GeekSWVA

You’re Invited to come to a GeekSWVA event!

Our next meeting will be Thursday, August 26 starting at 6PM at the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center (SVTDC).

SVTDC is located at 141 Highland Drive in Lebanon (Behind Wendy’s).

Refreshments and food will be provided by SVTDC.  We greatly appreciate their sponsorship of this meeting.

Our topic for this meeting will be Converting VHS Tapes to DVD.  Tim Siglin will be our presenter.  He will be demonstrating a way to use a miniDV camera to transfer both analog and DV tapes to DVD/BluRay.

We also will be discussing the future meetings and topic ideas so we hope that you will be able to attend this meeting.

Please RSVP by 10AM on Thursday, August 26 by going to this URL:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MRS2F3B

Again, thank you for your time and interest!

-GeekSWVA

Our next meeting will be Thursday, June 24 starting at 6PM at the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center (SVTDC).

SVTDC is located at 141 Highland Drive in Lebanon (Behind Wendy’s).

Refreshments and food will be provided by CGI.  We greatly appreciate their sponsorship of this meeting.

Our topic for this meeting will be a “Useful Web Sites Round-table.”
This will be an opportunity for you to “show and tell” about any web sites that you find useful (technology related or otherwise).

We also will be discussing the future meetings and topic ideas so we hope that you will be able to attend this meeting.

Please RSVP by 10AM on Thursday, June 24 by going to this URL:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G5QRCNF

Again, thank you for your time and interest!

-GeekSWVA

After a brief hiatus of regular meetings, we now are busy planning the agenda and meeting times for 2010.

Our first meeting of 2010 will be Tuesday, March 23 starting at 6PM at the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center (SVTDC).

Refreshments and food will be provided by SVTDC.

Our topic for this meeting will be a Photography Round Table.  We want you to bring your cameras!  Your comments about photography software of any kind—Photoshop, GIMP, Picasso, Flicker, TwitPic, etc.  Share with the group what you use to manage, edit, and archive your photos.

We will be discussing ideas for events and meetings for the rest of 2010.  It is our wish to have topics that interest you, so help up by providing your feedback.

Please consider completing a brief survey about GeekSWVA at the link below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7R76WKS

We hope that you will be able to attend the first meeting of 2010.
Please RSVP by replying to this message by 10AM on March 23 so we can plan adequately.

Again, thank you for your time and interest.

GeekSWVA

Digital Imaging – Free Food

TONIGHT! October 6 – 6:00-8:00pm at the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center in Lebanon

Ben will cover both basic and advanced level presentation with photos.
In the basic presentation, he will present 5 basic techniques for better photos. This includes the five most important compositional techniques you can use to take better pictures.

In the advanced level, Ben will cover high dynamic range with Photo Shop and RAW digital files.

Ben Collins is co-owner of the Bliss Agency. Visit www.theblissagency.com for more information on the firm.

Drinks and food will be provided by the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center. The Center is located at 141 Highland Drive in Lebanon, VA Visit www.svtdc.org for more information on SVTDC.

Please RSVP (by replying to geekswva@gmail.com about this message) by 3:00pm TODAY so we can adequately plan for food.

We would like to welcome you to the Southwest Virginia Technology Development Center in Lebanon VA for our 12th event.  Location is right behind the Wendy’s.
This month Craig Earls, Senior Consultant for CGI and Aaron Johnson, Student of UVa-Wise and IT assistant for SVTDC will be presenting to us all about Open Source Software.  The focus will be information about Free Software Foundation with some product demos,  how open source started.  Info about a few operating systems (Ubuntu, Damn Small Linux aka DSL, CentOS), and some network attached storage software (FreeNAS).  There will be discussion about some Linux productivity software, and some open source software for Windows.  Food and drinks sponsored by SVTDC and the Dingus Family.

Lebanon Anime Club.  What is it?  What is Anime?  For this meeting, Aug. 11, 2009 at 6pm, we will have the Lebanon Anime Club’s Zack Crenshaw tell us about anime.   We will hear from him a brief description about some of the genres of anime.  Then focus on the scifi and comedy genre that is his preference and preview some anime shorts from his collection.

