Year in Cities 2009
Here are the lists for 2006, 2007, and 2008.
January
St John, USVI
Salt Lake City, UT
Logan, UT*
Washington, DC
Brooklyn, NY
February
Edinburgh, UK*
March
Edinburgh, UK*
April
New Haven, CT
May
Barcelona, Spain
Gualala, CA
Garberville, CA
Arcata, CA
Crescent City, CA
Gold Beach, OR
Coos Bay, OR
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
June
Nashville, TN
Bovina, NY*
July
Logan, UT*
October
Berkshires, MA
November
Bovina, NY*
Atlanta, GA
Logan, UT
December
St John, USVI*
Scotland on Rails videos are up
Here’s mine, from my talk “Who Needs Photoshop? Creative Image Manipulation in Ruby.” This was my first time speaking at a conference. Do I look as nervous as I felt?
Who Needs Photoshop? at Scotland on Rails from bantic on Vimeo.
Engineyard is hosting the rest of the Scotland on Rails videos.
Three is a trend
I’m speaking at Euruko 2009 tomorrow, giving an updated version of the “Who Needs Photoshop?” talk that I gave at Scotland On Rails in March. This will be the third talk I’ve given this year. The first was when I talked about the Popularity Dialer at Ignite NYC in February. I submitted a talk idea to Ignite because I wanted to have a chance to practice speaking in public before Scotland On Rails. Ignite was a good place to practice. It was a big, energetic crowd. The talks were at 9:30pm in a club and the crowd had been drinking beers for a couple hours by that point and they were in a pretty good mood as a result. I gave my 5-minute presentation and was on a euphoric high the rest of the night. I forgot what a rush it can be to be in front of a big crowd like that.
My Euruko talk is probably the one of the three so far that I’m most excited about. Ignite was pretty nerve-wracking, and Scotland on Rails even more so, but I’m feeling pretty good about talking tomorrow at Euruko. I had a lot of doubts about whether my talk was the right subject matter at Scotland On Rails and was very nervous about how it would be received. It’s not a Railsy talk at all, and in some ways it’s not even very Ruby-centric. What I’m really talking about is my exploration of image math and how I used Ruby as a tool to do so. There’s nothing inherently Rubyish about what I’m doing — Ruby is one tool of many that are applicable. But I think you can say that about almost any code — you could always swap out a different language here, a different framework there — so I’m less concerned about that than I was.
I kind of went overboard coding up image processing code in ruby to supplement the talk that’s open source on github. I hope someone else gets as excited about this stuff as I am and feels like forking it and contributing.
I’ve also had about a month off from looking at this code and now, revisiting it to get ready for my talk tomorrow, I remember how cool all this stuff really is. Watching my code change images still feels more like magic than programming to me, and it’s thrilling to see these things come together.
I’ll post some of the videos and images I’ve been creating after my talk.
My talk at Scotland On Rails
I had the opportunity to speak at Scotland on Rails last weekend. My talk was called “Who Needs Photoshop? Creative Image Manipulation using Ruby.” It was my first time giving a talk at a serious conference and I really enjoyed myself although I was pretty nervous leading up to it. The conference was one of the best I’ve been to. Great talks and really great, friendly people. I have a very high opinion of Scottish people. They’re a really amiable bunch. I hope to get back there next year.
Here are the slides. When the video becomes available I’ll put up a link to it. Update: The videos are now available. Here’s me talking.
Cory Forsyth Image Manipulation
opencv ruby gem — for mac os x
I made some improvements to the ruby-opencv gem on github and have released my own version. The github page has some extensive installation instructions for getting OpenCV running on Mac OS X.
How to give an Ignite Talk
Whoo, I gave a talk at Ignite NYC last night. The talk was incredibly fun and I had a great time, but it was also really challenging. The rules are: you get exactly 20 slides and they each auto advance after 15 seconds for a total 5 minute talk. On the face of it, a 5-minute talk doesn’t sound so bad, but when you have no control over the speed of your slides it can get difficult. I like to call my friends when I’m walking home from the subway and leave them a voicemail. Sometimes I start into an anecdote and then start rambling and become aware that I am about to get cut off and then have to try and wrap up my story before the voicemail ends, which makes it that much harder to stop the rambling. That’s kind of the feeling of giving an ignite talk except multiply it by about 20. I also had the added bonus difficulty of having the wrong version of my slides show up (yikes!) and I had to ad-lib my way through a few parts.
