Here I sit at Cosi at 30th Street Station, in the hopes that there'll be a few more arrivals for my monthly OLPC meeting. I always buy lunch and a beverage, to make up for the fact that I will be helping to co-opt a table here for the better part of the afternoon.

I've never been the only one to show up. However, there were a couple months during the past year when I "called out sick", and the other Most Regular Attendee has been the only arrival.

Heck, even if all I do is sit here and surf on the XO for a few hours, it gets me out of the house. ;) So I sit here and surf for a while instead of sitting on the sofa and surfing... no harm, no foul.

I do have to say, though, that I'm glad that Cosi's wifi connection is working. That's more than we have been able to say for some prior months when we had groups coming in here. It's pretty sad when you're sitting practically right UNDER the wifi router, with a direct line-of-sight to the device, and your machine can't "see" it or make a connection.

There is, or at least was, one other freebie wifi available at 30th Street Station. Its name is "Home of the Best Cheesesteak", and I don't know which vendor provides it. I presume that it's one of the several proprietors in the food court, though. (Duh, no kidding, lol.) It USED to be the most reliable wifi available in here, but for the past few months, it hasn't worked. That's a pity.

I wanted to put our Nerd Meeting on my justin.tv channel, as I did in February, but I think I might just wait until someone else arrives. In the meantime, I think I'll register my Cosi rewards card and read the latest news.

I'm delighted to report that a school within a few miles of Philadelphia will be using and distributing OLPC's laptops to its students!

Chester Community Charter School in Pennsylvania is deploying 1,400 XO laptops to students, marking the largest deployment of laptops from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in the United States. The initial rollout will begin this week.

You can find the full article by clicking here.

Obviously, we can't invite 1400 kids plus parents to attend the Philly XO meetings at Cosi... it would be a record-breaking fire code violation to shoehorn that many people into that small of a space. But I wonder if the school would be open to exchanging ideas with Philly area users? I'd absolutely love to have a visit and see the XOs being used for exactly what they were designed to do: educating children.

Oh, and have I mentioned that there's still time to support OLPC via the Give One, Get One inititave? Check out Amazon.com/xo for details.

We had seven people in attendance with 6 XOs at Cosi in 30th Street Station this afternoon. Of those XOs, three were already running the latest version of Sugar and three had Version 656. One of those got updated to 8.2 while we were at Cosi; the other two machines had some software installed which they weren't in a position to wipe out with an upgrade.

We were able to demo the XOs for one attendee who was interested in our meeting after seeing it discussed on the forum. He hasn't got an XO yet, but is interested in them and in OLPC. He got to try his hand at using both versions of Sugar and watch the upgrade.

The user who upgraded his XO actually owns two of them: one from the first G1G1, and one from this year. His older XO was running the earlier version of Sugar, but his newer machine had the current Sugar on it. Now both machines have the new Sugar.

The machine we upgraded from a USB stick gave us a pleasant surprise and an unpleasant surprise. The pleasant surprise was that when we upgraded it from a USB stick, at the end of the upgrade, it had all the activities on it. That was unexpected! I downloaded the 8.2 upgrade from the OLPC wiki onto a clean USB stick, and I thought we would have to install the G1G1 Activity Pack separately from installing the upgrade. Apparently not, so that was nice.

The unpleasant surprise was the hardware issue that cropped up with the XO that was upgraded. Fortunately, the saga did have a happy ending. Right before the upgrade, we noticed that the XO's radio and wifi indicators were not lit. Somehow, the XO's radio decided to go on hiatus. We figured that the upgrade would rectify that, but surprise -- it didn't. Er, how what? Enter our attendee who uses his XO at work and in the field on a regular basis. He was able to go into Linux and enter various arcania to try and determine the source of the issue. Long story less long: multiple reboots didn't work, but taking the battery out and letting the machine sit for a while seemed to do the trick. Eventually. As mysteriously as the Radio Gremlins appeared, they went away and the wifi just started working again. Apparently, the old adage is true: any sufficiently advanced technology really IS indistinguishable from magic.

We did have one young'un on hand, which is good, since the XOs' creators did stipulate, "One Laptop Per CHILD", not "One Laptop Per ADULT". He and his mom had his XO in tow. His was one of the machines that has a lot of software installed that they justifiably were concerned about losing in the event of an upgrade. But he had a good time creating activities like Write and Record, and inviting us to them. Everybody was typing at once in the Write activity, demonstrating (and experiencing) the XO's collaboration features.

I also brought an Ubuntu SD from XO Explosion. This was the first time I actually used it so we could all get a look at how it works for the first time, at the same time. The grownups pretty much all give Ubuntu a big "thumb's up" for turning the Little Green Machine into a tool for grownup productivity, as it has Firefox and Open Office installed. Everyone also likes the fact that once my developer key was copied onto the Ubuntu card, all I have to do is boot with the Ubuntu card in the SD slot and bingo -- instant Ubuntu. Then I can reboot without the card in the slot, and voila -- I have Sugar. The ability to switch between both systems completely at will is a huge boon.

One of our attendees who has been to some DC meetings had some XO info cards to hand out, because sure enough, people saw all the Little Green Machines and wanted to know more about them. We touted the XO to at least three people during the course of the meeting.

So there you have it. Kids. Upgrades. Ubuntu. Info cards. Telling people about OLPC and XOs. That was our day in a nutshell.

Let's do it again next month!

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday when I checked out the OLPCnews.com site. Yesterday's post was about using the XO as assistive technology. I had seen the posts from LesleyT, who is using an XO with a class of special-needs kids, on the olpcnews.com forums, so I was happy to see the info repeated on the main OLPC news site.

But what I didn't expect was seeing my own userID make an appearance in the article as well. I was the person who started a discussion on using the XO as assistive tech on the forums, and it attracted enough interest from others that we wound up with our own forum. :) Technically, I don't feel like I've DONE anything yet, other than get people talking, but on the other hand I guess even a small "something" is still something.

Here's a direct link to the article from yesterday: One Assistive Technology Laptop Per Child. The stories LesleyT shared are great! :)

The first Philadelphia XO Users meeting took place this afternoon at 30th Street Station. Eight users, with six XOs, met and had a great time. :o)

Update: Here's a link to a group photo taken at the meeting: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmccleary/sets/72157603665076663//

That photo is the one that will be sent to Dr. Durbak, a psychologist who works with the UN and who knows Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the OLPC project. She even was there to see the first prototype machine being demoed to the UN several years ago. The prototype was larger than the final model and had a crank on the back to charge the battery. It was one of those "God provides" moments that she happened to be in Cosi, waiting for a train and checking her email on a Blackberry, when the XO users came filing in one by one for our meeting. She is very involved with educational projects and asked if she could publish the photo in their newsletter.

My Nerd Gene is all happy about these things. :o) We're planning to have monthly meetings in the same place, to help us learn about the device and to help spread the word that the OLPC project exists. The "Give One, Get One" might not be going on right now, but that doesn't mean that people can't help the project by making a donation.