nice picture and article of our friend Nikol from M. Magazine.

Look at me! I'm the Web414 Nikol stalker!

Web414 Member Nikol Hassler managed to get an awesome plug for Web414 in print. If you haven't seen it yet, I urge you to check out Birds, bees and lots of buzz at MkeOnline.com.

Where she gets Web smarts: "I attend Web414 meetings at Bucketworks and am now becoming a (Bucketworks) member so I can use a community space to further working with teens. Plus, excellent excuse to hang out with those artsy folks. Recently, one Web414 member called me the modern-day Jane Goodall, studying the geeks by moving among them. It is basically a group of smart people who create stuff for the Internet."

Nice work, Nikol. While the rest of us are simply wandering around in the mist picking bugs off each others backs, you're doing great work for the Milwaukee web community.
Let's all have a cheer for the Jane Goodall of Web414!

On Tuesday, April 22, I celebrated Earth Day by traveling to the Muskego Public Library and giving a "Always entertaining, often informative" presentation on Internet Video to the Milwaukee IBM PC Club.

What a great group of quality computer users and fans! They were gracious, appreciative, and we all had a good time playing with video on the web, showing off each others computers and talking about the upcoming Digital Television Conversion.

I'll have a recording of the presentation up soon, but you can enjoy the Google Presentation right now on this here website.

I added a "Light Amusements" category to the Web414 Forums. This is where discussions and information regarding non-web related amusements will go. Specifically, we're looking for your XboxLive, PS3 and Wii handles and friends codes.

We've got about three months under our belt using BaseCamp as our Project Manager in our Marketing Department.

Any interest in a BaseCamp demo/discussion for an upcoming Web414?
I want to show it to some folks who might be able to help me make better use of it.

37-signals (the publishers of basecamp) don't do demos, but I'd be happy to give one. And ask for a Barcamp Sponsorship. :)

G

I thin I left my EyeToy WebCam at Bucketworks at MilwaukeeDevHouse1. Have any of you seen it?
Found! Thanks James!

As our warrior troop from returns from the F1-Challenge, I thought I'd take a second here to thank the team for representing Milwaukee's Web Community. I have no doubt you represented well. Those of us still in Milwaukee'll have to wait until the gang is back in town for some first hand accounts, but if you just can't wait, I suggest you enjoy this shining molment:

"It's not 1999."

Due to some strangeness with the feed, the Ustream videos from the Feb. 21, 2008 meeting are in three pieces.

Please enjoy:

• Part One (50 min)
• Part Two (30 Min)
• Part Three (11 Min)

The Hospital I work for has two items of interest to you 414-ers.

1. We're looking for a Drupal Themer that can create Drupal Theme for us based (mostly) on what you see at www.rogershospital.org. I've received some interest from my posting at Drupal.org, but I'd prefer to give the job to someone from our little family if possible.

2. We're looking to hire a Graphic Designer in our Marketing Department. As the Communications Specialist, I'm trying to move more and more of our publications to electronics, but you'll need a strong background in traditional printing, because marketing will always have to send out postcards. It's a small team and a great organization and you'd have the best lake view in the entire hospital. I shot this picture from the Graphic Designer's Window last week. Seriously. Shoot me an email (gabe@writelarge.com) if you're interested or curious.

Technically, the job is titled "Communications Specialist," but that's dumb. You're really a graphic designer. We just got a new iMac for the position and loaded it up with CS3. I'll let you have it if you take the job. (Anyone not affiliated with Web414 has to use the old one.)

Thanks to your kind donations, Web414 was able to secure a Nintendo DS and three new games for our Winter Family project! You guys are the best. I'm very proud and humbled to be part of a group like this.

Not only did we collect $80 in cash, one Web414er donated a used DS to the family, so we were able to give one little girl a _Very_ nice gift and something that she'd have gone without if it wasn't for your generosity. She got a Platinum Phat DS and a carrying case, a copy of Brain Age 2, and two other games that I'll have to dig out the receipt to recall. (One was a platformer, and the other was a drawing game.)

The Winter Family project itself managed to collect almost $300 in cash and gifts (including food and toiletries) in addition to our gift.

Happy Festivus, you guys. Bagels NO! Web414 Yes!

Item! The Dec. 2007 Web414 recording is up and available at the Mighty Archive.org. Click through to the archive to download this 1 hour and 17 minute recording so that you have something to listen to on your next train ride.

Item! My fantastic and information-laden presentation on Prism is is now publicly viewable.

Item! Thanks so much to those of you who made a donation to our Winter Family Project. If you want to make an online donation, I've set up a Google Checkout form at Writelarge.com. The layout is kind of broken, but it works. Use your favorite credit card to send a donation to me. Every little bit helps.

Hey Web414ers.
I'd like to ask for your help.

My wife Jenifer and I run a "Winter Family" project (Jenifer does most of the running, to be honest) at Rogers Memorial Hospital in Oconomowoc. Every year, employees adopt a needy family to help through the holidays with gifts of food and supplies, and a few presents for Christmas morning. This year we have small family of 3 to help. We hope to send the family enough food, clothing, and a few extras to make the Holidays a little easier on them.

Our family this year is a mother, grandmother, and granddaughter. The father is out of the picture due to severe mental illness. The 9-year-old daughter has severe ADHD and they cannot afford for her to have effective treatment. The mother and grandmother spend a lot of time helping her with reading, math, and life skills.

Here's where Web414 comes in. I would like to try to raise enough money to buy the 9-year-old a Nintendo DS and a copy of Brain Training. I think -- and Jenifer agrees-- that the mental concentration exercises and basic math skills that Brain Training emphasizes could really help her work with her ADHD issues. It would make a great present for a little girl who, in spite of being aware of her family's financial situation, still believes in Santa Claus.

Working with the folks at Rogers, Jenifer is handling trying to get other gifts and necessities together for the family. A couple of bucks from each the Web414ers would go a long way to help us afford to give the girl a Nintendo DS. In exchange, I'll plug a few Web 414 cards in the gift pack and be sure to note the donations in any PR the hospital might do surrounding the program.

I'll be taking collections at Thursday's Web414 Meeting, so if you can bring a few bucks, that would be great. In the past, the families we've helped have really appreciated the support. This is a great opportunity for your donations to go directly into real-world applications of good will.

Thanks for your time and attention.

I noticed that there was no Web414 page on Wikipedia. There is now.

I am certain that there are Wikipedians among us who can do some of that Web414 magic and put all kinds of better information on that page, link it in to all the great and fantastic categories that it should be in, edit and change it and break it into a billion peices.

But that ain't me.

Here's the Nov. 9th meeting in audio form. It's roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes long and was prepared for the internet archive in the rock'em sock'em open source audio editor Audacity.

128Kbps MP3 128.9M
Ogg Vorbis 33.1M
64Kbps MP3 64.5M

The recording is released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. I expect a remix.