The reenactment from 24-Hour Party People:

On Tuesday I picked up a meditation candle (just a normal candle, really) and have been staring at it to help focus my meditation. Last night an interesting thing started happening after about 5 minutes or so. If I held my head still and didn’t blink, after a little bit of time the periphery of my vision would start to darken, and it was like being in a tunnel looking only at the candle. I could only hold onto it for a second or two. My guess is that this effect has more to do with suppressing my saccadic eye movement than anything mystical, but it’s fun to see how long I can hold onto it. Excepting of course that merely noticing when I go into tunnel-vision is an interruption of my clear mind and the goal here is to let go of things, not hold onto them.

Inspired by the article on distraction that I linked to yesterday, I’ve also picked up Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which was cited in it.

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.

The distance to the horizon is about 2 miles (I’m decreasing it a little due to city smog). And we blink for about 300 milliseconds. So for a train to come out of nowhere, it’d have to travel 2 miles in 300 milliseconds. Or 1 mile per 150 milliseconds. Do the math and that’s 24,000 miles per hour. Roughly Mach 31, but only about one and a half times faster than the space shuttle orbits the earth.

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*

Who Needs Photoshop? at Scotland on Rails from bantic on Vimeo.

Engineyard is hosting the rest of the Scotland on Rails videos.

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.

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