Giant Props!

Giant Stunt Props just rock. During the conference we had a couple of sessions of Lightning Talks. The only rule here is that the talks must be less than 5 minutes. But what do you do when people keep trying to talk past the time limit? In my case, I took inspiration from The Muppet Show, and built a Giant Prop. We only had to use it the once, although I threatened to use it a couple more times.

ding dong the conference is dead

So OSDC is done. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

I did end up doing a lightning talk today - I was last, cos I figured it would be entertaining enough to get the audience revved up to hang around for the closing keynote.

On Monday, Paul Fenwick mentioned during his talk that talking about the OSI 7-layer model is a certain way to bore the audience stupid. While I agree, I can't resist a stupid challenge, and decided to do a lightning talk to prove him wrong.

To make it more of a challenge, I delivered it as poetry - complete with some utterly utterly appalling rhymes - and had a couple of assistants constructing a 7 layer sponge cake as I got to each layer of the model. I sincerely hope that there will be photos of the thing, I don't _think_ it was recorded, alas.

To really push myself, rather than presenting slides I decided to learn how to use the PyGame multimedia library, and wrote an application to accompany me. Pretty scrolling text, crazy strange user interface, and of course .. music.

I'm not going to attempt to describe exactly what happened - feel free to ask me to show you it some time I'm around (it's less than 3 minutes long). If you warn me, I can bring a beret (you can't deliver poetry unless you're in a beret, I feel).

and on the subject of conference photos

In theory all the OSDC photos on flickr will be tagged with osdc2005. Marvel at the Anthony Dress Sense. I'd imagine photos from today will go up in a day or so - you too can experience the horror of my skintight lycra rainbow flares.