Just as an FYI…I will be appearing on the Fox 13 Morning Show sometime during the 8am hour and on the ABC24 11am news promoting MidSouthCon.  Just look for the silent guy with the big yellow head :).

My LCD display from Adafruit has been staring at me for awhile now and I finally pulled it out and started tinkering with it.  The hardest part about working with it out of the box is soldering headers onto the LCD board.  In a convoluted and more playful fashion I used an old Cisco serial cable and a small mint tin to connect the 16 leads of the LCD to a small breadboard.  Following a pinout diagram from Hacktronics I connected the arduino to the breadboard and a 1k ohm resistor.  After verifying continuity with a multimeter to all leads I uploaded the code I got from Hacktronics.  After the Arduino rebooted the result felt like an application of Clarke’s Law.  Its really just proof of concept level implementation but it taught me about the LCD library and soldering techniques.

It kind of looks like a hack job…because it is 🙂

We had a great meeting tonight thanks again to everyone who came out and special thanks to those who brought projects to show off. Tonight we learned about using a vinyl cutter to create custom stickers and we learned how to mod a Montblanc pen refill to fit into a much cheaper pen casing. We also got a few more ideas for a space since we seem close to outgrowing Republic Coffee. A few of us showed up early to join in on the local 2600 meeting, they were a great bunch and we had a few stay for our meeting as well. The local 2600 group meet the first Friday of the month and they seem very interested in a Memphis Hackerspace. We’ll share the pictures from the meeting and of the various projects that were shown off soon.

We have begun the formal process of discussing bylaws that are to be adopted by Midsouth Makers.  Join the discussion now on the Wiki:

http://wiki.midsouthmakers.org/w/Bylaws

You got it, we have our very own Zombie Walk here in Memphis.  Who woulda thought that we would actually have something cool.  For those of you who aren’t into the geeky aspect of zombies, I do seriously apologize for the fun that you will miss out on.  Any who, this event has gone on since spring of 2007 and is back again for its fourth run.  Maybe this will be a good chance for us to get out there, have some fun, and put ourselves in a visible light while doing so.

The general idea is this.  You dress up like a zombie.  You meet a Beale St. dressed like said zombie.  When the walk begins, you “travel” (not exactly walk) down a predetermined path “attacking” the people that are clearly marked as “innocent bystanders.”  Rinse, eat brains, repeat.  Sounds like fun right?  Well then let’s make sure that some of us are there.  Hope there are plenty available to attend, and I hope everyone has a blast being slightly straaaaaaaaaaange.