Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Posts Tagged ‘ask-later’

Ask Later #2

In Weblog on 16 November 2006 tagged ask-later, Events, London, Talks, Weblog with no comments

Steve is organising another Ask Later talk session for Tuesday December 12th. Obviously, since I'll be in San Francisco I won't be there, but if you're in London you should definitely take a look, maybe even give a talk? The first one was lots of fun.

I've added an entry about it on Upcoming.org too.

Ask Later #1 Video

In Weblog on 27 July 2006 tagged ask-later, Talks, Video, Weblog with 1 comment

For better or worse*, Toxi has the video. 

He only caught the first half, but he got Steve's intro, Sean Varney on cyberscanning, me on stuff, Alex McLean on livecoding with Haskell, Rob McKinnon on Topic Maps, Steve on negative things, Matt Westcott on Sudoku hacking and most of Paul Hammond on product constraints. Hooray for partial documentation.

*Remember folks, the adrenalin kicks in pretty quickly at these talks so people get caught up in the heat of the moment.  I seem to remember saying Schulze and Webb's metal phone was stupid, but I just meant that it's impractical and poisonous.  Not the same thing at all...

Ask Later slides and notes

In Weblog on 26 July 2006 tagged ask-later, Notes, Slides, Talks, Weblog with 4 comments

Notes from my Ask Later talk, One Should Not Think That These Are Two Separate Things, after the jump.

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Ask Later #1

In Weblog on 26 July 2006 tagged ask-later, Events, London, Pecha-Kucha, Talks, Techa-Kucha, Weblog with 1 comment

Last night was our first technology-themed 20x20 talk night (20 slides, 20 seconds each).  Well done to Steve for getting it off the ground by organising the room and presiding over the slide collecting.  The final line-up was as follows:

• Sean Varney spoke about data capture for film special effects and the progression from scanning 3D models and objects to scanning whole sets and people.
• I spoke about a few things that are connected by some of my favourite books.  Slides to follow.
• Robert McKinnon spoke about topic maps and how del.icio.us and flickr are sneaking them in the back door.
• Alex McLean spoke about live-coding and his new project, a domain specific language for live-coding audio, written in Haskell.
• Steve Coast counterbalanced all the positive vibes with a talk about negative things.
• Matthew Westcott rocked the house with his poignant tale of home-grown Ruby OCR code for hacking an online Sudoku puzzle.
• Paul Hammond talked about the effect of constraints on creativity and productivity, by way of Scrum, Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.
• Jon Crowcroft gave us 9 (count them) levels of indirection, and wondered what would happen if football teams were programming languages.
• Simon Willison tried (and, I think, succeeded) to explain the whats, whys and hows of closures in Javascript.
• Yoz Grahame talked about the joys of cloning applications, by way of Ning, Second Life and LambdaMOO.  With bunnies.
• Natalie Downe spoke about usability testing at torchbox, and some of the recent lessons learned.
• Muki Haklay spoke about usability testing for online mapping sites, and gave some pointers for the future.
• Tom Armitage reprised his talk from Reboot 8, making the case for telling stories with social software.

As we waited for people to arrive, Paul Mison played a bit of live Electroplankton on his Nintendo DS on the big screen, which worked really well (naturally, since it's designed for performance).  I think we had about 30-40 people, plus speakers, and hopefully people enjoyed it enough that they'll come along again.  We'll be starting a mailing list soon, so leave a comment here if you'd like to be notified when it's ready.

NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.

Techa Kucha Night becomes Ask Later

In Weblog on 26 July 2006 tagged ask-later, Events, London, Pecha-Kucha, Talks, Techa-Kucha, Weblog with 3 comments

To avoid collisions with Pecha Kucha Night's UK trademark, in the future we won't be calling our event Techa Kucha Night.  Nobody has specifically asked us to change, but a brief and civil exchange of emails with the London Pecha Kucha people has made it clear they'd rather we'd asked them first, which is fair enough. 

In honour of this, and of our preference for leaving question time to the pub afterwards, we've changed the name of the night to Ask Later.  I hope the topics remain sufficiently different between our night and the original architecture and design themed night so that there are no hard feelings.  I can thoroughly recommend you check out the original Pecha Kucha - the next one in London is at the ICA on August 30th.