Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Sounds Like Weird

Archive of posts with tag 'conferences'

: Branding Done Right

I have to admit I’m not usually a huge fan of branding campaigns, but Typecon 2014’s branding, designed by Build really knocked it out of the park.
The conference theme was “Redacted,” and the name was “Capitolized,” both homages to the conference’s Washington D.C. location. The theme also included double-speak and information combined with (justifiable) paranoia.

Welcome to the City of Magnificent Intentions

[![Typecon banner, photo by Akira Himei](/images/2014/08/BuOKwRDCEAAbjGY.jpg)](/images/2014/08/BuOKwRDCEAAbjGY.jpg)Typecon banner, photo by [Akira Himei](https://twitter.com/ashlight/status/496392946757812224/photo/1)

Typecon Bureau of Dining, Imbibing, Navigating, and Inconspicuous Tourist Operations

[![Typecon Dining and Imbibing Guide, pic by Deirdre Saoirse Moen](/images/2014/08/dining-and-imbibing.jpg)](/images/2014/08/dining-and-imbibing.jpg)Typecon Dining and Imbibing Guide, pic by Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Behold the Video Monitors

Here’s a link to the video one saw going down the escalators to the conference. (Note: Seizure disorder warning.)

All Neatly Leading into the Keynote

Tobias Frere-Jones speaks on the topic of In Letters We Trust. It was a fascinating talk I’ll write about in an upcoming post.

[![In Letters We Trust, photo by Helen Lysen](/images/2014/08/10570202_262734890586143_1722358510_n.jpg)](/images/2014/08/10570202_262734890586143_1722358510_n.jpg)In Letters We Trust, photo by [Helen Lysen](http://instagram.com/hcdarling)

: World Domination Summit 2014: a Quick Recap

One of the first questions I get asked when I mentioned that I was going was, “What’s the World Domination Summit?”
Fair question. And, to be honest, I didn’t know when I first heard about it either.
The goal is to help get people who want to do something different with their lives to take that leap, to find other people who also want to do different and remarkable things—and to help each other do them.
The speakers come from a variety of different fields, including Shannon Galpin, the only woman to mountain bike in Afghanistan, and who teaches street art to Afghani girls. Shannon linked to teafly’s amazing My Body Is Not a Democracy.
Another speaker, Saki Mafundikwa, a graphic designer teaching in Africa, is making a film about people dislocated due to a dam. He’s previously published a book on African writing systems.
Gavin Aung Than talked about giving up his graphic design job to start zenpencils, his cartoon and poster site.
Quite a few attendees got to stand up and give a short version of their own stories.
A woman had come to run the New York Marathon that was canceled due to Hurricane Sandy. She was disappointed, but understood. She had a trip coming up to London, so she thought: why not run the London Marathon?
Five months early.
She wound up getting on the front page of one BBC site, and had people run with her the entire way.
One of the reasons I love the science fiction community is that it’s a really broad spectrum of educated people (and not always in the traditional sense) who are interested in a wide variety of topics.
WDS is like that—squared, with the addition of more hopefulness.
I’ll end with this quote from speaker Michael Hyatt:
all-the-important-stuff

: TagCamp

So here I am at TagCamp, and I was reminded of an upcoming talk I’ve got for the Silicon Valley BSD User Group on Thursday about Ruby on Rails. If you’re in the area and interested in finding out more about RoR, come on down. This will be sort of an intro talk, so if you’re interested in some of the more advanced stuff, I probably won’t be covering it except to give a brief nod to some of the new features in Rails 1.0. If there’s interest, I’ll show the “tag cloud and AJAX for newbies” application I’m working on at this very moment.

Technorati Tags: tagcamp, svbug, ruby on rails, rubyonrails