pre-pycon stand up and blurt things out in a crowd practice

Tonight, the Python Cambridge Meetup held a practice run for three pycon talks (six of them are from locals, there will be another session 2010-02-03 or thereabouts.)  I'll get pictures up on flickr tomorrow.  I learned a number of interesting things:

• Astronomy has gone enthusiastically for open source.  "We have far more data than grad students, here, have some terabytes!"
• People are actively looking for those who "get" testing and python ("If you think you could have given the talk Ned just gave - I want to hire you" is a direct quote from someone at a startup out in the burbs.)

• I am *not* taking the DSLR to Atlanta.  Granted it will be a larger space, but mirror-flip is *loud* and the lack of auto-focus when using live-view makes it much harder than it should be to shoot from the audience.  The SX10IS is just a much better tool, especially given that the light may be *poor* but it won't be *absent*, plus it does video.  The DSLR wins on speed-to-shot, which is great for bird stalking, but pretty useless in a conference venue.

Oh, and the title? Ned asked for python adoption stories, and I have a pretty good one, and I'd already gotten up and asked people for permission to take their pictures...

(Also, in keeping with not putting *too* much metablog mechanics in here - it turns out that if you're "low on memory" on a G1, you can't receive inbound SMSes - so although it was shiny and didn't lose any of my hard-fought typing, it's eating at least 4M of storage that I would *rather* be using on the next rev of ASE (r17) which finally has UI object support from python.  So this is back to being written in emacs on the big thinkpad... and due to some roving internet outages, *still* getting posted after midnight...)