Club Moz

As some of you may have noticed, #seneca now requires users to register their nicks in order to join the channel.   I have posted a quick edit to the IRC Tutorial on clubmoz.ca to guide people through this process.  If you are having problems, please review it and feel free to email clubmoz@gmail.com if you are having any further issues.  I will try the best I can to help you work through the issues or direct you to someone who can.

Just a quick reminder that office hours begin this week. Drop on by ORI and see us!

Hey folks!  As promised, I am here to give you a follow up to what was discussed last week in regards to Club Moz.

Things will be largely the same as last semester.  We will still be testing, hacking, working on community involvement, providing support; basically being involved in the Mozilla community.  I plan on continuing my testing efforts with Mozilla testdays and bugdays, as well as dogfooding the latest Songbird and Minefield nightlies.  Others will be hacking away and working on open source projects for their courses.  I may also write a tutorial or two for the clubmoz.ca.  I encourage anyone else that wants to contribute to the community and clubmoz.ca to join our efforts.

The biggest change to the club this semester is that we will no longer be holding a weekly meeting.  I feel that this model, which has been used since the club’s inception, has not been successful at drawing out more members from the student body.  Instead, we will be holding office hours.

David Humphrey, has been uber-gracious and given us a few cubicles in CDOT (Centre for Development of Open Technologies), otherwise known as ORI (Open-source Research Institute).  The plan is to have someone in ORI so that students can pop in whenever they want during the week to find out more, get involved, or just ask questions.  Right now, we have enough people interested that we can cover the following hours pretty much every week:

We will be starting office hours next week, Monday Jan 21, 2008. Please feel free to stop on by during these hours. There should be an announcement being posted on Seneca’s CS homepage this week reiterating this information. As always, we will also be available on IRC during these times. I also want to create a flyer to advertise the club and post a PDF version of the ORI floor plan (ORI can be a bit of a labyrinth the first time around).

Finally, here are a couple of the brainstorming ideas we had for the club…

** Disclaimer: watch out for some major spit balls! **

1. Expand promotion efforts to include York University

2. Make class room visits to 1st and 2nd year students to chat about open source and Club Moz.

3.Give another presentation promoting the club and open source; this time including some of the open source students (maybe even a guest appearance by bhearsum…don’t worry Ben, we aren’t committing you to anything :P)

4. Firefox 3 Release Party (hopefully it is released before exam week).

Anyway, I think this justly summarizes the meeting and gives you an idea about what we are thinking.  If anyone wants to stop by this week, I will be unofficially holding office hours in ORI during my break periods.  Just pop in…if I am there, I am there.

I would really appreciate some feedback into our new plans, especially the new office hours model.  Feedback can be sent to clubmoz@gmail.com or just post a comment here on my blog.

Cheers,

Anthony Hughes

IRC: ashughes

Well it has been just over a month since my last post.  What a crazy time.  Starting with my trip back to the bay area for the weekend of Dec 1st.

I found out the hard way that I don’t like 8am flights too much and that I love the red-eye flight.  Needless to say, it was a very tiring, invigorating and fun filled weekend.  I had never flown 8000km in one weekend before.  It was definitely interesting.  The weather was a nice change of pace from Toronto too.  Luckily, winter was here to welcome me back with a punch in the face and kick in the nuts.

After that trip set me back about a week for assignments and course work, it was time to hit the books…hard.  Two weeks to finish 7 assignments, 4 labs, study for 3 tests and then go into exam mode the following week.  Not fun, but mission accomplished.  By cutting out sleep, I was able to complete all of my work and finish the semester with straight As, a 4.0 GPA and Presidential Honours.

So after a long battle of a semester, I decided to take the next three weeks to relax and stay relatively off everyones radar.  Sure I still peppered some QA time with Mozilla and Songbird in there, but that’s because I am addicted.  It’s like a chain-smoker of  50 years taking three weeks off of smoking.

Now I am back into another semester and thinking about what is to come for Club Moz for the next four months.  All that I can say right now is that we are meeting this week on Thurday to discuss this very topic.  So stay tuned for more details in the coming days.

On that note, I leave you with a simple haiku:

With a brand new year
Comes new opportunity
Club Moz’ers Unite

Cheers,

Anthony Hughes, Club Moz President