BarCamping (without the actual camping part)
I attended my first BarCamp today and I was really impressed. It was a very full day of interesting presentations by a lot of very smart people, the range of topics was really quite startling. I’m familiar with user groups (although I don’t go along to as many nights as I’d like) and they tend to be quite focussed, however today people talked about whatever their current interest is - from Perl 5.1 to hardware devices to MythTV. I was particularly impressed with the support and encouragement attendees gave to speakers. If you’ve never given a public presentation and you’re unsure of yourself today would have been an excellent opportunity.
Like at user group nights and conferences I’m awkwardly shy and awful at striking conversation so I missed talking to a lot of interesting people today. It’s a different mix of people than I’m used to (like the Ruby user group) with a slant towards freelancing and smaller projects which is so refreshing compared to the behemoth corporate beasts I’m more familiar with these days.
Favorite presentations today: Mark Ryall’s Intro to Scala (second time around), and Paul Fenwick on an Illustrated History of […]
Subdirectory
At the ER they put me in a room and gave me a dose of Morphine. Morphine is a very nice drug. It had the effect of filing the pain away in a convenient subdirectory where I could access it if I needed it, but was otherwise out of the way.
Brilliant description. I recently had a healthy diet of Morphine for a couple of days (followed by a few more days of oxynorm, which is similar). After my first dose of Morphine the emergency doctor came to see me and I couldn’t help grinning like a loony, despite the horror of my injury. Good stuff when you need it.