Another Bad Voltage Live is in the books

Earlier this month we recorded our fourth live show. I’d like to think it’s our best so far. We covered interesting topics, had some laughs, and although we still have a ton of areas we need to improve; we’re really starting to hit our stride. The show kicked off a discussion internally, and while I can’t offer any additional information now, let’s just say that if we can execute on our plans you should definitely stay tuned. If you have any comments or suggestions on how you think we can improve the show, we’re certainly interested in what you think. Back to the live show, I’d like extend a huge thanks to: Ticketmaster for providing the venue and entertainment/refreshments, Linode for getting us there, Dell and Endless for the prizes, and SCALE for once again allowing us to be the prime entertainment for Friday night. Also a huge round of applause for Chris on an ebullient intro, and Rikki and Hannah for agreeing to be in the game show… which in my opinion came out fantastic. Full disclosure on that – I was the quiz master. If you haven’t watched the live show yet, you still have a chance to win a Ubuntu Dell Sputnik laptop.

The Bad Voltage live stage show, from SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, March 2017!

An epic time was had. Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge, live on stage, in which there was some downright unfair quizzing of Jono, a one-sh*t trumpet, the brightest suit that’s ever been seen, a machine to count eggs, Perl abuse, a hollow burrito, pies, more pies, hammer pants, the Phantom Zone, no air horns, the products of the Chevy company, and a reappearance of Bryan! As well as:

• [00:07:00] The news! Featuring the Amazon S3 outage, Snapchat being worth $33 billion, System76 bringing manufacturing in-house, and how swimming pools have dustbins full of urine in
• [00:11:30] Cloudflare had a pretty serious security flaw identified by the Project Zero team at Google, where sensitive data from all sorts of Cloudflare sites was leaked — passwords, auth tokens, and the like. What’s the deal with this sort of issue? It’s surprising how much of the internet turned out to be behind Cloudflare, and this sort of centralisation is a problem… but equally, there’s a reason we go to experts in the field and outsource services to them! So, what’s the best approach here?
• [00:20:00] Quizmaster extraordinaire Jeremy plays Much Taboo About Nothing, in which team opensource Jono and Rikki team up to battle heroic ginger team Stuart and Hannah in a game of wit, erudition, vocabulary, guesswork, and trying to not be too nasty about Ruby people. Partially successfully, depending on your attitude on rule-bending and wide appreciation of cultures…
• [00:33:20] Why are all our amazing technological advances being used to make stupid pointless gadgets that nobody should buy? Paper towel dispensers that magically detect your hand movement and then still dispense a bit of brown paper to dry your hands on; amazing iPad-based payment systems which still require you to sign your name with your finger; endless pointless stupid Internet of Things devices. Stuart rants, and Jono and Jeremy respond with various degrees of defence or agreement as to where we’re going and what to do about incredible technology put to wasteful ends
• [00:43:00] Ig-NOT — it’s like the Ignite talk series, but… not. The presenters each do a talk, on an unknown subject chosen by the audience, using unseen images suggested by the community and the other presenters. And… well, see how they get on. Featuring some properly unkind choices, a brief and magnanimous appearance by Bryan, and a very weird old guy with an axe…

–jeremy