mopac-university

It's Drupal month at GeekAustin, and Mopac University is in session.

To gear up for the GeekAustin Drupal Party in May, I've been listening to the Lullabot podcasts. For over 3 years now, Jeff Robbins, author of the O'Reilly Using Drupal book, has been hosting a series of podcasts on everything Drupal. This is high quality and informative stuff. If you're just starting out, two of the early podcasts, Intro to Drupal Part 1, and Intro to Drupal Part 2, are a great introduction to the vocabulary-- although the framework has changed a bit since the recording.

Lullabot produces the Drupal Podcast, Drupal Voices, and well as videocasts.

Drupal Voices is a series of short interviews with luminaries in the Drupalverse. The series kicks off with an interview with Jeff Eaton on the CMS Showdown panel at SXSW. The second interview is on theming -- conducted with Colleen Carroll during SXSW '09 as well. Several of the interviews cover Drupal and the Semantic Web (numbers 17, 18, and 19). The most recent interview is with Larry Garfield on the new database layer in Drupal 7.

However, the real meat is the Lullabot Drupal Podcast. There are about 70 so far. They run from 30 mins to a hour in length. Listening to these is a great way to get a blow by blow history of the development of Drupal from 4.6 to the imminent release of 7.0. I burned the whole series to CD and should get through them -- by the time of the party.

See you on Mopac!

It was Paco Xander Nathan (blog), mad genius of Fringeware, who back in the early 90s first told me about Vernor Vinge and The Singularity. For the next decade, I heard it referred to only rarely. Then in 2005, about the time Ray Kurzweil released his book: The Singularity is Coming, I began to hear the term used with some frequency. That same year, Vernor Vinge gave the keynote to an all-star crowd at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference. A year later, in 2006, the first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford, Ray Kurzweil being one of the organizers.

Whether it is the result of the general hoo haa regarding the Semantic Web or some other factor, in the last few months, I've been hearing the term 'singularity' pop up quite a bit in local conversations. Thankfully, the word has five syllables.

Since no one has time to read any more, I decided to assemble a collection of mp3s on The Singularity for Mopac University. Right click, burn them, and listen to them on your way to the office.

Accelerating Change 2005

Vernor Vinge Keynote Presentation recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)
"The singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution."

Ray Kurzweil When Humans Transcend Biology recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)
(an abbreviated version appeared on Tech Nation with Moira Gunn - listen to the mp3)

John Smart How to be a Tech Futurist -recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)

An extended list of presentations from Accelerating Change can be found at ITConversations.

The Singularity Summit 2007

Barney Pell - Powerset Co-Founder & CEO - Singularity Summit 2007 - Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence - recorded 2007-09-08 (listen to the mp3)

Ben Goertzel - Nine Years to a Positive Singularity - recorded 2007-09-08 (listen to the mp3)

An extended list of presentations from the Singularity Summit 2007 can be found at ITConversations.

The Singularity Institute, which organizes the Singularity Summit, has a series of interviews. Some of them are quite good. They also have videos of the 2006 presentations and 2007 presentations. Please don't watch the videos while driving.

See you on Mopac. Remember, no need to rush. We're already in Austin.

To get in the mood for the upcoming interview with Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic, I scanned Google for podcasts dealing with UX. I stumbled on to Gerry Gaffney's User Experience Podcast (UXpod). This is a real gem. UXpod has over 30 high quality interviews with leading figures in User Experience including Luke Wroblewski, Joel Spolsky, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Steve Krug and many others.

You might have paid to hear some of these folks speak at conferences. Thanks to UXPod, you can experience them in your car on the way to the office. If one of the lectures isn't interesting, just fast forward to the next. It's not like being at a conference where everyone sees you leave the room. You can stop them while you head in to UpperCrust for coffee, and you can make them start all over again if you get distracted by the driver next to you. Not even Tim O'Reilly can do that at a conference.

Happy listening, and see you on Mopac!

I am more fortunate than many. I only spend about 20 mins a day on Mopac. Thanks to IT Conversations mp3s, Mopac has become my IT classroom. Leading up to this month's GeekAustin Agile Happy Hour, I decided to fish around for agile podcasts and conference proceedings. Here are two of my finds:

Agile Toolkit Podcast. There are a lot of great interviews here -- enough to keep you busy for a few months. In particular:

• James Shore - The Art of Agile Development
• Scott Ambler - Agile Modeling, Agile Database and the Agile Development Conference
• Bob Martin - What is Agile?

Team Agile Interviews. Includes interviews with Kent Beck and Johanna Rothman.

With all these resources, we'll all be scrum masters in no time. Just don't forget to stop for gas.
-Linear