Skip to main content

Back on the iron horse

I’m cycling down to work today, to make up for my physical slackness over the last few days, and wondering how much that’s going to hurt.

I don’t appear to have come down with the virus that hit Dunedin in the last few days of the conference, but the 5-hour zone shift has made for a couple of weird days (like, suddenly falling asleep just before lunch — I guess waking up with a laptop on your face is much nicer than the consequences of falling asleep at the wheel).

Pia’s announcement of the LinuxWorld Australia conference & expo — also in Sydney, but on the 28th-30th of March — represents an interesting opportunity, but naturally (in case you hadn’t noticed, this is an imperfect world) has a poison pill in it named Bill Hilf from Microsoft, there to finesse in an “alternative view” which history says will be amusing but will also subtly introduce much plausible FUD. How you prepare your boss to weather this mental assault will vary from case to case, but since the keynotes (including Bill’s) are free, I’d suggest sitting through it yourself, if you can, and taking notes so that you can sit down with your boss afterwards and hand him/her some tailored antidotes before the FUD has time to take root.

Another thing... I know this is early days, guys, but you really, really need to get your photos in order. This is a professional event, and so should have professional-looking photos up. Pia’s is low-contrast and pretty much completely loses the magic of her intense joie de vivre; Russel and Bdale were taken outdoors, which while sometimes pretty also makes the contrast and white-balance difficult and typically costs you a little of that professional feel. Bdale in particular looks too much at home on the farm. (-: Brendan looks like he’s about to be shot, stood against a harsh wall with a harsh in-camera flash. If I had to pick a winner from that page, it would be Ivan Kladnig.

It’s a mercy that JDub isn’t on there, or he’d have used something like this one, which while technically quite good, might prove a bit... startling for business tastes. (-:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.
Post a Comment
Read more

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...
1 comment
Read more

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.
Post a Comment
Read more