[Chicago] next meeting

[sheila miguez]

On 2/27/07, Atul Varma <varmaa at gmail.com> wrote:
> At dinner on Saturday, Fei-han (I believe that was his name--not sure if I'm
> spelling it right) mentioned that he would be interested in giving a
> presentation on unicode in Python.  In it he would explain Unicode as though
> he were talking to a child, where Chris is the child.

That's a good idea--and I'd like to see someone go through bit-banging
when taking strings of "hex digits" and doing calculations on them
and/or passing them through a serial port over to a hardware test
fixture as though they were actually hex digits, because I had to do
that in other languages and it seemed to work okay even though I was
duck typing from a string to, I guess, array bytes? We were worried
that when we upgraded to this unspeakable language's version where it
switched to unicode representations of strings that it would screw
things up but it didn't. yay.

which reminds me, maybe we could take a cue-cat scanner and play with
it. Carl has a few. They are not the USB kind though, and all of the
(2) laptops I have access to do not have serial ports.

> At last year's post-pycon meeting, there was some demand for someone to go
> over Guido's slides from his keynote.  I'm willing to do that if people are
> interested.
>
> I'm also interested in knowing how I can help with Pycon 2008.  One of the
> things we discussed at Pycon was the idea of having a "Chicago day" that
> encouraged people to go away from the conference venue and travel to the
> loop or Wicker Park or somewhere and see what Chicago is "really about".

I'd really like to do this too, but I'm not sure how easy it would be
to organize an event for 600 people. So, I have been thinking about
different things--don't organize just provide enough time and enough
guidance (in person or in writing).

Chris's(?) idea: offer volunteer guides to accompany people

But, believe me, when we put together conference wiki pages, I'll
populate information on Chicago. I am obsessive about wiki pages and
eating out/walking around etc.

Btw, The Chicago Architecture Foundation gives classes on being a
guide on their walking tours, which I've thought would be really neat
to do when I first heard about it, but it is a few weeks, iirc. I
don't know if I have time to do that. It might easier for someone with
a student schedule to pull off.

Anyway, the prices for the guided tours aren't heinous, and I wonder
if we could wrangle a group discount to offer to people?

more morning fueled coffee babbling,

-- 
sheila