IceArdor's Blog

This entry is also posted on the Campus Crew blog

With the conclusion of the United States Campus Tour, I wanted to report about the great success the Opera team had. Lawrence Eng, Anne van Kesteren, and Jason Chartrand came to Cal Poly after a tiring week of tours. A comfortable crowd of Poly students were drawn to the hour-long tech talk. Lawrence showed us how Opera flips into medium- and small-screen rendering as the page width is reduced.

Swag included Opera beer koozies and Moods of Norway t-shirts.

We hung out at the computer science lab immediately afterward. These three guys were a lot of fun to talk with. Since my cell phone is Verizon (nasty BREW instead of Java platform), I asked to see the power of Opera Mini on Jason's phone. I was expecting painfully slow internet on his phone, but instead discovered browsing was not much slower than my fiber optic internet at home. I remember watching an interview with Charles McCathieNevile at a tech conference, and at the time, javascript and flash hadn't been implemented in Opera Mini. Naturally, the first site I went to was YouTube. It worked flawlessly. Oops. Opera Mini 4.2 was an internal release only. I promised to keep my little discovery a secret about the next version of Opera Mini until the release of 4.2 Beta.

But the highlight of the day was the meetup that evening...

I arrived at The Shack shortly before Jason, Anne, Lawrence, and a dozen students showed up. Opera paid for the dinner, which consisted of a couple appetizer plates, some damn good burgers, fries, onion rings, drinks, and beer. Anne tried root beer for the first time (I don't think he cared for it much).

I talked with Lawrence about how improves the Opera Experience. The two hour conversation was just the tip of the iceberg. We talked about Opera's video campaigns and promotional events its held, and Lawrence's piece of the equation to everything that happens at Opera Software. Opera really wants to know its users and how its users use Opera. The title Product Research Manager doesn't say how busy this guy is.

Anne is a cool guy. His laptop fashioned a "So fast you'll crap in your pants" Opera sticker, and his slideshow presentation was done in Opera Show. Leet. He reverse engineers Trident, Gecko, and WebKit so that you don't have to write five versions of your webpage. Apparently people from the Netherlands like insanely strong mints, which a couple of us tried.

After over a month of organizing the Cal Poly campus tour with Jason and Cal Poly's ACM president Travis Dean, I finally got to meet Jason, one of Opera's marketing interns. Jason is Canadian, and as expected, likes his hockey. After dying from baseball boredom, we got the sports bar staff to change the channel on one of their oversized televisions to that night's hockey game.

At 7:30pm, the guys headed back to Mountain View in their minivan. In all, the US tour in whole was a great success thanks to Opera's talented and friendly team. And though we didn't get a special appearance from Jon von Tetzchner like the lucky ducks at SF State and Stanford, the Opera campus tour will be one of my best college experiences. If Opera ever comes to your town, grab as many friends as you can and have the time of your life.

Thanks US Tour Team and Opera!

PS, Opera wants your Widgets!

I'm so excited that Cal Poly's coming to campus through its worldwide education tour. I'm sure it will be very interesting to hear what Opera has to say about the future of the web. Seeing how much has changed in the past 10 years technology-wise, I think we can expect rapid change in a modest 5-10 years. There will be a completely new computer paradigm. Your cell phone is now more powerful than computers were a decade ago--they have more processing power, memory, and some with superior graphics. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Opera is more aware about the technological future than Microsoft or Mozilla, and that's why I want to hear what they have to say.

If you're a Cal Poly student, save the date! It's October 30th. Check back at Opera University Tours for the location and time of the event. If you are one of the lucky students to have Opera visiting your campus, I hope you find time to go. Opera wants you to see their vision of the technological future. Psst, there's free swag.

See the updated post with time and location: Opera Opera Opera! Tech talk at Cal Poly!