Pumping Station: One

Banana Man Costume

Tonight starting at 8pm Pumping Station: One will be hosting our first PotLuck style public meeting.  Tonight’s theme is The Internet.  We’ll have bacon wrapped bacon, a Peanut Butter Jelly Time Station with a live Banana Man and much, much more.  Come down and show off your culinary hacking skills.

Pumping Station: One is located at 3301 N Elston Ave.  Look for the big red door and follow the signs.  The front door will be open at 7pm but expect the fun to start at 8pm.  If you have any trouble getting in press the buzzer on the top left of the door.

When: Thursdays, April 8th & 22nd, 8pm
Where: PS:One, 3354 N. Elston

Like an artifact from an alien civilization–or is it from the future?–Haskell fascinates and confounds. Is it good? Is it evil? What does it want from us? PS:One member Robert Lee has investigated its mysteries, cut the Gordian knot of deep mathematese that surrounds Haskell, and emerged with near-mystical coding powers. He comes to share his newfound wisdom with the coder masses.

He has scheduled his first two classes in April. There will be more afterward, to be scheduled. Bring your laptop. Before we start, he requests you  install GHC and spend some time with Learn You a Haskell For Great Good. This will not be an introduction to programming–you probably need some proficiency with basic programming concepts. If you know what recursion is, you’re probably solid.

He promises you will merely gain familiarity with cutting edge techniques in functional programming. Haskell is not madness-inducing. You may go mad, but if you do, it will have nothing to do with this class.

Last night, I had the honor of an interview with Irish Radio show IT Freely.  I discussed hackerspaces in general, Pumping Station: One, and the nanotech and Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope projects I’m working on (look on my personal website), and the current state of garage tinkering and science.

IT Freely Season 2, Episode 15, direct link.

Lady Ada Lovelace Day (the world’s first computer programmer) is tomorrow.

Come join PS1 for our celebration of programming, computers, and women’s contributions to science and technology!

What: Beginners’ programming class, obfuscated code contest, and more!

When: Doors open at 7pm on Wednesday, March 24

Where: 3354 N. Elston Ave, Chicago, IL 60618 (look for the red door)

Cost: Free to the public!

It’s time for another Pumping Station: One Guided Tour.  This time, Dustin J. Mitchell, the maintainer of Buildbot is giving an introductory level tutorial on Twisted Python, a popular asynchronous programming library.  Afterward, he will lead a sprint on Buildbot to add some tests and squash some bugs that will give you some practical experience using your new Twisted skills.  The sprint will start on Tuesday night and reconvene during PS:One’s Quiet Riot Hackathon the following Saturday.  The tutorial will be recorded and once the video is complete it will be added to this post.

The tutorial will begin at 8pm on Tuesday, March 23rd.  The doors will be open at 7pm at 3354 N Elston.  Please bring your computer if you plan on participating in the programming.

Photo by Anne Petersen

This Friday and Saturday, the Chicago area open source community will converge on the University of Illinois at Chicago for this year’s Flourish Conference.

Flourish is a totally free (as in beer) conference and if you register ahead of time you get a free t-shirt as well.  Speakers will be covering various topics such as Git, Python, Women in Open Source, Building Open Source Software Communities and Video Recording Presentations.

Pumping Station: One will be manning a table in the mini-expo room handing out stickers and debuting our larger than life photobooth TARDIS for the first time outside our space.  Bring yourself and your friends to come see us and all the great speakers at UIC this weekend.  At 6:00 PM on Saturday right after Flourish 2010 closes, there will be an afterparty at OfficePort Chicago sponsored by ChicagoAndroid.com.

See you there!

Details:

Friday, March 19 & Saturday March 20
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
University of Illinois at Chicago
750 South Halsted St., Chicago, IL

You can visit the conference website at http://flourishconf.com to register, sign up for Lightning Talks, see last year’s photos & videos and more.

Happy Cat via icanhascheezburger.com

On Tuesday, March 30th, Pumping Station: One will be having the first food-centric open house at the space since we switched up our weekly Open to the Public meeting schedule.  The theme for the first fifth Tuesday PotLuck is The Internet.  Doors are open to the public starting at 7:00pm at 3354 N Elston (Look for the Big Red Door). We’re hoping this devolves into a pre-show for Chicago’s upcoming BaconFest; but even if it doesn’t that’s ok too.  Look all over the net for recipe ideas, come up with catchy names and bring your food for everyone to try.  If it’s ok to be ingested then it’s welcome here.

If you’re bringing food, plan to have a tasting for a maximum of thirty people.  If you need to reheat something, we only have a microwave and an induction cooktop (which can only heat ferric materials).   If you need other accommodations or have other questions leave them in the comments or send an e-mail to jeff [at] pumpingstationone.org

Photo by Anne Petersen

Last month we had our inaugural 300 Seconds of Fame, featuring a wild and wooly tour through Peoplehacking (Four Formulae For The Reduction Of Operational Mass or The Engineers’ Guide to Weight Loss), Maker Faire, photographers rights, a RepRap update, and the NEW and IMPROVED solution for HACKERSPACE maintenance: BRAWNDO! (which evidently makes you good at yelling).

Tomorrow we have more great (but short!) performances to enjoy, including some EXTREMELY AWESOME facts about neuroanatomy, fiddling around, an anonymous committee, some digeridooing, arduino radio, and how to renounce your legal rights to your creations.

Read the full monty about 300 Seconds of Fame and what else the night is about via our wiki.

But to really experience the night you have to be there! Or, if you can’t, you get demoted to watching the ustream. SO BE THERE!

I should really lay off the BRAWNDO.

It’s that time of the month again: time to gather together all of the loud things that you have and bring them to Pumping Station: One for an evening of fun!

This Friday, March 12, at 7pm, Pumping Station: One is hosting its monthly Unusual Musical Instrument Jam! We’ll be running it synchronously with i3Detroit again this month. As always, we welcome anything that makes noise…bring your electronics, your toys, your common household items, even your musical instruments if that’s your bag. If it’s loud, we’d love to see and hear it!

The event is open to the public, and free.

[Image by buhny on Flickr, licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.]

My friend Mary and I are (very) amateur animators who won a competition for the ChicagoOperaTheater last year with this  summary of their 2009 season.

This year, the Chicago Opera Theater gave us the opportunity to do longer-form summaries of their 2010 season.

Here is our summary of Moses in Egypt:

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