If you’re a developer in Chicago August 14-15, there’s no better place to be than SocialDevCamp at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where a few hundred likeminded nerds will be figuring out how they can leverage the social web to create great new applications. With two tracks going each day, plus an unconference and a Hackathon*, there’s something for everyone — social application and platform developers, mobile social developers, evangelists, and enthusiasts.

If you’ve got time on Sunday, swing by the panel discussion “Using Hackathons & Code Sprints for Innovation and Social Change.“ I’ll be sharing my own experience/flashbacks from our own Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge – a 24-hour nonprofit nerdathon we’ll be bringing to Chicago.

*For the Hackathon, I’m bringing a palette of Red Bull, ramen noodles, and my vuvuzela to cheer on our team – who as of August 2^nd will be the founders of our new Chicago office.

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The Thrilleresque dancing zombie is out and apparently, disco-dancing Zombies are in. MTV’s Multiplayer blog is reporting that the dancing Michael Jacksonesque zombie from the popular Plants Vs. Zombies is being removed from the game.

PopCap said they removed the zombie after Michael Jackson’s estate objected to its use.

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As part of our ongoing agency primers geared at helping our partners pitch, win, execute and deliver bug-free interactive projects, we’ll cover how to talk to your clients about bugs, and how our QA process vastly minimizes their risk. Learn how the QA team at The Nerdery handles its sacred mission as our last line of defense against bugs.

RSVP to join us Today, July 27 at 10:15 am Central or Thursday, July 29 at 3:15 pm Central.

Two thumbs up from The Nerdery’s QA department will only come after their careful scrutiny of web interface performance and usability, tested in numerous browsers. QA enters bugs into a tracking system, where they are assigned to developers for repair. Once a bug has been fixed, it is reassigned to QA for confirmation.

Nerdery developers give QA an overview of all functionality requirements and specific test cases; these help QA understand what aspects of a project are to be tested and how. QA gives the developers an opportunity to see their project from the perspective of a user or tester –The Nerdery’s QA process fosters an environment of successful self-testing by the developers and is key to the delivery of a quality final product.

In our one-hour webinar we’ll cover:

• What QA does and why they’re our/your friend
• Our QA process, functionality and work-flow
• Best bets for best-laid agency plans to improve quality of web projects
• How to avoid common missteps (and how we’ll catch them, anyway)
• QA gotchas: examples of bacon-saving/house-rocking functionality fixes, backend UX/UI, and security-savior stories
• Mosquitoes, dead. Cockroaches, dead. Bugs hiding in code that could upend the launch of a website, dead.

RSVP to join us Today, July 27 at 10:15 am Central or Thursday, July 29 at 3:15 pm Central.

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Air Quotes Quiz Show @ Pentathanerd Summer Games from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

If you’re still there, don’t miss the medal presentations:

Medal Stand, Summer Games 2010 from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

All-Around Award (overall points accumulated from the combined five events)

Gold: Jon Rexeisen

Silver: John Shimeck

Bronze: Dave Kam

Individual Gold Medals:

• Darts: Chris Locher
• Chess: Dave Kam
• Scrabble: Theresa Dahlberg
• Pinewood Lego Money Ball: Dave Kam
• Air Quotes Quiz Show: Jon Rexeisen

This concludes the 2010 Pentathanerd Summer Games. Our thoughts now turn to The Winter Games.

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Next and last is The Summer Games’ final event: The “Air Quotes” Quiz Show, with a mid-day preliminary round and the finals at 4:30. We don’t dare broadcast it live (fear of wardrobe malfunction), so look for good/clean coverage of the finale, medal presentations and closing ceremonies on Monday.

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Scrabble – Pentathanerd 2010 Summer Games from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Next up is a traditional crowd-pleaser, the Pinewood Lego Monkey Ball.

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Chess@2010 Pentathanerd Summer Games from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

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Darts & Procession – Pentathanerd 2010 Summer Games from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

One the medal stand: Chris Locher “won” gold, yours truly settled for silver and Jon Rexeisen took the bronze medal. I’m renouncing my medal and going back to covering the games like the bulldog reporter I set out to be. Next up is the Chess championship round. Can you handle the truthiness?

