This weekend was one of the most disparately eventful times in my life.
Saturday morning was taken up with a Client meeting. Impressive I hear you say.
Saturday afternoon I moseyed on down to Barcamp Sydney 5. It was a great time. I met folk, attended some seminars/presentations, and gave a talk right at the dying stages of the day that was disjointed, had people packing up all around me, and was cut short.
Narky much? No, not at all! Seriously, read on. This whole thing worked far better than I could have hoped.
I was so filled with unbridled stu-thusiasm that I took my guitar and burst forth in song in front of the entire population gathered for the final segment.
“Super Powered Geek” was a song I wrote in two days. Thursday night I wrote the first verse and chorus, Friday night the second verse.
The live performance was, well, interesting. Totally unexpected. The plan was for the 8th and final point of my talk, A Super Heroes Guide To Development, to be titled “A Little Splash of Crazy”. The point being that we need to, in our development, be willing to inject a bit of the crazy.
However, because it was the end of the day, and let’s be honest, everyone’s pretty beat and tired by that stage, I didn’t have a hope of getting through the talk.
Everybody was heading towards the Big Room, so putting the 8th Point (yes, capitalised, because that’s how I roll) into practice, I begged Ajay (@funkycoda) to let me give my last point to everybody.
Of course, Ajay looked at me like I was crazy and said, “What the? No way I’m letting a big hairy ape-like creature with a leprechaun t-shirt talk to my people?” (paraphrased)
A couple of Chuck Norris round-house kicks to the head and Ajay came around to my point of view. From the Ambulance bed he gave me the thumbs up. At least, I think it was a thumbs up.
So, without further violence I raced into the Big Room, down the front, and proceeded to serenade the crowd of folk with “Super Powered Geek”.
The guitar and my dulcid tones were both out of tune. My strumming was terrible. I missed a couple of lines of the song, and got the rhythm mixed up.
But you know, it didn’t matter. Because when you splash around a little bit of crazy, it’s about throwing together something far more than the sum of it’s parts. It’s about being willing to hold to a singular vision (mine being to tell people to wear their undies on the outside, point #6 in the talk). And it’s about getting out there.
If it wasn’t for me misunderstanding how the “card” system worked for putting your presentation on the timesheet; If it wasn’t for me waiting too long to start my talk; If it wasn’t for throwing caution to the wind, laughing at the fear which rises in the gullet; Then I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy Barcamp as much as I did.
And man alive I REALLY enjoyed it. So many geeks. So much fun.
A special shout out to the Youngin’s I made paper airplanes for. You guys rock!
Anyway, a big THANKYOU to all the Folk at Barcamp Sydney 5. It was great to get to know some of you, great to make a fool out of myself in front of all of you, and great to get some Microsoft paraphernalia for being “Most Entertaining Geek Of The Day” (again, I paraphrase).
Cheers to @halans for putting a recording of the song up on Youtube.
Saturday night my eldest and I went to the Rugby. We had a blast! Although the game wasn’t an exciting try-fest, it was still enjoyable. We nicknamed the France full-back “Softie”, and I’m sure I didn’t embarrass my son by screaming out “IT’S NOT SOCCER!”.
Sunday is a private day for us. I don’t talk about it much. We go to Church, we have fellowship with our friends, and we spend time as a family. But believe me, today (Sunday) had it’s interesting moments. Interesting enough that it will be a long time until I forget what happened at Church today.
So that was my weekend.
Kudos for reading this far.
I’m excited to really commit to attending more conferences like Barcamp. There’s a lot to be excited about in the world of Development (and general Geek-dom), and I’ve got a lot of excitement to transfer.
Increasingly I find myself building and advising on web systems as opposed to desktop.
In preparing for Barcamp I noticed a 
I”m going to the Developer Day mostly as a Developer keen to see what other folk are doing, and to talk about implementation of payment gateways, coding of them, that kind of thing.