Boring Conference Still Vows: We Will Not Rock You 42
An anonymous reader writes "The Boring 2012 Conference, the celebration of unexciting things served with dry British humor, now belongs to the wastepaper basket of history. Correspondents at the third annual London conference report that speakers covered a range of such dull topics as supermarket self-service checkouts; a photographic survey of results produced by breakfast toasters; a web site tracking the physical heights of celebrities; and the use of Google Maps to the chart the location of IBM cash registers around London." Funny thing is, the talks described actually sound fascinating.
Big fan of irony here (Score:2)
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Boring?
Was there a presentation on tungsten-carbide drills? I love tungsten-carbide drills.
" the talks described actually sound fascinating" (Score:2)
"Funny thing is, the talks described actually sound fascinating".
How would you know that?
Re:" the talks described actually sound fascinatin (Score:5, Insightful)
"Funny thing is, the talks described actually sound fascinating".
How would you know that?
They sound like extremely stereotypical technology demonstrators. So I wanna show off my new statistical analysis / HBASE backend /AJAX presentation / wiimote controlled scala classes, but I've got no data at work that's non-proprietary to share with the world, so you get ... um ... a database of movie star height, yeah thats it.. True, they could be "ancient" technology that's not really new anymore, or they could be poorly done demonstrations, but optimistically they could be pretty interesting. Or at least good for a laugh (ha ha ha I was doing that back in 2008, etc)
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I think you're missing the point (disclaimer: I did not attend). The talks were on subjects that were absurdly mundane, and yet the speakers managed to become engrossed in the details and (in the successful talks) were able to convey that interest to the audience, which was willing to suspend judgement. And everyone enjoying a good laugh on themselves for sitting patiently through such "boring" presentations. It's like being roped into a board game at a party which sounds really lame, and ending up getti
misread (Score:5, Funny)
I accidentally misread "a photographic survey" as "pornographic survey" and for a fraction of a second this article became more interesting.
Then I re-read it and the feeling subsided.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Premature (Score:1)
Ha!! Premature satisfaction!
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Wait until you read (Score:4, Funny)
my 677 page summary of proceedings — it's in point 8 Times New Roman, three columns to the A5 page.
Re:Wait until you read (Score:5, Funny)
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Yawn! (Score:2)
If news was plural it would have an apo'strophe (Score:2)
News are singular. Or possibly uncountable, which is close enough for the likes of you.
If an exploit is found on IBM cash registers . . . (Score:3)
. . . that location information of them might be useful . . . and profitable.
Wikipedia. (Score:1)
Why the fuck doesn't Wikipedia include the heights of celebrities? Afraid of the backlash when the world realizes how short all the men are?
I want my money back! (Score:1)
It was interesting.
Wait, it wasn't an ichnology conference? (Score:1)
These guys [wiley.com] should have presented their paper at it.
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Now show farting and wrestling jokes on the other hand .......
How can you have a boring conference in London? (Score:2)
I'll note that there is also a Boring, Maryland northwest of Baltimore (The City That Breeds [citythatbreeds.com]). However, the proximity of DC means that something interesting could happen. For example, a hardcopy of ObamaCare could fall on y
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I work in the POS industy (Score:1)
Made me laugh (Score:2)
"Waiting for more than half an hour in the November cold to get in, one conferencegoer wondered aloud whether the surprise queue was what it seemed. "Maybe it just goes on and on and at 5pm they'll let us out the other side?" he mused. "That would be really boring." "
Lol
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? (Score:3)
Please tell me Ben Stein narrated the slideshow of toasted bread pictures.
You Want Boring? (Score:2)
Fifteen years ago I worked in I.T. Support at a company making paper products. One of the salesmen was quite proud of his 120 slide Powerpoint presentation on toilet paper.
Ganty
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That sounds quite interesting - more interesting than showing it on a normal screen, at least...
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you laugh, but there is a lot of science in making toilet paper, i can easily see 120 slides in a presentation on the topic.