nerdnite wellington 5: of hardware, spaceware, brainware and wordware
UPDATE: videos available here, prezis from the talks available here.
18th April at Bodega, Wellington!
More geekery will be delivered to your eagerly-awaiting grey (and white) matter on this most auspicious of Mondays.
nerdnite #5 will cover topics such as antennae, narratives, open hardware and scrabble!
In no particular order, then (since I’m still deciding), may we present the Order of Things to Come!
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Antennas, Everywhere.
Jon Brewer
There are more antennas in New Zealand than there are sheep. Many, many more.
From millimeters long to kilometers across, these little guys touch every part of our lives: communications, electricity, entertainment, food safety, medicine, retail shopping, transportation, and more.
In this talk we’ll walk through the lot of them, with a dive in to how they work, where they’re hiding, and what we’d do without them.
Jon Brewer has spent the last seven years of his life obsessing about antennas.
Consciousness and Reality, Story, and Bad SF movies
Jonathan Todd
An exploration of the nature of consciousness and reality, explicated via the nature of the stories we tell ourselves, facilitated by the common nerd-language of bad science fiction movies. Also contains comic books and cosmic gibberish.
Jonathan (Billy) Todd is a writer, musician and filmmaker. No one knows if there is really a person beneath all the hair.
Beyond Arduino
David Zanetti
“Beyond Arduino” will be about going a layer lower and learning from the Arduino designs to implement custom embedded electronics, from the perspective of challenges and lessons attempting to a complete self-contained Stratum-1 NTP server board.
David Zanetti has been in and around IT for the past 16 years professionally, and a geek well before that. Most of the time it’s with Open Source systems, and currently as a contractor with a multinational running Open Source systems for a variety of large New Zealand customers.
On becoming a Scrabble® nerd
Steven Brown
What does it take to go from being a mere Scrabble player to meriting the designation Scrabble nerd? This talk will touch on a few of the possibilities, including anagrams, algorithms, intellectual property, and more anagrams.
Steven has been involved in club Scrabble for around 18 years, and has been playing in tournaments for almost as long. He has represented New Zealand in the Trans-Tasman Challenge five times (so far), but hasn’t qualified for a World Champs (yet). His day job is not important, but note that his full name anagrams to BRAW GOVERNMENTESE. (It also anagrams to SNOWMEN ABET VERGER or BROWSER AVENGEMENT, but those are not nearly as relevant.)
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Remember, new venue is Bodega. With oodles of room, so bring everyone you know! And yes, it’s still a free event. Because knowledge wants to be shared 🙂
Posted in nerdnite wellington | 
Tags: antenna, Arduino, consciousness, David Zanetti, film, Jon Brewer, Jonathan Todd, narrative, nerdnite 5, nerdnite wellington, nerdnite welly, NTP server, open hardware, reality, satellite, sci-fi, Scrabble, Steve Brown
Have just posted this to the NZ SitP meetup group.