BarCamp Boston Sunday Summary
I was at BarCamp Boston Sunday for a few hours. I went to hear the reddit guys give a talk. It turned out to be really, really funny and not at all what we expected. If I could do something like that for my presentations and have it work … wow.
I also went to a talk about Perl–something like 20 Perl modules in 30 minutes Chris Ball gave. No, I don’t know Perl, but I guess it’s a language I should probably learn. I think I understood a fair bit.
And, of course, I had to show Chris I downloaded and installed Dasher.
The rest of the time was just some basic networking and chatting. Networking indeed: I spent some time discussing online social networking tools with a programmer who doesn’t really use them and wonders why he should. I couldn’t really give him a good positive answer about why use them because I don’t really use them, either. I understand they can be valuable to some people, but I personally don’t really find them too valuable.
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June 5th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I’m glad you had a good time! The presentation style reminded me (as well as of Stephen Colbert, of course) of Larry Lessig’s absurdly-compelling _Free Culture_ presentation — http://www.lessig.org/freeculture/ — which I hope at least someone reading this hasn’t seen yet, else I’ll feel embarrassed for being the guy who showed up and posted links you all finished talking about four years ago.
There’s also interest in the Takahashi Method — translated at http://simon-cozens.org/programmer/takahashi.html — which is a Firefox XUL plugin that lets you just type a few words for each slide, and it resizes them to be centered and as large as possible, with the idea that your deck contains hundreds of small snippets of large text as Lessig’s presentation did.
I’d also love to give a talk using one of these methods, but it’s difficult for technical presentations. Saturday’s Geo-mapping talk has me interested in giving a talk on the history/math of map projections and how they can distort our ideas of which countries are the most important; maybe that would work.
June 5th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
(Eek, so much for paragraphs. Maybe I can embedHTMLline breaks
like this?)
June 6th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Hello Chris,
Welcome to the scratchpad!
Thanks for your comments & the links.
I just went through Lessig’s presentation. Great stuff! He will be at Wikimania in Cambridge in early August.
Most of my next presentation is screenshots and I’m required to use PowerPoint, so I can’t try the Takahashi method yet. Perhaps for Wikimania … ha ha ha
Hard returns used to work for spacing in comments, but that changed about a year ago with a server upgrade. Instead, <p> and <br> tags work. I’ve got a page about comments and membership if you want to learn more about those features on Manila, the platform. It explains how you can go back to edit your comment to put in the tags in.