The Geeks are at AS220:

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009, 5:30 – 8:30pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

The last Providence Geek Dinner of the decade (yes, _ the decade_!) drops next week, and it’s going to be a doozy.

For starters, the excellent Providence-based DiJiPOP will be presenting.

We also are having our second annual “Geeks for Good” food drive, led by the awesome Michelle Riggen-Ransom of BatchBlue Software. More on this very soon. (For the moment, suffice it to say, “bring food donations!”)

And Drinking Liberally will be hosting gubernatorial candidate Patrick Lynch.  8pm at the Wild Colonial, as always.

Photo swiped from GCPVD, where you might as well head for the rest of the details.

Brown CS Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck – a world-renowned pioneer in optimization technology – founded Providence-based Dynadec in 2008 to help businesses optimize the decisions and processes critical to success. At the next Geek Dinner, Pascal will give an overview of his fascinating, fast-growing company, as well showing its cutting-edge optimization platform – Comet – in action. These are jaw-dropping demonstrations of how Dynadec provides invaluable insights into a broad range of applications – everything from vehicle routing to workforce management to resource scheduling.

To learn more, read this recent Xconomy interview with Pascal.

Please RSVP at Facebook (In the interest of making it more “viral”, we’re experimenting with doing our RSVPs on Facebook – and while you’re there please join our Facebook group. And if you want to join our very-low-volume email announcement send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin@gmail.com with your name and affiliation.)

I haven’t been able to recommend Battlestar Galactica to anybody since the airing of last March’s vacant season finale. So much of the pleasure of watching the show followed from the twists and turns, and anticipation of the revelation of whatever cosmic force or conspiracy made it all make sense. Each new thread meant the answer would have to be even grander yet.

Turns out there simply wasn’t one.

The show was visually enticing and fun, but anybody can write a script rife with explosions and a whimsical wiggling plot. To justify the heft that BSG’s authors so desired, and for a period seemed to deserve, it all needed to make some amount of sense, to be consistent and complete within itself.

But with tomorrow’s release of “The Plan” and January’s Caprica, there remains the (unlikely) possibility that show will fill in enough of the gaping holes it left open, and make up for leaving all of its loyal fans hanging: