$95 Arduino workshop at The Edge, bookings close Sunday

A couple of friends of mine from NICTA are running an Ardunio sensing workshop over the first and second of May, I’ll be helping out.

For full details see the main post.

Ignite Brisbane

Ignite talks are similar in style to Pecha Kucha presentations but even shorter at fifteen seconds for each of twenty automatically progressed slides.

I recently had a chance to talk about the Open Source Ethos at Brisbane’s first Ignite event.

We had every different talk style imaginable, from infinitely nested bullet pointed lists to single-word-per-slide to stock photos. I liked Hannah Suarez but my favourite talk was Guy Yug‘s talk about setting up Mana Bar.

I wasn’t really happy with a lot of my slides, but I was happy with how they were organised – a simple timeline of open source achievements. I had to submit the slides a couple of weeks in advance of giving the presentation, removing the temptation of changing the slides greatly eased coming up with the captions. I’m not sure what really prompted me to do it, but I changed the opening line of the talk in my head just minutes prior to going on stage, channelling Rusty a bit maybe. I wasn’t at all nervous; until I got up on stage and started fumbling with the mics.

Oh, although the movie up above appears to show me completely out of sync with my slides, I was actually pretty close most of the time. I practised by the obvious way, staring directly at my slides on my computer till I got the timing right. On the night there was no presenter facing monitor, so I ended up turning around to look at the screen to get in sync, which was distracting. I’m happy with how I went though, read that as I managed to get through all my lines without falling in a big heap :)