(From my original post on ReadWriteWeb, where you’ll see a fun comment thread)
OSCON has wrapped in sunny Portland, and with it the most ambitious conference wireless networking I’ve ever seen. Yet even here I heard attendees complaining about sluggish Wi-Fi… and organizers asking them not to download large files.
Now, there’s little question that OSCON is an edge case. Get a few thousand developers and software engineers together and you’re going to strain the bandwidth.
But every conference I’ve been to – every single one in the last four or five years – has had issues with Wi-Fi. And for that matter, nearly every hotel I’ve stayed at has also had issues with Wi-Fi. And I sometimes wonder if the issue is often less one of conference overload than one of facilities that invest as little as they need to to be able to say they offer Wi-Fi.
Then again, every conference and hotel I’ve been to has had at least one person who insists on downloading an OS upgrade or a movie to watch on the plane home. That would be, um, me.
The question is, when does conference Wi-Fi stop being about just checking email and maybe sharing some notes, and start being about allowing people to continue doing the heavy wireless lifting they do at home and at the office? Ever?
If I’m sounding a little more breathless, a touch more excited, a wee bit more giddy than you usually find me, well, there’s a reason.
The heroic folks at Getting Things Done (why, yes, that Getting Things Done) just blogged my business-book-sequel cartoon on GTD Times. (I can well understand why they blogged that cartoon and not, say, this.)
If you haven’t heard of Getting Things Done – or, as author David Allen’s fans call it, GTD – and you’re hoping to raise your personal productivity, then definitely check out the blog and look into GTD.
I drew this on my iPhone - it’s the first cartoon I’ve drawn there (although I had to resort to the laptop to add the caption – graphic app developers, please consider adding text support, ‘kay?) and I did it with Autodesk SketchBook Mobile for the iPhone and the Logiix StylusPro, a worthy competitor to the Pogo Sketch stylus I’ve been using until now.
I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to make it look pretty; what you’re seeing is the first take, and took me maybe four minutes to draw. So the iPhone turns out to be perfectly viable for quick sketches.
It’s in support of David Eaves‘ Facebook Group aimed at getting 100,000 Canadians to opt out of receiving those tree-killing, energy-burning, shelf-space-taking-up tomes known as the Yellow Pages. Here’s my blog post on the topic.
I just finished two days of iPad-based cartoon-blogging and doodle-note-taking at Northern Voice, the Vancouver-based personal social media conference… and boy, are my arms tired.
But both the iPad and the Pogo Sketch performed magnificently. As for me, well, I’ll leave that to you to judge.
I got to kick off MooseCamp – the narrowly-rescued unconference stream at Northern Voice – with a half-hour on webcomics. I shared a little of what I’ve learned over the past few years, but one of the things that grabbed people’s imagination is that you can cartoon without, well, cartooning.
Here are links to some of the comics I mentioned that are created with little or no actual drawing (although there’s a lot of talent still there):
- Dwell On It, Tateru Nino’s cartoon created through Second Life screen captures
- Gumshoo, a fun comic that deals with the same kind of topics I do, created on Bitstrips.com
- A Softer World, with captions over top of photos – think LOLcats for grownups (often leading dark internal lives)
- Dinosaur Comics, which uses the same clipart and panel structure in every comic
- Get Your War On, which uses truly awful office clipart to devastating political effect
- And then there’s xkcd – stick-figure cartoons from someone who every once in a while proves he can, in fact, draw pretty damn nicely.
Thanks, everyone – I loved the session!
Enough people liked the Drupal pickup line cartoon that I’ve created a mug on Zazzle. And thanks for the great response, people!
