User:DancesWithCars

What's With the Name?

A biking persona and trail name...

Name Conflicts

There is a previous biking DancesWithCars out west (Northern America) somewhere rumored to have passed away... This joker on the east coast, is not that person, and NotDeadYet...

Attends DC Learning Club meetings

Since owning a G1G1 machine, started attending OLPC Learning Club DC meetings, to get support, find out what's in the community, give back, have some fun, etc..

Jerry provides some activities for the group's kids when the lectures get too adult, i.e. brings a WowWee Tribot on occasion and resists any long streams of information, i.e. Lecture, as he also has the attention span of a gnat, and needs notes, websites, camera snapshots, etc as accommodations to remember...

Parental Supervision Required

DancesWithCars does not claim to be adult besides his ever increasing adult age (45, sigh), so might want to provide adult and parental mentoring on occasion, (but he will resist...)

He is an Uncle of two children aged 10 and 5 and asked a parental unit for holiday money to buy an XO on the G1G1 Program in 2007), hoping his relatives would for the kids as well but did not... He andxiously awaited a surprise green box delivered to his subsidized apartment doorstep (lucky not to have lost it) on St. Patrick's day over a year ago...

Solo Machine =

Having one machine didn't try meshing unless at LearningClub events, but was usually to distracted to concentrate. Later tried some on Lending Library machines.

Touchpad Problems and DC Repair Shop

He later found his touchpad didn't work well and after some talk with the youth run DC repair shop, quickly bought a Targus mini mouse at a local office supply store to make his machine useable, bought an extra battery from the repair shop, and still wants to make a DynoHubSolarPowerCombo for Bike Touring. Googling DancesWithCars will probably yeild a CrazyGuyOnABike.com tour journal describing some of his crazy tours (in state, C&O Canal, etc)

Batteries Required

Received a 12 V car adapter as a gift from a visiting XO presenter. THANKS! (forgot name, please remind me)...

Has been drooling over power options, solar panel (tried at Nortel one winter through a window, and worried about the hissing sound).

Catalogging Accessories and Options

Takes pictures of various accessories that work with XO, some later available from XOExplosion, mostly wondering what will work with it and collecting info for others to try...

Some Assembly Required

Having gotten back into electronics with the purchase of an AdaFruit.com Arduino Starter Kit and some sleds/shields (Motor, Wave, Eth, etc) and learning that Java 32 bit works on 64 bit Fedora 10 with RXTX update, and some fussing, and even loads on 32 bit XO but windows are weird position and acting and have yet to get functional...

Soldering

With a clear glass teacup on his knee up too close to his face (NEED SAFETY GOGGLES! and PARENTAL SUPERVISION) soldered the Arduino 9Vold battery compartment (badly), Proto board, Wave and will work on the others later...

Projects

Lending Library

Helped (arguable) setup the machines with olpc-update -frvv 802, doing grunt work across the 25 machine and making policy recommendations for distributing across the whole DC region, living in the remote suburbs and not owning a car, biking is not always an option and long distance, difficult carrying, etc...

Kid Project

As checking out two machines to loan to relatives, and learn from the experience, described here... UncleCrazy

Other Affiliations

Does Linux in the adult community, created a (book) library for DCLUG, became webnewbie of DCLUG and has been going there since 2002...

Showed XOs at FOSE (Federal Office Systems Expo in 2008 and 2009) but lost some information in the translation...

Accidentally wiped the hard drive on my 64 bit laptop with the XO School Server ISO in a mad rush before demoing at FOSE2008, and whined about it on this wiki, but forgot his login, to continue the thread and account details...

He has yet to hack a kernel, and doesn't actually program much anymore, since losing his favorite lab machines, Symbolic Lisp Machines to post cold war DarkSide mothballing...