Ok, For those people who had the misfortune of missing out last GEEK SWVA we wanted to give you an update of what we did and what we plan on doing!

For the July event we watched Office Space and had some great laughs.  We all can think of a moment in time when we wanted to take a hammer to a printer or some other uncooperative piece of technology.  The South West VA Technology Development Center was kind enough to sponsor the pizza and popcorn for the event.  We extend a great thanks to them.

Prior to the movie we discussed what we wanted to do for the next couple of meetings of GEEK SWVA.  Here is what we have laid out:

August 11 Did you know that Lebanon had an Anime Club?  Me either!!  For this meeting we will have the Lebanon Anima Club tell us about what they are doing, and why we might want to check out their meetings.    We will hear from Zack Crenshaw on the topic of anime and preview some anime shorts from his collection.

Sept 16  This will be our open source software discussion.  Aaron from the Technology Development Center and possibly someone from CGI South will discuss what open source software has provided the most usefulness and discuss the pros and cons for using Open Source.  We are hoping to see some demos, so stay tuned for details.  Since there is so many types of open source software available we want a round table discussion on what you use and what you think of open source software.

Oct 6th or 8th  meeting will have the a discussion on digital photography given by Eric?  Kyle? Ben? And what all has been going on in that field.  These are people who are very familiar to the subject so we are hoping to have all three speak to us.  We will update with those details as soon as we have them.

For November we know it is busy with the Holidays approaching and people getting ready for Thanksgiving so we will take an extended time to prepare for the next meeting.  We give thanks for all the people who have visited and contributed to Geek SWVA as we will have met for 14 times starting with the first meeting on 5/27/2008  where Ron Paul was our host who told us all about IT work has helped the VA Wildlife Organization.  We also had  Joseph Meade, Web Systems Specialist with UVa-Wise, who talked about aspects of Linux being used with servers in an enterprise environment.
Thank you again for attending and keeping GEEK SWVA going!

Dec 1.  This will be the last meeting in 2009 of Geek SWVA and we wanted to help you give the best gift ever to your loved ones.  How many people have old VHS tapes laying around not being played?  This topic will be all about taking those video files and putting them on a DVD or other digital media.  This will allow you  to give those videos from long ago to your loved ones and prevent their loss as VHS tapes will degrade.  Be sure not to miss this last meeting of Geek SWVA!

So we are back to the Office after a long weekend……  Hard to be focused and not think about how much fun we had.  Are you ready for a little more relief from the day to day office tasks?  If you are then please join us for a bit of comic relief.  A Geek SWVA movie event.  A time to laugh and say hey I remember something/one like that! This coming Tuesday at 6 pm, July 7, 2009 Geek SWVA will be showing the movie Office Space.  We will be watching this at the SouthWest Virginia Technology Development Center.

This movie is about an office drone like many others who has a routine life.  We will watch while his ordinary life turns a bit more interesting.  Before this movie starts we will discus the topic, and date for the next Geek SWVA event.

94% of businesses that suffer a catastrophic data loss go out of business.

The new Disaster Task Force harnesses creative scenarios, forums, mock disasters, and even the social networking tool “Twitter” to increase regional preparedness.  Download your application for the 2009 Corporate Preparedness Challenge from the Disaster Task Force web site and your business or organization could win over $36,800 in prizes.

Under the leadership of regional technology partners, including BCTI, Gray, Tenn.; TCIM, Piney Flats, Tenn.; Deliberare, Mendota, Va.; and OnePartner, Duffield, Va., the ultimate goal of the Disaster Task Force (DTF) is that regional organizations will be better equipped to survive disasters, including both weather-related disasters such as ice storms, tornadoes and electrical storms, as well as fires and even pandemics.

Many factors contribute to limited contingency planning.  It takes a special kind of person to pull-out of daily task-oriented firefighting and actually make themselves imagine what would happen if the systems they work so hard to maintain are just suddenly, instantly destroyed.

The most crucial element of disaster planning is creativity. This is not the kind of task you want to put on the shoulders of someone with limited creativity. Anyone who can imagine and orchestrate responses to events that, in most cases, have never before impacted their business is a very exceptional employee.

