I signed up for Redline because Brian was a big name speaker and I thought he'd have lots of meaningful stuff to say. It's not that I didn't get much out of his messages but it was much akin to watching those infomercials on TV late at night when all you can remember is a particular phrase that's repeated ad nauseum to try hammer a point home.
Mark, on the other hand, was an absolutely phenomenal speaker! His solid Bible-based teaching was interspersed with entertaining personal anecdotes and practical examples of how to apply to it to my own life.
The conference had an activity time/break for ~45min-1hr between sessions and there was finger-food served [in the form of party pies, mini-sausage rolls, samosas (?), and biscotti for sweets]. Being a blokey conference the activities available were naturally very macho. There was a giant jolly-jumper [okay, so the name sounds a little girly, but that's what they called in on the day...] which was essentially a huge rubber band fastened to a harness and arms, enabling the person strapped in to leap several metres into the air and perform aerial acrobatics. Next to this was a rock-climbing pillar - nothing special to report there. Finally, and this was the most interesting and bizzare, was 2 stripped out cars [a Ford and Holden respectively - sans engine and other flammable bits] sitting in the car-park. Interested individuals were given a pre-determined number of strikes, presumably to show their manliness/vent anger from a bad week at work (?), to damage the car as much as they can. There appeared to be no limit as to the number of times you could head to the back of the line after your turn. It was really very comical at times as you'd get these lanky and awkward teenagers/"men" attempting to wield a sledgehammer and attempt to partially destroy the car before them. The sledgehammer's shaft/next looked to be thicker than some of the guys' legs who stood up there trying to smash cars into oblivion.
I wish I had a camera and then you'd be able to see what sort of madness these people got up to but, alas, I forgot to bring it with me on the day. :(
Geek alert: I'm excited as this past weekend Blizzard Entertainment, one of the greatest games companies of all time, announced that Starcraft 2 was in development. No release date has been published but from what I've seen so far, it's pretty freakin' cool! =D It's been almost 10 years since the original game was released and it's about time they got to making the sequel! ;)
