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Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
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Thu, 26 Oct 2006

50 people listening to someone talk about slugs - 20:29
The title is somewhat arbitrary to the content, but it is true, I am in a room with 50 people listening to a talk about slugs, and this is a Linux related thing not a biology conference or something. Heck Mikal even has us laughing. Though he just ruined the myth about running everything as root by using sudo many times to access root. There is still no firewall at least so all of our world views have not been shattered

Of course talking for an hour or so about slug's is possibly an unusual approach to holding the interest of an audience, I wonder what other unusual ways you could hold he interest of an audience. One that I liked the other day, though it only holds the interest for a few seconds per story were a bunch of 6 word creative works.

The blurb goes "Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves." This is at wired, they asked a bunch of famous people, mostly authors for 6 word stories.

As is often the case, Joss rocks with his story "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. - Joss Whedon", interestingly as Jane pointed out when I passed the link on to her, you can actually get a good idea of the Author's specific style and preoccupations even from their 6 word stories. Such as Cory Doctrow and Neil Gaiman.

Considering NaNoWriMo is on next month, you could do that, or if you are not up to writing 5000 words of one story a day for a month, maybe try 833 6 word stories a day with 833 different plots.

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Julie, Tom and Al Bundy stories - 16:12
The title refers to Julie Quinn, Tom Landon-Smith and Alina McMaster. I was thinking about this the other day, in the vein of the Floyd Stories there are stories around the place of that nature concerning people I know. I am sure others among you who know mad keen fit people have the odd story about them that astounds or confounds others upon the telling of.

What got me thinking of writing something about this was reading some of the reader contributed stories on Fat Cyclist, such as this recent story about a really hard bunch ride. I have not had much in the way of attempts at humour or simply interesting and fun stories on here recently so here are a few.

Julie is good at getting out and doing big endurance efforts, she won the 2006 World Rogaine Championships in the womens Category 2 weeks ago, 12th overall too. Julie has been a world rogaine champion for the 4 years now and will be for 2 more now, having won womens in Czechoslovakia in 2002, then winning the mixed category in Arizona USA in 2004 and now Womens again in NSW Australia in 2006. Also Julie competes in the Triple Tri solo and last year stormed through faster than all but one of the male solos, she even appeared to be catching the male solo winner last year near the end of the race.

So my Julie story for today is about the time she went out for a 30 KM training run in her build up to a solo Triple Tri. Most of us mere mortals look at the 30 KM and Training run in one sentence and are already scared of the effort involved. On this run however Julie just happened to go a different way and accidentally ended up doing a 50 KM training run that Sunday morning. How the do you accidentally do a 50 KM training run I wonder? Do you trip, almost fall, stumble a bit and suddenly realise you did an extra 20KM of running without noticing?

Alina and Tom are the core of the AROC adventure racing team, by far the most successful and capable adventure racing team from Australia. They have won the last two XPD races, finished second and were on the way to a good place the following year in Primal Quest in the US in the past few years, they also take out sprint distance adventure races around the place and have won every Geoquest they have entered as AROC. So tough and fast people both of them.

My Al Bundy store for the day is about her solo win in the Triple Tri 2 years ago, AROC had done a race in south east asia somewhere about a month before the triple tri and Alina had a fall or something and suffered an injury, a crack in a vertebra in her lower back. So with limited leg movement, some pain when using her legs and the suggestion probably being made to rest up and let it heal she entered the Triple Tri anyway, completed it solo in around 14 hours and was unable to even feel her legs at the end of it. Far tougher than the rest of us weak and wussy mortals.

As for Tom, this is a recent story. Tom and Al have recently moved out of town to a property in an area called Bywong, this is around 30 KM from Kowen Forest where the Australian 24 Hour Mountain Bike Championships were recently held. Tom and Al were both competing in the race, Tom was in a 4 person all male team, so he would be doing 5 or 6 laps in the 24 hour period probably at reasonable pace. Al rocked up to the site with gear for their camp, when someone asked where Tom was she responded, oh he wanted to run here. He had decided to do a 30 KM run to get to the start of a 24 hour race he was competing in. As anyone would do I am sure... and this was from a man who often claims he hates training and loves the fact there are so many races on every weekend, he never has to train and can just race all the time. Obviously the 30 KM run was a warm up for the 24 hour race, quite a different perspective from most of the competitors who complain the 700 metre run they have to do to get to their bikes at the start is too long.

I wonder how many other stores there are around about the people I hang out with all the time, hopefully lots more I can find.

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