The Task Force supports those individuals and raises awareness of the critical importance of disaster planning.  The Task Force has developed really innovative new approaches and information to help.  These resources can be found at www.disastertsakforce.com.

Scenarios and forums

How many F3 (or higher) tornadoes have hit Tennessee and Virginia?  What happens when a hospital has a near miss with an F3 tornado?  Check out our documented scenarios to learn about real-life events like the 2009 Kentucky Ice Storm.

Most people have heard of these disasters but don’t have the time to really dig into what happened.  We compile the information and create graphics to help succinctly describe the situation.  We want to document a disaster that can overlay right onto our region and ask, ‘How would our ability to perform our daily tasks be impacted by a similar disaster?’

The Task Force is pulling out all of the stops to promote dialogue and action.  From tornadoes, fires and ice storms to — zombies.  You’ll have to check out the web site for more information on that.  See the press release at http://www.disastertaskforce.com/corp_news_061009.html.

Mock Disasters

The Task Force uses new communications technologies such as Twitter to stage region-wide mock disasters.

We encourage folks from all areas of the organization, not just the team specifically charged with contingency planning, to sign up for our Twitter notifications.

Later this summer, the Task Force will stage its first simulated regional disaster.

We’ll take one of the documented scenarios for the simulation.  Over a three-day period, we will send out Tweets (Twitter notifications) to subscribers.  The notifications will mimic the kind of emergency notifications we’d expect to see during such a disaster.

The disaster planners in each organization can use the opportunity to walk through their disaster plans with their entire organization keyed into the process.  In most cases, this will be the first time those not directly involved in the development of the plan have the opportunity to drill on it and understand how their role will be impacted.  This type of walkthrough is recommended by the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST), but is rarely performed in real life.

2009 Corporate Preparedness Challenge

The Task Force is sponsoring a challenge, or contest, open to all organizations in the region.  The qualifying counties in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee are listed on the web site.  Each organization completes a planning questionnaire that describes their organization’s disaster planning contingency plans.  The questionnaires are confidential and reviewed only by the challenge judges.  Finalists are selected from four categories:

· Small business (less than 100 employees)

· Mid-sized business (101 to 499 employees)

· Large business (greater than 500 employees)

· Government

A winning entry will be drawn from these four finalists.  The Challenge winner will receive prizes for their organization worth more than $36,000.

Prizes include:

· 1 year’s cabinet hosting in the OnePartner ATAC data center

· 1 year’s offsite tape vaulting in the TCIM vault

· A Disaster Recovery Gap Analysis from Deliberare

· A $5,000 training credit from BCTI

Each finalist receives a 1^st Annual DTF Challenge Award.  Each participating organization will receive a written review of their contingency plans with recommendations.

For more information, visit www.disastertaskforce.com.

Erik Rolf, CISA, CISSP
President and Principal Consultant

Deliberare, Inc.

(o): 276.644.0246  (m): 276.594.1363

www.deliberare.com

Deliberate Defense

888.933.5423

This month GEEK SWVA wants to get you involved.  We would like for you to bring a cool new gadget to have a Gadget Petting Zoo.  We want to see computer equipment, cell phones, GPS, PDA, calculators or some other gadget you could bring.  Be prepared to demonstrate it, show it off, and answer questions about it. You know us Geeks, we want all the details!!

Or perhaps in a closet, attic, or garage you have some old tech gadgets that we can reminisce about. Pull it out and bring the ancient stuff also.  We wanted to have plenty of time to setup and show the gadgets so please plan to be ready for action no later than 6:45pm. This should be an exciting event so definitely tell all your fellow Geeks!

For those who are going to participate please be sure to bring an extension cord and surge protector if you need to plug in.

Event will be held at the SWVA Technology Development Center on April 23, 2009 @6pm.  (Right behind Wendy’s in Lebanon, VA)

Dinner for the evening will be sponsored by the SWVA Technology Development Center.  Please RSVP by 4/22/09 at 5pm.  to Adam Tolbert [alt2q@uvawise.edu]  so we will have an accurate count for the food.