NotCon Thoughts (It’s Over!)

Posted on June 7, 2004
Filed Under NotCon 2004 |

Well, NotCon is finally over. Yesterday (Sunday 6th June) saw the first NotCon, or the sequel to Extreme Computing 2002, or the British equivalent to O’Reillys Emerging Technology. But whatever you called it, it looks like everyone actually enjoyed themselves at the event.

Probably the two best indicators from an organisers point of view, is that (a) we didn’t lose money and (b) we sold out all the tickets. Looking back, we really should have arranged the insurance cover for a few more people (our limit was 340 in the building at a time) so that’s probably the most obvious cock-up. But although the ‘waiting list’ did reach 50 names, eveyone who wanted in managed to get a ticket from people leaving by about 2.30pm, which was nice.

Organisation on the day was a bit hit and miss, and certainly reminded me of my days in Student Rag (in fact the Imperial College Union did see a great day in Rag when Miss Tyson Ma’am from Strathclyde Rag decked a rugby player from Loughborough Rag, but that’s for another post). But we got there in the end. There’s an equal amount of panic and proudness when you realise the queue for tickets was reaching back across the courtyard to the main gate.

The talks and the people were the main point of NotCon. I managed to catch three talks on the day and I’m looking forward to mp3’s of the talks I missed (like most of Cory and Bill’s debate for example).

The two opening hardware talks really did make my day, and if I had been a paying punter (the pricey sum of £4/£3 - a touch less than the £1,100 tickets for eTech) these two would have been worth the entry fee alone.

There’s going to be som much written on “Telling the time with a BBC B and a M&S Prawn Sandwich” that I’ll rely on track backs to point out posts for that. The recent modifications on the ZX Spectrum scene we’re just as hilarious, in an eccentric Great Egg Race way. It’s not enough to put an IDE interace on one of Sir Clive’s machines. it’s not enough to add 4 gigabyte Microdrive for the ultiamte storage solution. No, you have to have streaming audio and video on the 256×176, 16 color clash screen as well. I think everyone in the hall realised how crazily perfect that idea was.

(For reference, the main mod to the Spectrum was a new heat sink, and the entire Spectrum archive of games and applications adds up to around 380mb).

Finally, I made sure to be at the last talk of the day, Yoz’s “What’s Happening With ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy’ Movie?” For no reason I’ll link to an old post of mine at this point. Yoz and Sean gave a great impression of two rabid fans, and I love the exclusive picture from the set of H2G2M - and the stories of utter panic from Disney when they heard this was happening. I must source at the very least a link to the picture.

To summarise, a great day. I hope we can do it again next year, so all feedback blog entries and articles will help us improve it. So if you’ve blooged on NotCon, can you ping this entry so I can have a nice reference file of Trackbacks?

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