Ireland

Posted byRandall 121 Comments on Ireland

I will be in Ireland this Saturday, at SkyCon at the University of Limerick. I’m guessing they found me through my LimerickDB project, which may not be what they think it is. Since they rejected my original idea for a talk, which was based on John Cage’s 4’33” I will be talking about doing internet comics for a living, and related subjects such as frozen pizzas and MarioKart.

My apologies to everyone who’s extended a speaking/convention invitation who I didn’t get back to — the answer is usually ‘no, thank you’, but I’m too meek to say so (which is probably part of why my email piles up so badly). I love traveling and talking to people all day, but it’s so exhausting that I only do a couple of them a year.

121 replies on “Ireland”

  2. Excellent talk, hopefully we’ll see you again (in Limerick :P) next year 🙂

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  3. someone mentioned the cake in the comments. i am a sucker for public appreciation. 😀

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  5. Thanks for coming to talk to us all Randall! It was fantastic to meet you and it was a most excellent talk! I hope you had a good time in Limerick and it was be awesome if you would come to speak to us again sometime!

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  8. @bob the whole talk was recorded, so hopefully should be going up on the skycon website soon… soon may be a relative term

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  9. Pingback: Microsoft Ireland Blog : SkyCon – Recap

  10. Thanks so much for coming Randall, hope you enjoyed your stay and the lack of Hulu didn’t make the experience too miserable. I loved that your talk was based so much on responses to the audience instead of just a rehearsed speech.

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  11. Awesome talk (well, more of an interaction really, which made it all the awesomer).

    Hope you had a good trip and enjoyed the Guinness and the X-cake-CD! Definitely looking forward to seeing you on these shores again, should you choose to revisit.

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  12. I just heard about john cages’ “4 minutes 33 seconds”, so I can say for the first time: Randall get out of my head!

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  14. the nicest part was afterwards when a guy from Dublin was pwned. I’ll paraphrase the conversation:
    Dublinguy “how come you didn’t come to Dublin?”
    Randall “Because you fuckers didn’t invite me”
    Marvelous. Well done to UL Skynet, and burn every other Irish person in the comments section whinging about Randall not coming to Dublin/Cork/Ballygobackwards.

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  17. I had to do a project on contemporary classical composers. I played that song. and then a video of it. Then I tried to get a live re-enactment. It was a very good presentation. I found a score to that once. It was like three pages. It provided lots of valuable info about cage. Then it said tacet solo for whole band. Does he get paid royalties for each playing of it?

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  19. You should try watching Manon de Boer’s short film TWO TIMES 4’33”. This piece of art describes Cage’s intention better than any boring 90-minute documentary could do. I saw it at last year’s International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. Oh, and by the way:

    Cage once wrote a piece that was quiet
    But it nevertheless caused a riot
    You should hear it a lot
    On your tiny iPod
    It is not DRM’d, so just buy it!

    PS: That captcha know my birth year, creepy!

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  20. Damn it Randall, how could you do this to me? Why did I only just find out now? WHY?
    If I get some people from TCD to pool our moneys, will you come to Dublin?

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  22. A little late in the day to be saying, but I couldn’t have thought of a better way to spend Valentine’s day in Limerick. Thanks for coming to the conference.

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  24. I was in hospital over Valentines weekend, getting poked with needles. Last Friday I saw a sign outside one of the computer labs, informing me that the conference was on…..
    I wept bitter tears through my class, the lecturer was touched, he believed that he finally crushed a students shabby soul.

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  26. I understood the 4’33” joke (thanks to academic decathlon) without having to research it! All nerdiness seems to have a connection with another nerdy entity… Maybe thats what the strings in string theory are connecting 0_o

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  27. My officemate is from Ireland.

    I don’t really have anything to say, but perhaps other xkcd-ers can sympathize with my desire that Randall’s last two blag entries each have 77 comments.

    (if only this were FF7..)
    (and the way-back-machine took minute-by-minute snapshots…)

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  30. Pingback: joej’s blog » Blog Archive » Skycon ‘09 follow-up

  34. Re John Cage

    When this work was first ‘performed’ apparently one critic said: I look forward to a much longer work from this composer.

    Love your site: I’m sick of sites telling people about how to be more successful the internet by ‘appealing’ to friggin’ Search Engines: Mamma Mia!! And as a consequence writing devolving into a series of tenuously linked keywords.

    Excellent stuff!

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  35. Oh! I found this on the project!

    #81
    Theres a comic called XKCD see
    The humor does oh so amuse me
    So I check it all week
    The updates are meek
    But when they come; oh how they please me!

    — Chad S.

    It’s almost good.

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  36. I found this!

    #81
    Theres a comic called XKCD see
    The humor does oh so amuse me
    So I check it all week
    The updates are meek
    But when they come; oh how they please me!

    — Chad S.

    It’s almost good.

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  37. And further, this one!

    #107
    See that lighthouse beam in the sky
    That guides yonder ships going by?
    My friend shines that beam;
    She’s living her dream.
    I’m in grad school. I still don’t know why.

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  38. I sir, would like to attend your talk on mariokart.
    Please send me further details, or a vodcast.

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  39. Hope you had a good trip and enjoyed the Guinness and the X-cake-CD! Definitely looking forward to seeing you on these shores again, should you choose to revisit.

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  45. roodie – responsible for the yummy X-Cake-CD Terran looking after the guests TrustTommy’s summary Alexia has videos of Randall’s talk and the giggling crowd Martha Rotter’s recap Randall also mentioned that he was coming

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