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MSP WordPress user group meeting, Thursday, 6:30-9 p.m. at The Nerdery (free)

Topics:

• BuddyPress for Dummies (Toby Cryns, presenter)
• Moving WordPress to a new domain/server (Ray Champagne, presenter)

Please RSVP here so we can order enough food.

The Pentathanerd Summer Games

• Darts: Monday, July 19
• Chess: Tuesday, July 20 (preliminary rounds occurred Monday, July 12)
• Scrabble: Wednesday, July 21
• Pinewood LEGO Monkey Ball: Thursday, July 22
• “Air Quotes” Quiz Show: Friday, July 23 (Quiz Show will also have a championship round at 4:30)

Sticklers on rules (from Pentathanerd founder Mark Seemann):

“Air Quotes” Quiz Show

Setting the scene: You’re in a game show. You’ve been given the answers. Well, some of the answers. Can you remember them? End scene. Freeze frame. Star wipe. The preliminary round of “Air Quotes” Quiz Show involves taking an online quiz about a database of questions, some provided before the competition. Some questions will also be about the Pentathanerd itself, such as “Who won the Darts Event?” The competitors with the top three scores will advance to the Championship Round (Friday). The top three will truly test their skills at memory, competing against each other in three final rounds:

• Icon Recall – an image of 15 icons is shown at the start of the event for a period of time. After the second round, the finalists will take turns calling out an icon from the master image. If it’s there, 10 points. If not, the finalist is done with this round. Getting five correct earns a maximum 50 points.
• Nerdy Numerics – finalist must recite as many digits in order as possible from one of three numbers: pi, e (euler’s constant), and the square root of 2. One point for each digit past the decimal point, to a maximum of 50 points. Hint: the numbers start with 3, 2, and 1, respectively. Now remember, after this recitation comes the recall portion of Icon Recall!
• Showdown – three categories, one question each. Finalist in third chooses their category first, then second place. Get the question right, get 50 points.

Pinewood LEGO Monkey Ball:

Competitors design crafts that convey a LEGO person (or a reasonable substitute thereof) down a short ramp onto a field of point-valued areas. Where the LEGO person ends up determines the score for that run. Crafts may be constructed of anything (within reason: non-lethal, non-oozing, legal, etc) with the following three stipulations:

1. Must fit within a specific size (to be determined, for now say roughly a shoebox)
2. Must not have any external controls (no remote-controls)
3. Must be activated/initiated by the deadfall mechanism common to Pinewood Derby ramps

Scrabble

Competitors will be ordered randomly. Each competitor in turn will take seven new tiles and then have one minute to place a word on a standard Scrabble board, scoring points as per the game. Unused tiles are not retained. After seven competitors have placed valid words on the board, the board will be reset, allowing the next competitor to place the first word. The words will be tested against the SOWPODS [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOWPODS ] word list. Invalid words will be removed, and the player attempting an invalid word will score zero points. After every competitor has had a chance to place a word, the order of competitors will again be randomized, and play will continue with any existing words in play on the board. There will be a third round, after which the total scores will determine overall placement for the event.

Chess

• Clocks will be set to five minutes per side with a three second delay.
• Players will be randomly seeded into pools of four (or as close as possible).
• Everyone in a pool plays everyone (there’s only time for one match each, random color selection).
• Top 50% of each pool advance to the next round – ties advance together.

Darts

Competitors will have two sets of three throws each to get the best combined scores. Top 50% advance to the next round (ties advance together) until the field reduces to the top four competitors. Final round of four will determine top four placement. Ties in the final round will be broken by single sets of throws.

More rules may be added as needed (not that we’re just making this up as we go). Some rules may be made to be broken…

More here: http://pentathanerd.com/

Still more here: http://blog.nerdery.com/tag/pentathanerd/

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The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal recently announced that we received The Jefferson Award for Public Service in recognition of our record for spurring volunteerism among our nerds and throughout the web development community with the webchallenge. In the first three years of The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, volunteers have donated approximately a million dollars worth of professional services to 39 nonprofits.

The Jefferson Award was created in 1962 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Senator Robert Taft, Jr., and Sam Beard as a “Nobel Prize for public service.”

We promise not to let it go to our heads. Non-subscribers, you can read the whole article right here.

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