Here’s some advice that I would offer future igniters:
1 15 seconds is way shorter than you think
Be careful not to try to cram too much information into a slide. A good rule of thumb is you want about 1-3 sentences per slide, max. To get a feel for your own pacing, mock up 2 or 3 slides in powerpoint and then run the show in ‘rehearse timings’ mode and see how long it takes you. Believe me, you’ll be surprised how quickly the time goes.
2 focus
You only have 5 minutes. Not enough time for an indepth analysis with technical information or 40 bullet points. Speaking concisely and quickly , it will take you between 45 and 75 seconds (3 and 5 slides) to explain a simple example or tell a short story. Accounting for transitions and filler, this only gives you time for 3-5 major points. So keep it simple.
3 practice
If you’re like me, when you don’t know exactly what you want to say you’re going to ramble. In addition to making your talk boring, this sucks up your time and you’ll look up and realize you’re now three slides behind.
Figure out what you want to say and practice it until it becomes rote. When you’re standing in front of the audience you want the words to be automatic. If you learn visually, try writing a script and practice reading from it.
An ignite talk is unique because of the 15 second constraint. In addition to practicing what you’re going to say you need to practice how quickly you’re going to say it.
What worked well for me was to chunk my talk into the major points/anecdotes that served as timing ‘checkpoints.’ I practiced talking through each of those until I had a good sense for how much time I needed for each and then built up my slides around those timings. This gives you a little more control of your timing. It’s easier to slow down than speed up, so if you find yourself getting to the end of a ‘chunk’ ahead of your slides, you can slow down and emphasize. This is good for the audience too; they’ll be able to understand you better. When the first slide of your next chunk appears you can launch into it, confident that you’re right on time.
After I had an outline of what I wanted to say, and a good feel for my timings, I created an audio “click track” that beeps every 15 seconds. After I had converted my slides to PNGs and put them on my ipod I could practice the talk by listening to that audio track and talking along with it, flipping slides at each beep. It’s a great way to practice on the subway. Don’t be afraid to mumble or even talk out loud while you’re practicing. This is New York after all; there’s always some crazy person talking to himself on the train. It might as well be you.
Update May 28: Here, I’ve added the click track that I mentioned: click track (2.8MB mp3).
Good luck! If you read this and it helped your talk please leave a message in the comments.
Here’s my talk, which admittedly doesn’t make much sense without my narration. Hopefully there will be a video online soon that I can link to.
Popularity Dialer IgniteNYC Talk
1-year anniversary of tattoo
Today is the 1-year anniversary of me getting a tattoo.
Tattoo from bantic on Vimeo.
tripit, my favorite startup
I twittered about tripit after using their service the other day but 140 characters wasn’t quite enough for me to write out the reasons I like them. They’re my favorite startup right now because they do a really great job of solving a particular pain that I have had.
Tripit is an online tool for managing your travel itineraries. You can forward them the email itineraries that you receive from airlines, hotels, priceline, etc. after you book travel online and tripit parses the email and emails you back (immediately) with a link to your itinerary on their site.
Good startups work because they give the people something they want, typically by solving some pain point for them. The time I really got into tripit was when I was booking a lot of flights to travel back and forth to San Francisco last fall. I was chasing cheap hotels with priceline, and booking the cheapest convenient flights I could find, which meant I was flying lots of different airlines and amassing a lot of confirmation emails. My gmail account threaded the emails so in order to look up an itinerary I had to dig through a couple emails in a single thread and check the arrival and departure dates to make sure I was looking at the correct email. It was a huge pain, and I started forwarding all of the emails to tripit. After doing I had a single place to go to where I could see all my flights and hotel stays and easily look up any information I needed, such as confirmation numbers and departure times, for any of them. Like any successful startup should, using tripit made my life better.
Once you’ve nailed the execution of the core promise of your app, like tripit has, there’s a lot of opportunity around the margins to experiment with other features. This is often where a startup’s revenue will come from, and at the least it’s the thing that differentiates them in the marketplace and keeps users from switching to a similar service. In tripit’s case, they offer a bunch of useful features, many of which are obvious (flight delay information, links to check in, ads for rental car packages) and some that aren’t (a link to seatguru, for example, to give you advice on which seat on this particular model of plane has the most legroom).
