$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 :)

Humbug meta

One complaint I often hear about Humbug is how difficult it is to attend our weekend meetings due to our Saturday timetable.

In an attempt to make Humbug a little more accessible I’ve got some week-night room bookings at Brisbane’s Central Library, from six to eight pm.

I’m calling these meetings Humbug^meta for the time being.

These meetings are much shorter than the regular Humbug meetings, so I expect they’ll be different in style.

Plans are very fluid at the moment, possible things to do are:

• talks
• workshops
• computer help
• presentation practices

As Humbug likes to see itself as an umbrella group, these bookings are available for use by any tech / design / edu group if they need a space for whatever reason. I’m particularly hopeful that groups will use the space for speakers that have a wider audience than their own group.

Wifi should be available to those with a library account.

The actual dates I’ve got booked are:

• March 24
• April 29
• May 14
• June 21
• July 22
• August 25
• September 22
• October 28
• November 25
• December 22

I’ll be shutting up a little early this Wednesday to attend Pecha Kucha.