foo camp

I was sittin' in a breakfast room in Allentown, Pennsylvania,
six o'clock in the morning, got up too early, it was a terrible mistake...
sittin' there face-to-face with a 75 cent glass of orange juice
about as big as my finger and a bowl of horribly foreshortened cornflakes,
and I said to myself: "This is the life!" . . .
Frank Zappa
"200 years old"

A lot of story telling. A night of caffeine, whiskey, homebrew beer, pizza, and vodka made on the conference site. Ingesting enough of each to hit that sweet spot of drunk and wired. 2am. Giving a talk at 10am. Having Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly show up, and easily answering their questions, which made me realize that perhaps I'm not just getting by on looks alone.

Making Bunnie Huang eat some caffeine powder. Telling Howard Rheingold how to hack fortune cookies. Bumping into an old college buddy, and wondering if our beloved timewaster, the MIT Yearbook, actually still used home-made photo chemicals, or if everything has turned to bits and quark (files).

There were a lot of good talks. The computer museum guy did 60 years of computer marketing in 45 minutes, and updated a quote from Marshall McLuhan: The global village blogosphere is where people care way too deeply about each other's business.

(That's poorly-remembered, forgive me. I think McLuhan was talking about radio, originally.)

There were also deeply held opinions waved in each others' faces, about DRM and BitTorrent, mostly.

Someone was showing a genetic algorithm search agent, much to the annoyance of several other people in the room who could not resist explaining just how much it would never work.

My soundbite for the conference:
In pretty much every aspect, computers are one million times as powerful as they were 20 years ago, yet they are only five percent smarter. Dammit!

I deeply feared being attacked by the venture capitalists, or accosted about open source licensing. I realized I had no reason to worry when Jordan Hubbard showed up. (Yes, fears are silly, aren't they.)

I have more ideas now. I owe O'Reilly a magazine article if not a book. Time to write the idiots' guide to (some small subset of) 3-D photography and graphics output/consumption.

Almost the same effect as Burning Man. Only indoors, and with projector displays. That'll work.

Why yes, I want to go back. Preferably next week.

Edited after giving talk.