webdu day 1 – talk

So after about 3 hours sleep, I rose to face webdu day 1. Unfortunately Andrew couldn’t and ended up staying in bed all day. I was a bit worried because I had lost my voice and felt crap but some butter menthol and water and a lot of ‘I can’t be sick’ thinking, I was able to enjoy the day and got my voice back.

Down at registration I picked up my conference goodies including a pack of my own trading card to hand out to people who came to talk with me. A big thankyou to Kai and Minty who organised the game and who put me in the deck. The point of the trading card game is to collect all the cards and find out all the rules as each card has rules about the game or about another card. You can only submit 9 for the final score and the order they go in is critical as cards modify other cards around them. I have some extras to share with family/friends and fellow brisbanite geeks.

Before the keynote, the webdu twitter feed appeared up on screen while people sat on their phones posting messages to the twitter. I’m not geeky enough to have an internet enabled phone yet 😉 There were also some intros and a ‘how to’ for the card game. Unfortunately this year there were no nectarine webdu animations.

The keynote was from Adobe mainly on the flash platform. I’d known about most of it before, but there were still some interesting bits and pieces including catalyst.
I’m not convinced on the catalyst stuff yet but I guess I won’t be till I have a chance to play with a not a still in development build and put it through what we have to do daily. Mike chambers did show off some nice augmented reality demos. Basically, you have a piece of paper/cardboard with a distict shape on it. Your webcam then takes video and analyses it and places computer graphics where the distinct shape is.

I then spent the first session making sure that I knew my presentation, all the examples were there etc. I’m really happy my presentation was second because I could enjoy the rest of the conference. Getting up on that stage was very scary but once I got into it the butterflies went away. I had a few people come up to me throughout the day to say they liked my presentation (and that they learnt things) so I guess it went well. A big thankyou to Michelle for taking some photos of my talk.

I spent the remainder of the day and night talking to people and having a great time.