Upcoming Events and Talks

There are some excit­ing days ahead, and I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time get­ting pre­pared. First of all, in less than a week, Bar­Camp Van­cou­ver 2010 takes place on Novem­ber 19^th-20^th at the new loca­tion of the Wal­dorf Hotel, just to the East of down­town. It’s a unique venue, com­plete with the city’s most spec­tac­u­lar vin­tage 1950s Tiki bar and it’s recently been ren­o­vated and is ready to host events. I’ve put together a pre­sen­ta­tion and demo called: Play­ing with Future Tele­vi­sion, What I learned Mess­ing Around with Plex 0.9. I’m a huge fan (per­haps even a fanatic) of this free soft­ware that turns any Mac (Intel only) into a Media Cen­ter. Built orig­i­nally from the XBMC (XBox Media Cen­ter) project, but now an inde­pen­dent ini­tia­tive, Plex includes a gor­geous (and skinnable/customizable) TV inter­face (that like Apple’s own Front Row, works with a remote), an omniv­o­rous video player that can han­dle most of the video for­mats I’ve ever come across, iTunes and iPhoto con­nec­tiv­ity out of the box, plu­g­ins that add the abil­ity to stream media from all sorts of places: YouTube, Shout­cast, Hulu and Pan­dora if you’re in the US — although I have found a sneaky workaround — Apple Movie Trail­ers, MSNBC, and again, if you’re in the US, Net­flix. (That last ser­vice ought to work in Canada as well, because we now get Netflix…sort of, but the US plu­gin won’t work in Canada, and the com­pany has not offered any sup­port for devel­op­ers try­ing to use their API in Canada, despite the cries of protest from the small but vocal group of Cana­dian Plex users and devel­op­ers.) So that’s my con­tri­bu­tion, and I’m also look­ing for­ward to pre­sen­ta­tions by Kris Krug on iPhone pho­tog­ra­phy and John Biehler and Duane Storey on Arduino.

But Wait, There’s More…

A few days after Bar­Camp, I’ll be doing another pre­sen­ta­tion, on a com­pletely dif­fer­ent topic. It’s enti­tled “User Expe­ri­ence Design for Word­Press Web Sites: Does Your Blog Design Sup­port Your Con­tent?”, and I’ll be pre­sent­ing it at the Novem­ber meet­ing of The Van­cou­ver Word­Press Meetup Group at The Net­work Hub, a co-working space in down­town Van­cou­ver. I’ve been doing a ton of research and work on this pre­sen­ta­tion, so I’m look­ing for­ward to giv­ing it. The atten­dance so far is com­pletely full, with a wait­ing list of over 16 peo­ple as I write this. Wow.