For podcast hosts out there that attend conferences, especially those that only do Face-to-Face interviews like us, I’d so recommend making the most of these moments.

You get to speak to people you wouldn’t normally come in contact with, plus you get to ride on the coat-tails of the buzz that the conference creates. 

Craig and I have experienced this recently attending Open Source Developers Conference and YOW, recording for our podcast Coding By Numbers. We recorded 3 at OSDC and 2 at YOW, and so far they are own highest downloaded episodes. 

The 3 from OSDC are:

• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-31-perl.html
• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-32-open.html
• http://www.codingbynumbers.com/2011/12/coding-by-numbers-episode-33-michael.html

Just a few tips from me:

1. Get the organiser’s permission. You probably don’t need it, but it’s always polite to do so. It also helps with number 2
2. Ask the organisers if there is a quiet room you can use, they usually have a breakout rooms or unused conference rooms that you can loan for an hour
3. Make contact with your interviewees early in the conference and try and do the interview after their talk so they are in that euphoric post talk mood!
4. Make sure your interviewees understand when the podcast will go out and what the licence on it is. Also tell them if you are going to edit or not (we don’t)
5. Most importantly - use social media and buzz to your advantage. If people are raving about a particular speaker that you are going to interview (in our case this was Mike Lee at Yow) then make sure people know about it and give them the link. When you finally post the show, make sure you use the conference hashtag and follow up with the people that you originally talked about. They will be your evangelists.

We are pleased to announce that the CFP for gr8confau is now open. Gr8 Conference Australia will be held on 15th November 2011 at ANU (Australian National University), Canberra

As this is our first time running the conference in Australia, it will be run as a mini-conf of Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) 2011 which runs for the entire week from 14th -18th November. To attend the gr8 conference you will need to have a ticket for OSDC (which is very reasonably priced) or pay a small fee (expected to be around $50) for a miniconf ticket. We’d strongly encourage you to buy a full ticket for OSDC though - it’s a great conference and very good value.

We’ll have a proper landing page on the gr8conf website soon, but for the moment this blog post should suffice to get things rolling.

So, if you have a presentation you would like to make on Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Gaelyk, Gpars or any other technology based on Groovy - please forward your submission to:

australia@gr8conf.org

This part is very important, please include in your email:

• Your Name
• Bio (a bit about yourself)
• Twitter name (if you have one)
• Title of Talk
• Talk Abstract
• Length of talk: 20min + 5 min Q&A, 45min + 10min Q&A or feel free to suggest another format (eg. longer tutorial)

Look forward to hearing from you. 

Your gr8confau organisers,

• Craig Aspinall
• Glen Smith
• Paul King
• Steve Dalton

Ever since about 2005 I’ve only worked 4 days (or less) a week. It’s only in the last year I’ve had to go back to 5.

When I worked 4 - I LOVED my 5th day off… it’s great being able to get all those odd jobs done. You know - those things that either spoil your weekend (waiting in queues) or you end up trying to squeeze them in during your lunch hour or the working day as they are only weekday things.

Anyway, this week I managed to to get a “5th day” again. There was a lot of context switching (I changed my clothes 4 times which gave me a clue) - but it didn’t seem to slow me down too much. 

All up I managed to (in this order):

• Spend a couple of hours in the garden (building a new garden bed) - great start to the day while it’s cool.
• <clothes change>
• Have a decent swim for the first time in a while
• Drop the kids at kindy and actually have time to stay and play with them for a bit
• Switch my car insurance (procrastinating on this all week)
• Freecycle a load of garden stuff to a friend and to the kindy
• Give away a whole load of clothes and things to charity
• <clothes change>
• Meet up with Gold Coast Tourism people about OSDC proposal (yay - this was very exciting)
• <clothes change>
• Down to the Broadwater parklands to do photos and a test drive of the Zigo with the Gold Coast Bulletin - exhausting, but fun.
• Picked up kids and spent a while playing and chatting to the kindy teachers (I’m usually in and out)
• Played with the kids on the bikes in the street for a while, actually had time to chat with the neighbours!

Despite the busyness - it was a nice day.

The 5th day is awesome. I wonder sometimes, if we all worked only 4 days a week would we be more productive at work in our 4 days? We wouldn’t have all the clutter hanging over our heads and we could concentrate on just having fun on the weekends and not spending the whole time on jobs. Would love to see some studies on this - personally, I reckon you would recover the lost day of work though better focus & less stress.