Moolies

Last day in Californiyay

Plane and sleeping horror to come tomorrow.

What not to do - no, scratch that. What to do with a credit card and an afternoon spare. Get the 180 from San Jose Civic Centre to Freemont, then get the Richmond Bart to Berkeley (misnamed as "Downtown Berkeley" on the maps). Get off, buy cup of peppermint tea to go at the coffee shop on the way, before finding "Comic Relief". Say hi to Rory the Manager with a wonky tooth and spending nigh on $175 on comics and books.

(Sob) what have they done to me, these bloody people! I can't be let near anywhere selling dead wood media! Curses. So, am I going to be a biiitttt geeky and give you the run down of the books? Well - sort of.

More leftovers from last week

Cory's photos including one of me sans surname (I don't have a "brand name", that's my trouble). Luckily the picture is so far off, it doesn't show my *extreme exhaustion* at that point. Meanwhile, you can see the somewhat mad array of people who went to Dan's party. Doc! Cantor! Etc! A whole slew of people who are quite literally not known in any other context.

In other news, everything seems to be outgoing reasonably well in the down-there run of things (mostly due to finding ways I could get hold of fruit at the otherwise fruit-free hotel experience).

Other photos, I forgot to put the ones from Sunday up in here, I'll go back and put the link in later on the day. It isn't Prosidio park it's some other park with lots of "o"s in.

Now I am at Norbert et al's having a very chilled out Saturday night. Which is exactly what is needed. More geeks are here but god knows who they are! A book reading for a book I didn't have a chance to get should be going ahead, but it looks like we might all go for a meal instead (yay! back to the Ethiopian restaurant!).

Oh yes - clash of cultures. We were discussing American paper shopping bags at the conf on Friday. I invoked two images / sounds from films: the Odd Couple soundtrack and straining spaghetti through a tennis racquet - you know that, right? The Apartment, right????? I mean - why did literally no one in my group know what I was talking about! Well. Strange for me, anyway. I think I live with films in my head far too much. It does remind me of that absolutely awful old television series where the guy lived with '50's TV in his head.

Funny thing last night

So I'm walking down the road with two of the loveliest people. Phil and Matt Webb (I have to say his surname because he's not 'Jones'). And we're being very silly and giggly about Micro-Celebrities which is a nonsense term for people... er, who are well known in this circle but not outside it - but the miracle of the interweb makes them seem sooo much more important. Ahem. Which was part of the humour of it. Phil was namechecked quite heavily in Clay's Keynote this morning so we were (obviously, because we're from London) taking the piss out of him, and it all got very silly.

So we go to an Ethiopian restaurant to eat - very nice but not very hot - and in walk 4 geeks. We mildly laugh about the fact that we should be wearing our nametags, and then Matt notices as we leave that one of them was - gasp! Justin Hall!

So we tried to goggle through the window at him, being very stupid. Hilariously, given the meaning of all this micro-celebrity shit, I was telling this story to Jones and JPC today and - brilliantly, neither of them knew who Justin Hall was. Which was perfect.

I have to say, despite the knackeredness and being sick on Saturday, it has been such extraordinary fun hanging out with my mates for days and calling it work. So good to be around people for whom I have so much more than just affection.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world...

From Ambiguous, Guantanamo Bay misery. 13 year old children being held in single cell confinement.

I live in a western world completely unable to accept it's own inhumanity.

Friday

So we're sitting waiting for Matt and James to start their talk on BBCness - we're missing a talk on Smart Dust and Robot flies to do some cheerleading. The tech isn't working at the moment so no slides! Horror!

James is quite quiet - ah, they've sorted all that out now. Poor bastards! This is painful!

So JPC's talking about why people could be turned off by politics. A guy in the audience has suggested distributing the slides now and letting people see them on their own computers. Good idea in theory, however the slides are absolutely massive apparently.

Matt, bless him, is holding great swathes of microphone lead in one hand to help him focus and not go off in to a spiral of bleh.

Ahhh.... now it works. Matt should really shut up for a minute because there are 4 people trying to work out the gizmo stuff at the desk at the front.

"it's quite big and it's hard". That is not something to say on the stage given that it sounds like a punchline.

"We make ourselves stupid in order to make the computer software seem smart". Shouldn't the software seem easy, not smart?

Ok. Notes on the next one regarding Groups are in the extended section. "What groups will be"

Games and Social interaction afterwards.

Last one of the day

Schools and social software. My back is absolutely killing me. Sitting down almost constantly all day indoors is so far from being healthy, it's ridiculous.

....and on, and on, and on

the network was buggered a wee while ago so I couldn't dump the last session notes on Chandler up at the time. Like it fuckin' matters! I keep almost being semi-public with this diary/blog thing which I obviously - duh, should not do.

It was so nice talking to D&Q yesterday without having to worry about what I was saying.

Anyway - notes coming up in the extended bit for Chandler and also the Game playing social software notes:

Thursday talks

Sitting in listening to Tom Coates, bless 'im, blah-ing on about UMS conversations. It's a bit strange given that I use it all the time. He's not really saying anything other than describing it. He's not talking about the philosophy of it that much.

Aaanyway, so keynotes for today were: Alan Kay, who was in turn lovely but also slightly underwhelming to me (but not to other people), Kevin Lynch from Macromedia (who I mostly missed to be honest, I was busy working - but Ian and Vinny from work will have written a bunch of notes on it) and Mr Shirky, the ringmaster (haha).

So various notes and musings are in the extended section:

Thursday blah

Sooooo....

Yes. Social software BoF.

Meanwhile...

Constipation.

Warning - foulness in discussion is to be expected.

Oh! Before I get in to that natural-function-ness, Quinn, Dan and Ada came in from the sticks. Ada is gorgeous. I had a lovely few minutes stroking her head. Although ultra-careful Quinn might not appreciate that! Erk.