I'm at Gnomedex today and tomorrow, I thought I'd keep track of my semi-raw thoughts.
Hmm, is that a 12 foot poster of his cartoon likeness he's talking in front of? That takes a certain something. I'm reserving judgement.
He spoke at HOPE, too bad I only made it to H2K.
What's really important these days? It's easy to get caught up in the mercantile and personal, but we're at a pretty unique place in history, and future generations are going to look back and wonder what us masses were doing day-to-day. I know I did when reading about the Alien and Sedition Acts.
It's tough to talk about this stuff without sounding a bit crazy, so why not embrace it? I certainly like how he connects open source with open spying, open spectrum, open money, etc. Plus he used the phrase "syphalitic whore having sex with a leper" to describe the quality of closed source corporate software (Microsoft or Google I think).
On the other hand, he's the #1 non-fiction reviewer on Amazon and uses PowerPoint.
The idea of retrospective impeachments is interesting. He's certainly willing to attack pretty much everybody.
Turns out I sat down next to the laptop that the conference organizers are using, and Chris Prillo just sat down next to me- I guess I should scroll that thing about the giant poster off my screen.
Great talk, funny, engaging, and enjoyable.
Oh, this is the getafirstlife.com guy, now I'm impressed.
He lives in Malta? Okay, I'm actually impressed. Let's see where he's going with this. No thesis slide yet.
Looks like he's also struggling with how to do greater good in the world. Combined with living in Malta, sounds like a pretty good life.
He's talking about how to compare different kinds of volunteer work objectively, but I find myself just reading about how he decided to go live in Malta for six months on his blog instead.
The best type of charity work we can do is to build infrastructure and institutions for future assistance. Makes sense. I like the kid-powered water pump.
Cheesy good quote: "be the best ancestor you can be"- some nice implications, although fundamentally selfish (but maybe that's a good thing).
An audience vote chooses Evangelism as the topic, and Guy clarifies that he was actually the second of the original Apple Evangelists.
Meaning, Mantra - could I come up with these for all of my projects?
Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Elegant, Emotive - DICEE; he has some great examples, but I think that's too many elements.
Side note- I like the word dicey, I think we should work to give it more positive connotations.
Good word: bozosity
"Don't worry, be crappy"
Great lunch, good friendly conversations. I'm very impressed with the audience.
I caught the end of something called Bad Sinatra that seemed to be Robert Scoble and a panel. I'll need to figure out what that was sometime.
Got a chance to say hi to Justin beforehand, he came in totally unprepared, but I'm sure he'll be fine.
The internet is sucking, it's getting harder and harder to push these updates out. I assume that's because everybody is trying to stream justin.tv at once, hopefully it'll settle down later.
Justin's doing great, it's too bad his EVDO isn't working indoors, but it looks like everybody normally on justin.tv switched from his live feed over to the gnomedex live feed for the duration.
Darren Barefoot sat down near me during Justin's talk, so I got a chance to ask him more about Malta. His problems have mainly been with phone service (he really wants GrandCentral- I'm on the beta also, I hope they hurry up and scale it out), although I think there are some tax implications to making it too public, certainly if you got big.
I guess I had EU visa information mixed up- he says you can stay for three months at a time if you leave for a few days. I thought you could only do three months every year or something.
Interesting talk on computing for older people. This is something my father has been harping on for years. There's definitely a big market out there for the right products, but it's a tough problem that doesn't have a lot of sex appeal.
Also the Internet got bad again, so much for it being one of Gnomedex's central tenets.
http://immersionactive.com/carolsweb
She hadn't seen an iPhone before, so we got to witness her trying to use one for the first time. She was incredibly excited until she got to the keyboard, then she declared that she (and other old people) would never use it.
Apparently a last minute replacement for somebody who was in a Veronica Mars commercial? Also, her laptop's battery had to be popped out to get Powerpoint to show up. Poor.
Online objectification, sweet topic. She's worried about losing control of our online images, histories, etc. Occaisionally in a google search for something involving my name, I get really old embarassing Usenet or mailing-list posts from high school, so I hear where she's coming from.
I also enjoy the attention that the creepy huge poster of Chris is getting.
Lots of people are telling stories of privacy invasion, both premeditated and otherwise.
Also at the end there was a brief slideshow of Chris Pirillio nude. I wish I were kidding.
The internet is being polluted and abused.
After many slides about the evolution of spam (email, blog, search, etc), hecklers in the back yelled out "Conference Spam!" when he started introducing his new anti-spam company. Good stuff.
Later he called Nick Denton a lying sack. Basically it was a mud-slinging talk, but fun.
Definitely rigged.
(Random note: people were cheering everytime Canada was
mentioned. That's the sign of a country with self-esteem problems.)
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