Rocking out at MXUG
For a while, Melbourne has been running MXUG, the Melbourne X Users Group, where X is a technology you're interested in. It has a nice format: 15 minute talks, timed, with five minutes for questions. Then beer, pizza, lightning talks, and a trip down to the pub.

Despite me apparently living in Melbourne, I've never attended a MXUG meeting, but I'd been hearing good reports about them. Apparently one can become a speaker just by adding themselves to the speakers list (which is editable by members), and so I aggressively volunteered to give my (still formative) talk on facebook privacy.

The talk went really well. The audience was warm, interactive, and laughed at all my jokes, even the really lame ones. Since I judge my self-worth on the size and enthusiasm of my audience, I decided that I really liked MXUG. Normally, that would be enough for me to call the night a success.

However enough people asked me about how I used my wiimote as a presentation device, so I volunteered for one of the five minute lightning talks. I had no slides. I did no preparation. I spent all the time I'd normally be working on my talk eating pizza, drinking beer, and talking to MXUG members.

So I was especially happy when I showed off how to use Xwii to enable a tilt mouse, and as a presentation device. I then showed off how I could use the wiimote to control my music player, and sung a few bars from "I've got a feeling" from Buffy on stage. That would normally be enough to count the night as doubly-awesome, but oh no! It gets better.

My last Xwii profile showed how I can hook into a Guitar Hero controller, "but I don't have one of those here, so I can't show you". Sure enough, someone produces a guitar out of nowhere. A few seconds to pair it with my machine, a few more seconds to start up Frets on Fire, and I am rocking out on stage in front of a cheering crowd of 50 people.

I then got to sit back down in the audience, and read about my exploits on twitter. ;)

That, ladies and gentlemen, was my thrice-awesome night at MXUG.