Sat, 09 Sep 2006
Ask Later #1 (Not a Techa Kucha Night. Honest)
I've been very remiss about blogging the July Ask Later evening,
organised by Steve Coast
and Tom Carden. The format was
different to any presentations I've seen before, each speaker had 20
seconds to present each of their 20 slides, and no way of altering the
timing. BWHAHAHA.
The first speaker had me worried, without trying to sound harsh, his timing was off and my fears about sudden rushing as a slide changed before he was finished and awkward silences in between came flooding back to me. His material was good but he didn't hit his flow and in an enforced slide schedule it was a lot more visible than a "normal" presentation. I was mentally hunkering down for a painful evening. But then something clicked.
The gaps started to vanish and the over running started to reduce, I don't know how much time the speakers spent practising and timing but it paid off big time. Paul Hammond, who I've commented about before, hit every prompt in his Constraints talk, which felt very 37signals, (hopefully he'll give it again elsewhere). The only person with better timing was Jon Crowcroft who presented 9 levels of indirection (and got a lot of laughs) and only looked around at his slides a couple of times. And his timing was near bang on. Oh, and football jokes - which were actually well placed.
Other highlights were Simon Willison, who reached a new speed of vibration, as he dived in to Javascript closures (the most tech talk of the night and a nice intermission among the other, softer, talks), Muki Haklay on why mapping sites suck (it's all about screen size) and one of the best usability talks I've seen, presented by Natalie Downe. I know I've missed some of the dozen or so speakers but I stopped taking notes through most of the sessions, I was enjoying them too much. So take me missing your name as praise, not me being slack ;)
The only downside of the evening is that was criminally under-attended. A combination of the school holidays, night of the week and unbearable heat seemed to keep the crowds away, and that's a shame as it was a great evening, from the presenters to the pub chat afterwards. The best one evening event of the year so far, and yes I'm jealous as hell it wasn't one of mine!
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Posted: 2006/09/09 14:25 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Three Basic Release Rules
Here are three nice, simple, general rules regarding releases that you
should try and stick to. If you don't then you're running on luck and
eventually you'll get called while doing something way more fun than
deploying yet another bug fixing release.
- No releases on the day before a weekend / national holiday.
- No releases within two hours of the official end of your work day.
- No releases before you go away on holiday.
These should all be common sense (and to be ignored on the *RARE* occasions when something needs to happen right now) but I'm constantly surprised by the number of people that ignore them, make the release and then earn the enmity of their team as people start getting SMS and email alerts from their monitoring systems.
And a bonus trick, if you want sensible release times (none of this six AM insanity) ensure you've got developer and management support in case something goes wrong and you need either guidance or roll back assistance. It's weird how the available windows change when it's other peoples time (and sleep) on the block.
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Posted: 2006/09/09 13:40 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Best Advert of 2006 - Sky
I know the title of this post might seem a little premature but it's going
to take something amazing to beat Skys skateboarding advert.
The last couple of times I've been to the cinema I've seen an advert for Sky that features some stunning skateboarding by Danny Way, the adverts footage was taken from a documentary on him, with Regina Spektor - US providing the music. Mute the skateboarding clip, hide the US window and watch along, it's very cool.
While looking for a copy of the advert to show a friend I discovered that no one seems to a copy of the full ad online. The skateboarding clip originally had a different soundtrack, which I don't like, and the music video for US is dull, but when put together (for me at least) they just work. I don't know who came up with the idea but it's stuck in my head.
And to be honest, the advert was better than the film.
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Posted: 2006/09/09 13:10 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
