lca2007.thursday
Thursday morning we woke up at 5.20 and got in a taxi with Matt and Andrea to gate 14 on the UNSW campus. There were a bunch of people there waiting for the bus to the secret speaker's adventure. The bus took us in to town and stopped outside the Sydney Tower building. Inside the building everyone had to get into these wacky suits with harnesses and stuff, and then they took us up to the top of the tower and linked us onto this rail. We walked around the outside of the top of the tower, which was pretty neat at 260m off the ground. You could see a full 360 degree view of Sydney. It was quite a cool experience, if a little ovedone with the harnesses and suits and safety videos and stuff.
After that we went home and had breakfast, and then I slept through all of the morning talks and got to the main Linux conf pavilion around midday where I donated my laptop for use in the games section of the open day activities. My laptop was set up to run FrestOnFire which is like a FOSS version of Guitar Hero for the PC. A wireless keyboard is attached which you hold upside down and play the function keys as frets and the enter key to pick the strings. The game looks pretty rad actually and the tutorial was especially funny and well executed. Open day was a huge success with over 1000 people passing through the pavilion (including conference attendees). There was a Dance Dance Revolution clone running with two dance mats attached and the kids loved that. Someone had Tux Racer running with a Wii-mote controlling the little penguin - very fun to play. Much more intuitive than a joystick. I need to get a Wii-mote and start hacking some stuff together ASAP. Google were handing out free sparkly things and "come work for us" information sheets. The OLPC laptop was on show and I got to touch one for the first time. Very nice. Vik Olliver was showing off his RepRap and I had a good chat with him about it. The open source Segway(tm) guy was letting people have goes on it. There was a pretty cool little bit of code running on a projector called 'constellations' which used a video camera to pick up your movements and you could move stars and constellations around the screen with your hands and other limbs - very pretty. The UNSW was showing off robot dogs. I saw a robot dog soccer game at UWA recently and it totally blew me away. The future is happening right now, and all my childhood sci fi dreams are coming true! If only Asimov was still around to see it happening.
In the afternoon I saw Alex Reeder's awesome talk called 'Open Source Art'. He rides to and from work in Tokyo every day and needs to be able to see the weather so he's hacked up an old laptop and put it in a new perspex flat case with some pieces of electronics showing and stuff. The laptop panel shows the last few satellite photos of cloud formations and from that you can predict where in tokyo it's going to rain from this aesthetically pleasing device that is set up in his house. I really liked this talk because he addressed aesthetics and interface and mentioned all kinds of neat projects that combine technology and art. Lots of medialab style stuff.
After that I missed the keysigning because I was busy helping out with open day games stuff.
That night, Matt, Andrea, Michelle, and myself had a plan to go to 3 awesome bars we had been told about which were luckily within walking distance of eachother. The first was going to be the Opera bar. We couldn't find the Opera bar so we went to the second bar called "Minus 5". This was a bit of a novelty and for the second time that day we had to watch a safety video. The bar is in a giant industrial refridgerator and is -15 degrees inside. All of the furniture and the bar itself was made out of carved, ornate blocks of ice. The drinking glasses were made out of ice too. We were given huge jackets and gloves in order to go into the bar so we didn't freeze our asses off, which we did anyway. After two drinks we left before our half hour was up, but we had a really good time - it was quite a novelty.
After that we had a drink downstairs (I had a really great gin Martini) and then went to find Magnus the swedish hacker and friends. This took a while and several circuts around the city. We stopped in a really cliched Irish bar, and didn't make it to our third bar, the rotating bar, in time for closing. Eventually Moosey Hawk Eye spotted Magnus purely by chance walking the opposite way down the road from us. We then walked several blocks to the park and met up with Rasterman, Alex, Wayne, and some other dudes, and then we walked up to this Sydney Festival drum and bass gig. They played some pretty good music and Moose got really bored.
After the dudes left, Me, Moose, Andrea, and Matt walked down to the Ship Inn and had another couple of drinks before heading home.