My friend Fipi Lele has provided me with a scan of old German postcards with illustrations depicting what life would be like in the year 2000. I posted one of them below — “Theatre in the Year 2000”:
Click the photo to see all the postcards.
Note how practically everyone in the audience is on the phone, which is pretty much what the movie-watching experience in 2000 was like. It’s eerily prescient.
Now you conservatives can’t say I never did nuthin’ for ya…
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Click the photo to see the original on its own page.
I’m going to simply quote the announcement:
What is Open Coffee? A weekly informal opportunity for the startup
scene (entrepreneurs, developers, and investors) to Percolate,
Discuss, Demo, and Meet!
Where is Open Coffee? Tequila Bookworm. A cozy coffee shop at 512
Queen Street West. Free WiFi and ample parking across the street. We
can even take over the whole 2nd floor!
When is Open Coffee? Every Thursday 10:00am to 12:00pm.
I’m going to try to attend this week’s Open Coffee gathering.
The 13th DemoCamp — the regular show-and-tell gathering for Toronto and area’s developers, businesspeople and creatives — takes place tomorrow at No Regrets Restaurant and Lounge (42 Mowat, not far from the corner of King and Dufferin). The presentations start at 6:30 p.m. and run until about 8:30 p.m., after which the social part of the evening begins.
Here’s the lineup for this DemoCamp:
David Crow has a message for presenters, and I concur:
These presentations should not be sales demos.
Demonstrators should read Value to the Audience.
I am also going to ask that every presenter create a blog post or page on the wiki that is linked from their sign up that answers the following questions:
- Have you attended a previous DemoCamp?
- Who are you? Previous experience, what makes you qualified for us to listen to, etc.
- What does your product do?
- What hard problem, interesting insight, or cool feature will you be demonstrating?
- What are you hoping to get out of presenting?
- What does the community gain by hearing you present?
Basically, we need to improve the quality. I’m thinking of following the Ignite Seattle model of having all presenters submit a PowerPoint presentation. The point is not necessarily to use PowerPoint at DemoCamp, but to make the slides (and we’d limit the number, say 8 slides) available before the talk to the community.
For goodness sake, you have the attention of people in this community for 5 minutes. Make it count. And if I have to sit through a demonstration of a tag cloud or web login form, so help me…
See you there!
A quick report on the Motorola KRZR that Ian Barr sent my way: damn, this phone has serious battery staying power! I’ve haven’t charged it for a week, during which I’ve taken and placed a few calls, shot some video and taken some pictures, and the battery indicator says that I still have two-thirds of a full charge. My old Samsung, which doesn’t have all the bells, whistles and other power-hungry features of the KRZR, would’ve run out of charge just by being on standby for about three days.
(And no, I don’t have the Pussycat Dolls as my phone’s “wallpaper”.)
For those of you living near Accordion Cityt’s weather system, I hope that you had a chance to enjoy the sun and nearly-summer-like temperatures. The Missus and I went out on a picnic in High Park on Saturday and had a relaxing time reading, people- and dog-watching and drinking ice tea at the nearby Starbucks patio on Sunday.
I decided to dig through the music library and look for songs with the word “Sun” in the title and found Bobby Hebb’s Sunny. This version has an intro and outro by Bob Dylan, who explains that Hebb wrote the song as a way of finding comfort after being devastated by the deaths of John F. Kennedy and his brother, who died within a day of each other. Wikipedia quotes Hebb as saying:
All my intentions were just to think of happier times – basically looking for a brighter day – because times were at a low tide. After I wrote it, I thought “Sunny” just might be a different approach to what Johnny Bragg was talking about in “Just Walkin’ in the Rain”.
Sunny reminds me of weather like this — not only for its name and its optimism, but also because it’s one of two songs that I played at my last recital at organ school, which happened during a rather memorable late spring. The other song I played was the one that got me kicked out of the Yamaha School of Music, and that’s a story for a later date.
(This song will be available for a week, after which it’ll evaporate.)