The plans for the upcoming Strange Loop conference are ramping up! The conference is just 6 weeks away and there are lots of things going on. If you’ve been procrastinating on signing up, now is the time. Next Friday is the last day for $110 registration and then it goes up to $130 until the conference, so register now! Right now there are about 200 people registered but still plenty of room for more. If you can’t scrape together $110, you might also check out the call for volunteers to help out at the conference – a few more people are needed and you get free admission (but less flexibility to see everything).

If you’d like to promote or mention Strange Loop to your friends or co-workers, check out this 1 page info sheet in PDF or JPG form.

Strange Passions

If you’ve already signed up for the conference, you can submit talks to the Strange Passions track right now! Strange Passions is a fairly unique part of Strange Loop where conference attendees submit short 15-minute non-technical talks. Then other attendees vote on their favorites and the top vote-getters are chosen to present in two sessions at the conference. The winner of each session by crowd favorite will receive their very own Klein Bottle! That’s right – Strange Loop is the only conference to award immersed, boundary-free, nonorientable, one-sided surfaces as prizes.

If you’re attending, please consider submitting a passion talk soon so we can get that process under way – so far it’s been slow.

T-shirts

Rather than build the cost of a t-shirt into the cost of registration for every attendee, I chose instead to make the registration price low and allow you to buy a t-shirt if you want one. I also decided to hold a design contest for the t-shirts so the shirt actually was something you might possibly want to wear.

The contest is currently in progress! You can see the current options right now (5-stars are ones I’m considering as candidates) and feel free to comment here if you have a favorite – I’m listening. I can only award one winner in the contest by their rules but I will likely try to license 2-3 other designs and make them available as well.

Web site

I continue to hack away on the conference web site as I have time. Keep coming back and you’ll see something new. Watch the blog for more frequent news and announcements. Talk on the forums about t-shirts, strange passions, travel, or whatever you want. Check out the full session list or rate the Strange Passion talks.

See you at the show…