They also show you some cool information like total number of days traveled and total miles traveled, and there’s a world map on your dashboard showing previous trips as blue dots and upcoming trips as red dots. The net effect is that I enjoy using their service so much that I want to book more travel just to see my mileage increase and get more red dots on my map.
If you’re using tripit and you know me, you can connect to me by inviting me at my gmail address.
1.20.2009 part 1: 5:30am-7:30am
Our day began painfully early, especially considering that we had been up until after 2 getting home from a Frightened Rabbit concert the night before. Jenna woke me up at about 5:30, and we got the crew together and ready to go by a few minutes after 6. I could tell the metro was going to be packed because as we walked down from Dan’s house to the Columbus Heights stop in the freezing predawn, folks kept pouring out of houses and joining us on the way there. Little trickles of people were coming from all the side roads, accumulating at every intersection.
We barely missed the first metro that came by and had to wait a little anxiously as the crowd grew, and grew, and grew, before the next train arrived. We had to push a little to fit in, and several folks pushed up behind us to get on. I didn’t have enough personal space to get my arms up so I let other people’s shoulders hold me up when the train departed.
At each station that we stopped at a few more people managed to squeeze on. When we got to our destination we stepped off the train and saw…wall-to-wall people leading to the escalators and up to the turnstiles. In DC you have to swipe your metro card on the way out and this caused a pretty serious bottleneck as people jammed up against those turnstiles and fumbled through heavy coats for their cards.
We were a few blocks away from our entry point, which was the Blue Gate. Every ticket had a color that indicated which section you’d be in, and each section had a correspondingly named gate. The blue section was one of the closer sections, well in front of the reflecting pool and maybe only about 100 yards back. (This turned out not to matter later as we didn’t have a direct line of sight and had to watch the huge monitors like people further back, but we didn’t know that yet and were still full of Hope©.) As we got closer to our gate the crowd got thicker until we reached a t-stop near one of the silver gates and came upon a thick, nearly impenetrable wall of people waiting for the gate to open. We had to go single file and snake our way shoulder-to-shoulder through the crowd, weaving in a curvy path through and around. Other people joined our line as we made our way, and at one point I was a few people behind Jenna and Travis and Dan and I realized I could very easily lose them completely, even in plain sight, and next time I caught up with them I should grab my ticket from Jenna and keep it on myself from then on.
After about fifteen minutes curving around, we finally broke through the other side of the mass of people and could take our place at the end of the blue line. It was wrapped around the side of some large government building, and so we were actually facing *away* from the capitol when we got in line. It wouldn’t be the last time we weren’t what was going on or if we were in the right place. It was about 7:15am now, and the gates were supposed to open at 8.
Now that we were no longer moving, the biting early-morning cold really started to sink in. The night before we had tried to buy some of those chemical hand-warmers from the CVS but were told that all the stores in the area had already sold out of them, and I was really wishing I had thought to wear more clothes. I put the collar of my pea coat up to keep the wind out a little, and I put on my ear warmer under my hat, but the chilly air still cut right through.
The worst of the cold didn’t come from the air but from the ground. We were standing on marble, and the cold from the stone seeped up through our soles. Everyone around us who hadn’t thought to wear big thick boots was stamping their feet to keep warm.
[to be continued tomorrow]
the greenpoint police stole my bike tire
In late November, about 3 in the morning one Saturday night, someone tried to steal the back tire off my bike, which was locked up outside my apartment. A good samaritan hipster couple who were walking on the street saw what was going down and the girl’s boyfriend physically held the thief down long enough for her to call the police and wait for them to arrive. When the fuzz arrived they arrested the thief and took my tire into custody as evidence.
Since that time I have been to the police station four separate times, and every time I’ve had to explain my story to the same J.K. Simmons-looking officer who denies any knowledge of my tire and tells me to come back another time.
It’s been a month and a half and I’ve finally given up. I wasn’t expecting to have a chance to ride again until March anyway, but we’ve been having 40-degree days lately so I’m going to take matters into my own hands and replace the tire at B’s Bikes this weekend.
