[chicago-lisp] Group update

[John Quigley]

Hey Peter and Everyone Else:

I hope this finds you all well and in good spirits.  It's been a while since we've had anything happen on this list, and as Peter has pointed out, there has been a significant increase in list-borne spam.

Let me touch on the spam issue first.  Unfortunately, this list was inherited and I maintain absolutely no control over its operations.  I've attempted to contact the common-lisp.net administrators on several occasions, to no avail.  This is no small source of frustration to me.

The group itself has proven difficult to get off the ground.  This is in large part because I've been so busy with other things.  This past month, I've been working to hand off responsibility of Chicago Linux so that I may focus on a programming-specific group.

I was thinking that group would be Chicago Lisp, but on closer thought, I think we'd all be better served to open the community to a wider set of Chicago programmers.  I think another significant component that has made it difficult to get Chicago Lisp operational is our small numbers: we are a fairly niche group.  To get a vibrant community like we've built over in the Chicago Linux camp, you need a good number of folks.

In that vein, I'm going to be putting my effort against the Tekniks:

  http://www.tekniks.org/

The initial focus will be in programming together in an informal way.  I'm setting our meetings to coincide with the thriving Programming Tonight sprints to get things going.

The meeting is at Cyberia Cafe, which if you've never been, is a truly great coffee shop to program at.  The owner is a local ISP owner, and the place is very 'hacker' friendly, with free Internet, plenty of seats, comfy sofas and great drinks.

I do hope you'll join me.  Our mailing list, which I guarantee will be spam free, as I operate this domain and list directly:

  https://www.tekniks.org/lists/listinfo/tekniks-discuss

> Is anyone going to the ACM Chicago meeting tomorrow night, or Silicon
> Prairie Social on Thursday?
> 
> http://oldwww.acm.org/chapters/chicago/
> http://www.siliconprairiesocial.com/2007/09/17/silicon-prairie-social-this-thursday

I won't be able to make the ACM meeting, but the Silicon Prairie meet-up looks really cool.  I'll definitely do my best to make it, although it's rather out of my way.

All my best,
John Quigley