Session 1 - A geek’s social conscious

Cameron Reilly was humble enough to start off the day with a short whistle accompanied with a welcome for everyone in the room (approx 30) in encouragement to "come on down" and help him as an audience. We all complied

Starting off the day we had quite a moral teaching. Cameron’s view was that we as geeks in australia, and around the world, are so privileged today with the opportunities we have. We have a platform to change the world right in front of us that right now is just used in waste compared to what we can do. Instead of coming together to talk about the latest facebook or mac applications/hardware/etc we could be speaking about how we could changed things to help out the world.

We were given a vision to start off our day about how us as people who have skills to talk to the world should look and see what us as well paid white collar workers are doing compared to someone in our past, approximately 1000 years ago. Cameron is a man whom cares about the future well being of the world.

Session 2 - Adobe Air

Akash gave a great presentation on how he thinks that Adobe Air is going to be an extension of the browser. He started out by saying that the current website browsers are flawed by the fact that they are constricted by the fact that they are a browser. He then explained that Adobe Air is a program that uses website technology to easily create website applications that run on your desktop.

Akash then went on to explain how to make these applications, the usefulness of these applications, what this means for the future of web development, etc.

Session 3 - WCF

Spoken by Dan this pretty much explained everything you needed to know about WCF if you were ever interested to start learning it.

Powerpoint: barcamp-wcf-toomey

Session 4 - Screencasts

Powerpoint: screencasts-are-great

Session 5 - Why I changed to: Ruby on Rails

— gave us a live coding example on how easy it really is to use Ruby on Rails. Below are the primary items that he said why he changed from PHP to Ruby on Rails

• Migrations
• Makes everything a lot easier and quicker to create
• Everything is in objects
• He would much prefer the Ruby development setup

Lunch!!!

The Greek community in Brisbane has been celebrating Paniyiri all week, and I’ve just made a video of tonight’s “Greek Dancing with the Stars”, hosted by Effie (Mary Coustas):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjbZCGuzxtU[/youtube]

There’s a fantastic belly dance starting about half way through, and you’ll also see Brisbanites Glenn Lazarus, Tracey Wickham, Loretta Ryan from Radio 4BH, and Massimo Murdocca from the Queensland Roar dance off for a glittering trophy. Sleek the Elite from Fat Pizza also dropped in.

Paniyiri continues Sunday May 20th 2007 at Musgrave Park, South Brisbane (Click here to see a Google Map of the exact location). Best way to get there is to catch a train to South Brisbane or Southbank/Vulture St stations or a shuttle bus from the city - click here for more info.

Sunday is the last day of Paniyiri - if you head down you can see the final of the Olive Eating contest, and also the Honey Puff eating. Narissa (the belly dancer from the video) will be dancing again, and there’ll be some grape stomping. I took some photos today which should be on the site soon, and there is also a ‘Ready Steady Cookoff’ at the Greek Club and public lectures on Greek and Greek-Australian culture and cooking demonstrations. And the official Paniyiri after party starts from 8 and goes on to…whenever, really.

Photos from the march and the rally will be appearing tomorrow.

UPDATE, Anzac Day evening: I recorded audio at the Dawn Service and sent it straight to Brisbane Is Home with my mobile phone:

I also sent in two good photos direct to the blog via mobile:

And there’s a video of the first 16-odd minutes of the March, right here:

[googlevideo]7949256465535973243[/googlevideo]

You might get more out of the video by watching it in fullscreen mode: Click here to try that.

I’ve finished the first batch of photos: click here to see 30 photos from the Anzac Day March.

Second photoessay finished! Click here for the photos from the Dawn Service.

And click here to see the full set of 180 photos at flickr, where you can download them, see much larger sizes and watch a slideshow of the photos.

ORIGINAL STORY, Tuesday April 24th:

Anzac Day is probably the most deeply-felt national holiday in Australia. April 25th is the anniversary of the morning the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces attacked the coast of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, as part of an operation led by the British and French Allies to assist Russia.

(more…)

You little beauty!

I got my new camera this week. It’s a Fujifilm Finepix S5600, and I’d like to thank patrickg of the Blueberry Fool blog for recommending this camera to me. It was only A$ 429 from Digital Camera Warehouse including delivery and a 1GB memory card.

(To give you an idea of how much that is, I work in an office 3 days a week and get about $A 380 for that).

But a camera is no good if you don’t use it, so last night I recorded videoclips of 4 songs by Brisbane DIY music outfit Lightbulb: (click here for Lightbulb’s myspace page).

“I Had To Grow Up Before I Grew Down” is a song about finally seeing the end of a long, hard, lonely road, and it’s full of heart.

The two instrumental tracks are called ‘Sparrow‘ and ‘Blue Sky Realm‘.

And the last song is a happy, fun pastiche/homage to Bob Dylan’s music, called:

“Dylan Hoedown (I’m Just Chillin’ Like Bob Dylan)“.

If you like Lightbulb, you can visit the Lightbulb myspace page or listen to Lightbulb free on last.fm.

This is just the start of what I can do with this new camera, so let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see. Enjoy the music!