Mark your calendars: on Thursday, October 16, CubeSpace marks our second birthday! What does this mean for you? A community-wide open house, with delicious food, great company, and some fun and games to boot. Current, former, and future members of CubeSpace are all invited, as are general well-wishers, curious onlookers, and newsletter devotees (hey, I can dream, right?). The festivities will be happening from 4 to 8 p.m., so drop by and help us ring in Year Number Three!

The Open Source Bridge Content team is ready to kick off 2009 with a meeting on Tuesday, January 13, 7pm at Cubespace.

We'll be going over our content areas, reviewing our initial call for papers, talking about our philosophy for the conference and assigning leads for each of the content areas.

We're looking for people who can coordinate the activities of a few people in review committees, can commit to 10-15 hours of reviewing and responding time over the next two months. We figure we'll have 3-4 in-person meetings before we finalize acceptance of presentations on April 1!

Anything else you're interested in chatting about? Send it to the list, and we'll make an agenda.

Several people may retire to a nearby bar for #afterhours hacking.

Let us know if you can make it!

Geeks Day On is a day of service in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr Day when folks with technology and Internet communication skills will offer advice and assistance to nonprofit organizations and open source projects. Visit http://dayon.org for more information.

This presentation will cover the following topics:

• PHP Data Objects Model and Setup
• PHP Data Objects and Object-Oriented Programming
• MySQL Stored Queries Design and Development
• Calling MySQL Stored Queries in PHP Data Objects Programming
• Advanced PHP Data Objects Programming Tips and Ideas
• Conclusions
• Questions and Answers
• Slides, docs, examples and PHP source code will be provided

presented by Ernest Bonat, Ph.D. Visual WWW, Inc. www.evisualwww.com

Aspen is a PHP-based website and application development platform. Not only will you be able to produce quality results in less time, but your work is kept modular for amazing portability.

The team from Trellis Development will give an introduction to the framework, along with a real world use-case scenario. Trellis is a local company that is developing a series of web-based products, and consists of members who currently run programming and design companies.

http://www.aspen-framework.org

This month's session will include a presentation by Nathan Bergey (@natronics) about CSS and how you can customize a theme to make it your own.

Join your fellow beer-and-bloggers at CubeSpace this Friday where KJs @MizD and @Chefchopper will spin (is that even the right word? I'm exposing my lame-ness here, aren't I) any one of their thousands of digital karaoke songs for your crooning pleasure. Lyrics will be projected big and tall for those spontaneous sing-along moments that always happen when someone sings pretty much anything by Pat Benatar. (At the very least, there is involuntary toe tapping. Think about it.)

We'll also have more Beer and Blog buttons to pass out. They're beeutiful.

Passover is among the best-known of the Jewish holidays. It is a time when family and friends gather together for a ritual meal. The Haggadah, the text used in the seder (structured meal) explicitly encourages the invitation of "strangers." And many Jews (David and myself included) take Passover as an opportunity to bring Jews and non-Jews together for discussion and food (food is very important).

We would like to invite members (in the broadest sense) of the CubeSpace community to the second CubeSpace Passover Seder. There are no minimum knowledge requirements to attend. Questions are encouraged and families are welcome.

The seder will be on Thursday, April 9th, beginning at 5pm. Adults are $10/person, children under 12 are $5/person and children under 2 are free.

Food will be kosher for Passover by ingredient, but we will not have special Passover plates. The seder will be vegetarian-friendly, and we will do our best to accommodate special diets for those that pre-register.

For more information, please email [email protected]. Ticket Info: Adults are $10/person, children under 12 are $5/person and children under 2 are free.

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to be talking about Agile. Agile is used at scrappy startups that are iteratively defining their products and markets and at large companies with complex business problems working with internationally distributed teams. In each of these different settings, some folks are strong advocates of Agile, while some are still skeptics. Some people in the User-Centered Design (UCD) community dismiss Agile as a fad, others have embraced it whole-heartedly. Can these two worlds intersect?

My next Yahoo Pipes class is scheduled for June 25th. For those who aren’t familiar with Yahoo Pipes, it is a tool that I use to monitor conversations happening across various social media sites. While Yahoo Pipes can also do so much more, I have focused this introductory class on monitoring conversations.

Register: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/350105174

  Costs:
      * Early Bird: $124.99
      * Students, Freelancers, or Unemployed Early Bird: $34.99
      * Late Registration (After June 18): $199.99
      * Students, Freelancers, or Unemployed (After June 18): $49.99

  Prerequisites
      * You will need to bring a laptop to the training class
      * You must have a Yahoo account (Flickr / Upcoming) and confirm that you can access Pipes with that account
      * You will also need to create a Google Spreadsheet with 5-6 keywords formatted like this prior to the class.
      * No prior knowledge of Yahoo Pipes is required

  Visit the Introduction to Yahoo Pipes training page for the course outline and other information about the class. http://fastwonderblog.com/training/