Latest News >> 2008-11-13

Well, DHH seems to be caught in a lie in his latest blog post on Rails myths so I feel I should correct it. An outright lie that Mongrel caused his 400 restarts/day problem. However, David must have forgotten that I have a full log of the chat where he admitted it, so let’s get into some nice clean truth for a change.

2008-11-11

I’m quickly coming to the end of my first semester in music school and am considering taking a consulting gig for the two month break we have. Not really sure what’s available these days, as I actually haven’t touched a computer for the entire semester.

2008-10-30

In this world there are these weird little dickheads who think that they have some kind of magical powers manipulating others to do their bidding. They spend their days making people around them dance like marionettes in a sick little play that only they find funny. The sad truth about manipulators is their machinations are only powerful and effective in their own mind.

2008-10-28

UPDATE: Read my follow-up post to this where I explain Matt is alright.

The Freehacker’s Union is officially a global movement. Hot damn this is so much fun. We just had our first meeting on IRC today and worked out some really good ideas. It’s awesome to see so many other people just as pissed off and hungry as myself.

What we’ve got going is the start of a website, the IRC channel for chatting, and two mailing lists for coordinating meetings.

We’re also going with the organization structure of having “FU Locals” that are organized by a “Curator” in different areas. We’re pushing the management and organization of the gatherings down to the locals and trying to get each local to report back and share. The Curator isn’t in charge, he or she just organizes the show.

We’ve got locals in these major cities so far:

  • New York, NY
  • Austin, TX
  • Greenville, SC
  • London, UK
  • Boston, MA
  • Nottingham, UK
  • Salt Lake City, UT
  • Sarasota, FL
  • Toronto, ON
  • Baltimore, MD
  • Jyv_skyl_, Finland (sorry, UTF-8)
  • Phoenix, AZ
  • Champaign-Urbana, UL
  • Gouda, Netherlands
  • Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL
  • Jacksonville, FL

Each of those have about 1-5 people that have started trying to organize. If you’re interested in joining a local, you can subscribe to our mailing list and introduce yourself.

Mailing Lists

The mailing lists are on the Freehacker’s Union site server. The web site is still being built, so you can piss off if you hate it.

To subscribe, do this:

  1. Send an email to minimalist@freehackersunion.org with the subject “subscribe converse” without quotes (of course).
  2. Follow the instructions it gives you and you’re on. You then send to converse@freehackersunion.org after that.
  3. Do the same with “subscribe announce” to get on the announcements list.
  4. Don’t be a dick.

When you get on, introduce yourself and say what local you’re interested in joining or helping with. I’ll shoot you IRC information once you subscribe.

Next Meetings

Each local is going to figure out how to organize around the rules I developed and then they’ll try to do a gathering in the next couple weeks.

We’re shooting for having them record the event somehow so we can put it up and share what’s going on.

We’re coming up with guidelines and ideas, but the important thing is this is an experiment so nothing’s set in stone just yet (if it ever will be).

If you have suggestions, shoot me an email or bring it up on the list.