[PyAR2] pyArkansas Update

[Greg Lindstrom]

Another 168 hours and, once again, I really can't believe the response we
are getting for the conference.

We have a moin (fancy wiki) up and running and I have some content on it.
There has been some discussion of moving the start time to 9:00 to make it a
little easier on our out of town guests (and it looks like we will have a
lot of them).

We have received word from lots of people about talks, but we still need
more!  Dr. Gabriel Ferrer would like to give a talk on Real-Time Image
Processing using Cython, Numpy and PyGame.  It's a 30-minute talk and is
perfect for "what can do actually do with Python"?  These are the kind of
talks that show people Python is more than just a "toy".  I'll work more on
the schedule this week, but we need more talks!

I'll be getting some text to Dr. Hu at UCA so he can get word out to our
High Schools.  I figured a letter from UCA would get more attention than a
letter from Yours Truly.  I hope to get that to him by Monday and he was
gracious enough to take it on.  Dr. Burch is sending word out to Arkansas
Colleges and Universities.  How can we get work out to professional
programmers?  Anyone have a contact at Acxiom?  HP?  Where else?

I wrote Conway Corporation's "Living Local".  Does anyone want to contact
newspapers and TV stations?  How about KARN (maybe we could get a slot on
their morning or arternoon shows!)?  Who else can help us get the word out?
What about public access channels at UCA (or in *your* area :-)?

We will have a mountain of books and things to give away.  O'Reilly has
donated 15 ebooks (this is cool because the winners can choose the book they
want) and some swag.  Manning Publishing is sending books (and swag).  No
Starch Press is sending books (and swag).  Wingware has given us 2 licenses
for their professional IDE (which runs on 3 different operating systems) and
swag.  ActiveState has donated one of their Komodo Editors (and swag).  I
have written Barnes and Noble asking if they would donate a Nook but have
not heard back.  We will go with the raffle ticket system that worked last
year, but we will do it just a little differently (an idea I got from our
friends at pyTexas).  We will give people a short registration form.  When
they return it we will give them their raffle tickets and record their
ticket numbers on their form.  If we keep the forms in order, we can match
the ticket number with their name (I think we will still do the "double"
tickets where they keep a stub, though).

I have asked Dr. Hu about getting temporary Internet access for attendees.
What we would do is, at registration, ask if the attendee would like
access.  We would have half-sheets of paper with individual
usernames/passwords along with an id number.  We record their id number on
the registration form and then give ti to them so they have instructions.
It's a bit of work and was nice at pyTexas and pyOhio, but certainly is not
a requirement for people to have a good day.

As far as state-wide Python communication, I could have a mailing list set
up, arkansas at python.org or is there another means of communications that
would work better (facebook?)?

I'll have more, later.  Please consider submitting a talk proposal (30 or 60
minute)!

* Logging
* Web topics
* Sphinx
* File Access (reading/writing)
* Any "Intermediate" topic
* Cool Applications

--greg
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