Warning - the tone of this is frantic. I must be comming down off caffeine or something. If it's offensive let me know and I'll feel bad about it. It may also have the effect of reminding me to only write when my caffeine system isn't too diluted with blood.

A new member Kevin introduced himself. He used to solder together his personal computers about 25 yrs ago. Was a telco tech, then a software tech, then moved into manglementish roles and now wants to get back to being productive. We welcome him and his kind!

Stuff what got talked about:

Meeting Venue: Beer is sorely laking at the food court and there is an abundance of "sun in my eyes" for about 30mins. The Phoenix was suggested as an alternative. Power and light may be an issue there but I think it's worth a try.

Hacker Space options: Angus has been doing a bit of home work on potential rental spaces. He asked the owners(Shell Corp) of the old servo in Campbell but they sent back a response saying they're knocking it down Real-Soon-Now. Angus also had a look at a space bellow the Jaycar in Fyshwick which might be available for rent. This terrifies and excites me.

Soldering workshop: This was talked about briefly. Alistair has a few 40Watt soldering irons with elcheapo stands that he could loan out on the day. I suggested we do an order of MintyBoost kits. We decided to put off major plans until more of the people from the CLUG list who have offered to assist are able to make it along. We might have to reach out to them outside of the CLUG list.

Collabing on the ANCA application: Alistair and Angus have both tried to send me Google Wave details but I'm yet to find them.

Projects: I showed off my "Its a damn site less complicated than using a servo and a 555" implementation of the electronics for a Most Useless Machine. Geoff showed off his less then blinky lights project where he decided (very admirably), only hours before the meeting, that he wanted to make a PWM servo controller to follow a light source. His prototype circuit can vary the frequency of a square wave pulse, but not the duty cycle and therefore can't directly drive the servo reliably. His use case is a sun tracker for photo voltaic panels. At the moment it's more of an "I'm doing it because I think I should be able to" kind of project. Alistair got another box (or two) of goodies in the mail. His Makerbot plastruder custom pieces arrived as did a new spindle for his mill. He'll be cutting the acrylic parts for the plastruder and waiting the rest of the parts for the subtractive mill.

Collaborative project ideas: Glossed over a bit. Alistair thought we could lie about our current projects to call them art. Geoff and I agreed that we didn't need to lie because they were art. Even if they aren't "high art" if they have a reason or a comment on society or anything they're arty enough. Some art just looks nice, some art looks butt-ugly but make us reflect on an aspect of our society and change or solidify our views on social issues. Well within the scope of the things we do.

Also, now I feel bad for not writing minutes for meetings 2,3 & 5. Someone else can take the guilt on meeting 4; I missed that one.

And what's the story with the Drupal HTML cleaner stripping out paragraph tags now too? Here's a hint by the way... use the "code" tags to make line breaks, unless this doesn't work either!