Blog entries tagged with "software"

Last weekend was StixCampNewstead, a Melbourne BarCamp out in the sticks. The general consensus is that the event can be summarised in a single word:

Awesome

This one word covers:

• the talks/discussions – schedule of talks
• the venue – Welshmans Reef Vineyard
• the food – BBQ lunch; wood fired pizzas; bacon, egg and sausage rolls; homemade dumplings
• the people – too many to list
• the adhoc discussions – to varied to list

If you didn’t come along, you must come along to the next BarCampMelbourne in September and next year’s StixCamp, wherever that will be.

Over the weekend I took almost 600 photos, earlier in the week I sorted through them an uploaded 129 into a set on Flickr. There are photos from others on Flickr, or you can check out what people said before, during and after the event on Twitter or Identi.ca.

After reading my conclusion regarding the Forms That Work training, Hamish asked me if I had ever posted about the bikeshed.

I took him literally and replied that I had; at first when they were installed and again when I first used them.

He wasn’t talking about the actual lockers where we store our bicycles at work. He meant the proverbial bikeshed that doesn’t get painted because everyone must have input on the simple decision of selecting a colour. The other part of the proverb is the billion dollar atomic power plant that is approved right away because it is too complex to grasp, and thus few feel that they must have input.

When I think about it, bikesheds occur far too often. In my experience, most of these are “it’s just” situations:

• It’s just another web page,
• It’s just another web form; or
• It’s just another link.

I’m not going to expand on these “it’s just” situations at the right now. They could be good topics for future posts…

Apparently today is Software Freedom Day so after I picked up my latest acquisition I parked at Clifton Hill Station and made my way to the Melbourne Town Hall to check out the bazaar which had a melbourne.pm representation.

I was only there for an hour and a half but I:

• listened to Jon Oxer, Mark Gray, and Steve Middleton talk about combating the 20 billion dollar ICT trade defecit with FOSS, some pragmatic examples for small businesses and how FOSS enables a free media.
• Found out about BarCampMelbourne that is happening in March next year. I shall keep my eye on this one.
• Briefly caught up with some people I know through melbourne.pm.

There weren’t that many people there but I hope it picked up later in the afternoon.