Czajkowski

I had a pretty amazing weekend down home last weekend.  I was asked back to give  a talk as part of a weekend of talks that took place at my old University. It was a great honour and rather amusing at the same time.  Years ago I had set up the Skynet talks, where you’d invite a Skynet member back and members of the Industry.

Friday night kicked off in the stables, a flash back from my college days. We have two pubs on campus and a small bar. Walking into the Stables bar it was a flash back to the 90’s music.  All of the cheesy head wrecking songs that you know once your heard them the lyrics were going to be in your head for the night.

Clearly my age showed as I couldn’t hear myself and moved out to the courtyard to have conversations, albeit it was a bit chilly I could hear the music and have a conversations so worked out better.

Saturday morning, I was up in time to go into the Market for breakfast and collected Matt Zimmerman who kindly agreed to come over and take part in the days talks.  After a cup of tea in the what looked to be someones kitchen and listening to a Trad Session at 11am we were fed and set up for the day headed to UL for the talks.

1. “Talk 1″ - Paul O’Connor
2. “Google Summer of Code” - Jimmy O’Regan
3. “So you want to build a Hackerspace” - Jeffrey Roe
4. “Ubuntu Inside Out” - Matt Zimmerman
5. “To Ubuntu and Beyond – Where individual participation can take you” - Laura Czajkowski
6. “An introduction to CouchDB” - David Coallier

This time I was a little less nervous talking, but not by much! I gave a similar talk to the one last month but this time was a bit slower and updated slides as I knew the target audience had a clue about Ubuntu and Open Source.

Matt gave his talk with such ease and clarity and it was very enjoyable. All of the talks during the day were interesting and nice to bring people together. they covered a range of topics so there was something there for most people. Students came from Cork, Dublin and Galway so that was great that it wasn’t just one college having these talks. It was a nice way to spend an  afternoon. David and his entertaining ways gave his talk on CouchDB, and very nicely obliged to get us to the pub for the last half of the Ireland V England Rugby game.

It was great to be back again and I had a lovely weekend. glad I gave the talk, and I believe it was recorded and will be up at some point.  Here are the slides at least.

Many many moons ago when I was in college and involved in Skynet, I set up the Skynet talks.  The idea behind them was Limerick was not Dublin. Dublin had all these big companies and developers up here and we should meet these people and hear what they are doing, also we should invite back past members of Skynet and see what they are up to.

This year I’m being invited back. I’m going to do the same titled talk I gave to the MSc students in DIT- To Ubuntu and Beyond where Individual participation can take you, but with different content, so I need to work on that this week. Also Mat Zimmerman has been asked over so looking forward to hearing him talk.  Skynet have also nicely asked a few other speakers to come along and make an afternoon of it.

Everyone is welcome to come along and we’ve created a wiki page for the event.

That’s what I am at this weekend. Heading to Limerick to the SKynet awards. Should be fun to see some old mates there. Each year skynet runs a internal award system for best society person and best admin within the society for work done for Skynet. This in turn leads to an award night with some nibbles, drinks and this time some talks.

In 2006 Alan Cox came over, presented a talk and then Daniel Nagle and John Madden were presented with their awards for Best society person and best admin. Fun night was had with sitting outside Moll Darbys (flash site) till all hours and then onto Dolans. Oh and I won last year, we just didn’t get to go on the beer!

This year the following is the time table of the event.

Starts off at 2pm in the Students Union, Room 3 (Upstairs, beside the common room) Mel Gorman will be giving a talk on: “Maintaining
Performance of Software with a Basic Awareness of Hardware”.

After that (at 3:00pm) Christian van den Bosch (m1, composer of one of the Skynet Game clue’s) will be giving his talk on Retro cryptography.

Next (3:40pm) Sean Blanchfield (DemonWare) will be giving a talk on: A technical history of DemonWare.

4:30pm Quiz in the Students Union Common room.

6:00pm Award ceremony for Quiz winners, Society Person and Admin of the year.

6:30pm Then into Java’s (formerly the Scholars)

So I first tried out pix.ie months ago and at the time there were a few glitches but they are all sorted now and it’s nice to use ( Kudos Marcus ).  I used to use my Skynet account and still do for photos I need to share privately, but for ones that anyone wants to have a gander at, and share out to my mates who like things in a nice pretty easy to view format with folders so they can copy and leave comments and also they can log into so that they can see actually what actually happens on my strange but exciting nights out! Trust me! I need a camera to actually prove things happened, and also cringe at!

So now all my photos are going to be on pix.ie

So back in April Skynet won  Best Society of the year award within Clubs and Socs. Which was great! All the work that was put in by so many people and for people to finally sit up and see a computer society win this award within UL, was a great feeling.

Skynet also runs its own internal award system set up by Grainne Daly/Wrinkles for Admins and a Skynet Person of the year award set up by Daniel Nagle/Sith. The awards are designed so that the members nominate a short list is arrived at and put to the members to vote upon.  So it seems this year I won the Skynet Person of the year award, 2nd time for me   Yay   Kinda nice to know people actually liked the stuff I did. Even if it did involved large chunks of my sanity being lost when having to deal with Anal retentive cunts on legs! Sometimes dealing with some people it’s more than one can handle to bite ones tongue and not want to take a swing at them, but I did in fact.

I should point out before I came to college and while I was in college I organised promotions all over Munster.(Hired politely let go of staff who had no manner of time keeping or able to take direction for events) There were different types of promotions Drinks, alcoholic (yay) non alcoholic, sweets, gadgets, large company info days like for Dell or Eircom in  Limerick.

So I do have a fair bit of experience in running large scale events, which did stand to me when running SkyCon. Unfortunately little anal cunts don’t always see it that way.

Saying that, I’ve left the running of Skynet now to others. Which is weird but good at the same time. I’m looking at the stuff that is being done and it’s different. While different is good. I hope it works out well as so far it has even if some things were done that really shouldn’t have been. I’ve told Daniel and Olivia, the new President and Treasurer that I’m but a pm away for questions and answers, and to make use of that. I did help them do the budget and I think from what they learned that weekend I should be getting a few more questions in future. Which I’m really glad to get.