JavaZone'08 coming up

I'm still going through my post-summer awakening, so I still haven't gotten the wheels of this blog running again. But current events are sort of relevant to the people I'm guessing are part of this blog's readership.

The biggest happening coming along is JavaZone 2008. Now this is especially important for me for two reasons. First reason:

I've been a part of the crew preparing the conference. My role has been gathering a crew of volunteers to help out with all the practical work during the conference. Hooray, very rewarding work, getting 40 people to work two days for virtually nothing!

Luckily there's a great crowd of Java-interested students in Oslo, and they can't afford a conference-ticket! So our evil schemes of acquiring a cheap workforce are proceeding as planned. Actually, there is a win-win relationship going on here. Student-organizations like to profile themselves in front of companies, cause companies have a tendency to give away free stuff when they do presentations at universities in order to recruit more newly educated computer scientists. Never underestimate the value of free food for a student.

Companies, however, are wondering "So how do we get to these students?" - when it comes to the University of Oslo, Institute of Informatics (the biggest contributor of volunteers to JavaZone), the answer is through events like dagen@ifi, and student organizations like ProsIT and Navet. You (recruiters) can meet members of these organizations at JavaZone. But try not to bother them while they're busy with the crucial tasks of keeping the conference running smoothly :)

We still need more volunteers, though, so if you know anyone who'll chip in some hours of work in exchange for some freebies and free attendance to the conference, send them over to the JavaZone volunteer sign-up page:

www.javazone.no/funk

Second reason: My proposal for JavaZone'08 talk got accepted! The title of it is "How I Learned to Love and Hate Web Testing", and that's pretty much what's it about as well. If you want more details you can read my last blog post on the subject. I haven't gotten to prepare the talk half as much as I've wanted, but I've got most of the content pretty clear up in my head.

I've started writing a manuscript for the entire talk. Now before you think "Stop it!" I won't print it and read it out loud when I do the talk. It's more like a movie script. I know too well that Norwegian audiences beyond a certain size are very hard to read, and therefore hard to adjust to, so I'm going to perform the talk exactly has I have planned it in advance. What I loose in adaptability I'll gain in stability and content. Or that's what I hope anyway. Comments on how to prepare for talks in front of big JavaZone audiences are appreciated.

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