Community Blog

So I went to the Geeks, Gadgets, and Games event at the Michael Fowler Centre on Wednesday and I have to say it was a great night.

I met Jo aka Mangee so "Hi once again, nice to put a face to the name and thanks for helping to run such a cool event."

The night basically consisted of 5 speakers. I found the first two to be quite boring. It was all about what they and their companies are doing and how to make money. Frankly I don't care about that so I was biased against them. I want to learn about technology and how it can be applied effectively not how I can make money off people.

The first guy was trying to tell us that Wellington should be the leader of the world in terms of technology but I think he's wrong. Don't get me wrong, Wellington is a great place to live and I've enjoyed it since I moved from Taranaki about 5 years ago. But I don't think that Wellington should be the technological hub of New Zealand let alone the world. Wellington is full of lawyers, accountants, and politicians - the very people who are a hinderance to the advancement of technology. I am still racking my brain to think of what major technological advancement was made in Wellington. The first person to fly, Richard Pearse, did so in Invercargill. John Britten, the genius behind the Britten motorcycle, perfected carbon fibre manufacturing while making the Britten and that was in Christchurch. NGC (now Vector) in Taranaki had perfected the processes for using hot tapping which allows engineers to weld on live gas pipes. Burt Munro's 1967 World Speed Record to this day hasn't been broken and he built the thing in Invercargill. Massey University is among the world leaders in agricultural technology and they're in Palmy North. The atom was split in the South Island and Otago is ironically world renowned in terms of nuclear research. Where does Wellington fit in in all of this - hell where does Auckland fit into this?

The second was a lady who runs a company called Yaktivate. Let me tell you, she embodies the very things wrong with business. Don't get me wrong, she seemed like a nice enough lass, but she's one of those typical people who likes to see money in new opportunities and tries to tell you all about how you can do this that and the other to make money on the web. But she lost credibility with me when she made the common mistake of saying the Internet was invented around 1995. If you're going to use some piece of technology to try and make money, DO YOUR RESEARCH. The Internet was made in the 40's and 50's as a means of the Allied military pooling their research in a number of places  so that if one site got hit there would be still be research pools around the world. The geeks took it over in the 70's which lead to the development of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners Lee which is what people mistakenly call the Internet which came on the scene around 1994. The Internet is actually a number of different protocols unified to communicate with the world. But the other problem was she seemed to be contradicting herself quite often. She asked us how many of us skip the ads, how many of us hate to go to Myspace and Youtube and what have you and seeing ads all over the place, then she said that we need to reach the next generation of consumers where they will be which ironically is Myspace and YouTube. So why advertise to people who are sick and tired of advertising? They're going to be turned off by it all and you lose customers. She did have some interesting points though, like with Myspace and YouTube and even iTunes ordinary people can become celebrities. But given the current crop of celebrities is that really such a great thing?

The evening kicked off when Marco Wynands stepped up. He is one of the co-founders of Sidhe Interactive. I was surprised by the titles that he mentioned they were making. While I haven't played them per se I have seen them around. To think a New Zealand company has that much nouse in the world gaming scene is both mind blowing and fantastic. He mentioned there was something like 22 game development companies in New Zealand, 7 of which are in Wellington. This can only be a good thing.

Then stepped up Glynn Foster of Sun Microsystems. Part of the Engineering Department that I work in are contracted by Sun do to their support work so I was interested in their plans for OpenSolaris which is the open source version of Sun's Enterprise OS. It's going to be interesting what they're doing so I'll look forward to playing with it when it's ready around about Spring 2008 (I guess that means Autumn for us). It's not going to be an easy process though when there's 10 million lines of code in over 35 thousand files. Snapshot rollbacks sound a lot like Time Machine though. :)

Then the pièce de résistance - Renaissance's Lee Herbet. I love guys like Lee. Here's someone who loves the product he sells. He might have seemed somewhat hyper but how can you not be when you're selling Apple? I'm exactly the same way when I talk about Apple to everyone. They think I'm mad but Apple is just proof that anything is possible when you put your mind to it. Incidentally, it was Lee that got asked the most questions. I wonder why?

I spoke to Lee at the end while everyone was having drinks because I wanted to know about getting Apple Hardware Certified. He pointed me in the right direction and we had a good chat.

Then I had a really awesome chat with Steve from Ocular Films. He gave me some really great tips for camera work and pointed me to a great site for video editing.

I also met a young chap by the name of Saveun. He's looking at developing serious games (training type games not games like Sim City et al like I thought). He's going back to school to learn more but from what he said it sounds like an interesting venture. I hope he manages to do something when he gets out of school.

All in all the whole Unlimited Potential concept is great. It's a means of people who wouldn't normally have contact with each other to share ideas and concepts.

I'll leave Jo to explain it better one day but if you're interested the site is:

http://up.org.nz/home/

By the way, there was someone there that asked a question and he sounded like Phil. Were you there as well Phil? If you were and I'd have known I'd have sought you out. I was the one that asked Glynn Foster about who OpenSolaris was aimed at. :)