The reenactment from 24-Hour Party People:

I read AJ Jacobs’s article about unitasking and the focus-destroying properties of multi-tasking last week. It reminded me that I have been wanting to try meditation.

Last night’s meditation: 5 minutes. Notes: That went much faster than I thought it would (meaning I didn’t get bored), but my mind still wandered like crazy after a couple minutes. Today I’ll push it a little.

I’ll include some more thoughts here as the week goes by.

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*

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

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

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.

Chris Wanstrath, parse tree

• Sake, rake tasks that you can use between different projects.
• Cheat — command line interface for looking up documentation. Like ‘man’ for ruby and rails methods.
• Ruby2Ruby (I can’t find the official homepage, that’s a placeholder). Looks very cool, but I am not 100% sure what it does other than self-document (?) your ruby code with ruby code. I have to play with this to figure it out.
• RingServer, RingyDingy — a way to do mapreduce type stuff using drb in ruby. I wonder if we can use this for tasks at outside.in

Ryan Davis, Hurting Code For Fun and Profit

• Code-writing ability increases non-linearly when you become a Ruby sadist/asceticist
• coined a new term: menturbating/mentorbating
• “Introspection-driven development”
• self-improvement: read 1 nerd book/month (12x the industry avg). c2.com , read 10-20ish smart blogs
• ignorance is not bliss. NYT article by Erica Goode
• wtf, coding horror and other idiot forums, trim the blogs in your newsreader, focus
• important/not-important, urgent/not-urgent. these form a quadrant. push towards important. the not-important and not-urgent stuff are useful at times, too, for fighting burnout. via 7 habits of highly effective people by covey. “do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?”
• study something non-coding-oriented. push yourself. write more code, lots of it. junk code. write stuff to figure something out. quantity can be greater than quality (sometimes)
• “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork
  is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction
  of your artwork that soars.” from: “Art & Fear”
• Don’t be a sheep. challenge the status quo. Feel. Let your emotions flow. Have an opinion (but dont be an asshole).
• zentest, flog (complexity reported based on ABC metric, correlates to testing complexity. the scores are important relative to each other, not absolutely) & heckle — (love of good dev tools)
• vlad and image_science — (hate of complex code)
• use feedback. ask for it. listen to it. feed the feedback back. constantly refine.
• find your balance. between 0-100% action and 0-100% thought is your sweet spot. find that balance an dyou’ll be most of effective.
• ryan hates inject — why? (see the mailing list)
• heckle: runs your tests and mutates your implementations to verify that your tests are good. if youre mutated tests still pass after mutation, you missed an edge case
• enjoy hurting bad code and you’ll have less of it over time. eschew complexity.

Paul Dix, Collective Intelligence

• Slides are up at paul’s blog
• explicit versus implicit data. implicit happens as a result of other actions. scrobbling is an example. explicit makes you make choices (give ratings/grades/stars to things, etc.)
• types of recommendations — content-, user- and item-based. content is like other content, users are like other users, items are like other items.
• basic strategy: map data to a euclidean spaces, calculate similarity using a metric, and use similarities to recommend. represent the data as vectors.
• (I discovered confreaks just now. cool. I think goruco vids will be up there later.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Merb

• Merb looks really cool. I got tired of taking notes here so I just sat back and watched his talk. Next personal project I do is going to be in Merb.

Can’t Believe A Single Word from bantic on Vimeo.

Also check out this awesome drivelapse video (in HD no less) featuring a VHSOB backing track:

Driving Time Lapse 2.0 from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.