Laurie White’s Blog

So,

I’m sitting in a session that makes no sense to me, but mostly because I think it makes no sense to anyone.  Well, that’s not quite right.  It just seems to be presented by someone who has no idea what a good OSCON tutorial is. 

The slides are done in a simple white font on a black background that is so much duller than anything I can describe. 

The speaker is talking in a monotone.

He doesn’t have his examples ready…to show something new, he goes to Google to look it up.

Not that the examples are that good…we’re seeing YouTube videos, ads for 3D mice, etc. etc.

I think for a very small audience, this is a good presentation.  I’m not in that audience.  Neither are most of the people here.

I needed more of an overview of the tools available.  I mean, sheesh, this is the Open Source Conference.  You don’t need a lot of time on licenses.  I expected you to start with Blender or Inkscape or the Gimp or something and do things.  Surveying just doesn’t cut it.  Hey, I did a survey of someone else’s tools last Friday, but I showed examples and explained what they were good for. 

And I didn’t keep talking about tools that weren’t open source and not for the web during a talk titled “Real Time 3D on the Web for the Web.” 

But my morning talk was great.  It was devoted to the fun and convolution that is Perl programming.  How bad is the code you can write?  Damian Conway can write worse code and he walked us through it.  And I understood it most without my head exploding.

And while I avoided Damian like the plague for a while, he really has mellowed and started being more interested in his audience than in his own strutting and posing.  By far it was the best of the tutorials I signed up for. 

It’s break time.  And while I’ll try to be polite, it’s a bit hard with a talk like this…

I wonder how many people will be back here after break.  I guess I’ll never know.