Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Operations

Save the Polar Bears
Twas my privilege to meet with the CSN CTO at Laughing Planet today, to go over my Pycon 2009 Chicago slides. I'm now one of the lucky few with this Save the Polar Bears T-shirt, a fine work of art.

We also chatted about the CFO some, another jet setter, if I may use an archaic term.

Prior to jets, Hollywood movie stars would head for Avalon, Catalina, a romantic overnight trip. The small airfield wasn't really about handling large scale commercial traffic, so when jet travel came into vogue, Catalina sort of went off the radar, in favor of Paris, Hawaii...

The Chicago talk looks at the importance of mnemonics, the Art of Memory, as a complement of skills building. We master new skills with a purpose, because we're expecting to accomplish some real world task. A seminar or workshop will have that purpose as a focus, and gear its stories accordingly.

The same skills-building exercises will come wrapped in different stories, depending on which subculture is making use of the tools (in this case, computer languages).

My choice of predominantly Akbar font was pretty interesting. We talked about Oregon's history as a source of cartooning, including of political cartooning. My particular brand of positive futurism builds on that past.