soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

After three failed attempts, I managed to go to yesterday's lrug meeting. It was intended to be a kind of experimental collective code review, so people would contribute with pieces of code and get it dissected and improved collectively. There was an special obsession with Hashes, most of the code submissions were improvements and/or workarounds for the Hash class. I understand it. Hashes are cool! The other topic was using continuations for (I believe) solving sudokus. Backtracing and fibonacci were also mentioned in the session, and Rob McKinnon made one of his quick presentations, this time proposing a way of getting data from different sources into a generic shareable format (and using upcoming as an specific example, and hpricot and hashes, of course!).

I must say it was pretty interesting, even if I got lost at some points (my ruby knowledge is still too poor). I specially got lost with the continuations stuff, which at the same time brought me back uni memories, of those times in which I skipped some lessons and then went back to the classroom with lots of knowledge gaps and tried to follow the teacher (with no luck, usually). Hehe! But fortunately, this time the teacher was interesting and deserved to be listened to.

This reminded me as well of the beauty of programming and talking about pure concepts and abstractions. It was ages since I felt that, so thanks to all who did it possible. I think we all need a good dose of abstraction from time to time. Keeps the brain working.

One of the books which was strongly and fervourously recommended is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which I believe I read some years ago (again, in the uni :-)). So you can see, ruby is not about rails only!

If you read my Thurday's post, I was terribly undecided about what to talk about (doesn't sound too good, heh!), but after forcing myself to revisit all the special and interesting issues or topics I have been involved in lately, I finally decided that I really needed to talk about communicating and more specially, making yourself understood. So here they are… the slides for Being Understood by Soledad Penadés. (I presume they are not self explanative so I'll probably extend them in an article soon).

The presentation itself wasn't nothing spectacular but I think it went terribly well, given that it was the first time I spoke to strangers and in english. We were a reduced number of people so we could have some interesting chat instead of being a traditional speech, which was pretty cool.

I tried to use keydoob for making the slides; keydoob is a little thingy that (obviously) mr.doob prepared for a couple of presentations he did, but as I couldn't manage to find certain files and also I was beginning to feel the panic attack at 3AM I decided to go for some HTML+Javascript+CSS. I used Script.aculo.us and Prototype for the little Javascript involved, which could be thought of as absolutely overkill but anyway, it was a quick hack ;-)

The good thing of this is that as the slides are HTML with a css style sheet only for screen, if you try to print them they will appear as raw HTML with all the content still looking meaningful. In fact, if you use Firefox and have the Web Developer Toolbar installed, try deactivating all the linked styles - it should do :-)

BarCamp itself was great. It was very very motivating to see so many active people, so many presentations lined up, on so many different topics. I really liked that willing-to-share atmosphere. And in a way, it also confirmed that dream idea we had once of organising an event like that, where people could organise themselves and their timetable, wander around the spaces and join whatever they liked more. And the next half an hour, maybe present something.

So, congratulations and thanks to all the organisers and attendees for the insane amount of work required for bringing it all up and running :-)

For the ones which do not know about, BarCamp* are a different type of events, they are meant to be called unconferences, in the sense that it is not about 100 people listening to someone for 2 hours but each person giving a short talk about something of their own. So the listeners become speakers at certain times, and as there are several rooms, talks are simultaneous. These events are always highly busy and they get booked blazing fast, so I already assumed that I wasn't going there, with no tickets and 2 days away of the event.

How wrong I was… I finally got a ticket for BarCampLondon2 and now I have to think about something for a talk!

I should have been less pessimistic and stop assuming that I wasn't going to get a ticket ever, and think about that talk instead. Oh well… no more regrets, let's see what can I work out (just in case I end up doing the talk…), taking into account there's amazing people like Matt Wescott already signed up, so the level is interesting.

Watch out for finding out how it ended… heh…

Although I just could find a couple of minutes yesterday to remove the polka dotted header image, I've been wanting to write about The Pipettes' Saturday concert at the Roundhouse since then…

As expected, there were lots of girls, boys and children all dressed in polka dots, with lassos, tutu's and all that stuff. But there were also some unusual people, like a very tough, completely bald and square-shouldered complexion man, which we thought was a bodyguard at the beginning but ended showing himself as a sweet bloke, singing in the ear of his girlfriend and clapping the hands like the biggest fan ever.

There was also a completely drunk man that was miraculously able to stand, but oscillated continuously in an erratic way, sometimes hanging on the people surrounding him and other times placing his head about the shoulders of the poor attendants ahead.

Misty's Big Adventure were the support for the big act. I had never heard of them and I must confess they were quite weird. Somehow they looked to me like a circus parade, maybe because of the singer's hat - something like And now ladies and gentleman you're going to see the most unexpected show in Earth!!- and then that guy with the red suit and lots of hanging hands appears on stage, kind of scaring!

It was a real pity that the sound equalization for this band was soooooo poor. We just could hear the trumpet because we were in front of the girl playing it, and same goes for the chorus. The piano/keyboards player was extremely funny and amusing, with that way of moving the feet at the same time that she played. You have to see it for understanding it. We definitely want to listen more from them.

The big act, The Pipettes live, was somehow disappointing. Although they did really well, singing perfectly, making perfect jokes, etc, etc, it was all so perfect and prepared as it was in this concert I found days before. I always thought that a live was the opportunity to improvise or experiment with arrangements, expand songs a bit more, play them with a different rhythm, kind of interacting with the public, but maybe I was expecting too much from this!

Apart from that, and from the fact that I'm beginning to consider to bring with me a box in order to see something on the stage, I really enjoyed the evening, and quite liked the little funny details as the candies which we were offered before and during the concert (no, they weren't drugs!) and the confetti which was poured from above our heads in the last song, kind of resembling snow. It was so amazing to see people keeping the confetti in their heads after the concert had finished!

Something which surprised me was that I was expecting more fanaticism but people was quite quiet; apart from singing and dancing, nobody threw lingerie to the stage or cried or whatnot. The only passion act that we saw consisted in a lesbian couple having the time of their lives, right in front of a group of super-pure girls-with-mummy which were complaining about the artificial smoke in the concert hall prior to the beginning of the concert, and really looked a bit embarrased.

All in all, it was cool, but I'm not sure if I would recommend it to somebody outside Christmas period. You know, during Christmas we allow ourselves a certain degree of naivity but when it finishes it's kind of different… So it will depend on how innocent do you feel like!

PD We brought a camera but didn't charge it, so you'd better rely on this search for The Pipettes at Roundhouse in flickr for some pictures.

I went to the post office this morning to pick up a valuable item: the tickets for The Pipettes live at the Roundhouse next Saturday!

Since it's only two days until the concert, I take the opportunity that I give myself (since this is my own blog) and therefore declare the following days as Polka Dotted Days (note the header! look at it! - obviously it just works if the people which read the blog through the feed do come here and have a look at the header… now do it).

I discovered The Pipettes a couple of months ago, being curious about what other people were listening to in last.fm, and I discovered about this concert in last.fm as well, so it looks like it's working well as a music promotion platform :-)

And since I'm still regretting not having gone to a concert that La Casa Azul played in Barcelona a couple of years ago, even if they are not directly comparable, I thought it was a good idea to go and start the holidays in a funny way.

It all looks very much like american 60's-ish and those movies about High School graduation balls. I wonder if they will serve punch and choose the queen and the king of the party! Although being a Brit event, they will either serve mulled wine or alcopops or something like that, very girly. Who knows!

I'm looking forward to it - while trying to come up with a polka dotted something to dress with on Saturday, but I think I don't have anything like that (yet) :-)