Paying Attention

I've been awake for about an hour. When I got up, it was dark and I wasn't sure what time it was, only it wasn't yet morning. There's that moment between asleep and awake, when the mind is trying to figure out where it is, what's happened. That's where I was.

On Saturday afternoon, I had planned to go see cherry blossoms with Jay. Cherry blossoms are an annual ritual of spring in Washington, DC. Although I'm well into my 30s, growing up, I never much paid attention to things blossoming. This, I suspect, has little to do with my gender, even as women are somehow more associated with flowers than men, then my general inattetion to nature as a whole.

A few years ago, I was living with someone who was a landscape architecture major. He had this idea that he'd grow tulips in our house, with special lights, then sell it to folks on campus for Valentine's Day. I don't know how successful that was, but I do recall asking him about how long things stayed in bloom, and remarking it was awfully short.

Fifteen years of living in DC and I had never been to the cherry blossoms. Not once. Every time I'd think about it, it would pass, and eventually, so would the cherry blossoms. Until recently, I didn't go much into DC. Over ten years of living here, and I hardly ventured into DC.

Much of that was due to, at the time, an irrational fear of DC. DC is one of the more crime-ridden cities in the US. It shares the dubious distinction, with its sister city Baltimore, as having many murders. Add to the fact that when I first came to the area, I had notions about African Americans that have since changed. To understand that, you have to know that Asian Americans get picked on and many Asian first generation folks don't look too kindly on African Americans who tend to like a little provocation. Over time, I realize that these are primarily cultural differences. While Asians tend to be quiet and reserved, African Americans are generally not.

This is what you get when you're raised out in the suburbs. It creates a wholly unrealistic fear of different situations. Over time, I've learned that the touristy spots of most cities are fine, that most people that you see are off minding their own business, and not interested in harassing you, and that taking the time to walk around a city gets you familiar with it more easily.

Even so, it was nice to have someone who had actually gone to the cherry blossoms before, because I had no idea where it was even located. The web is one thing that's made things a lot easier for me. Where's the cherry blossoms? I'll Google it. And so I did. I knew there was one of several stops to go to, and the Smithsonian seemed best.

Once we arrived, we started heading towards the Washington Monument. When you get off at the Smithsonian exit, you arrive at the "mall", a very large rectangular area defined by buildings all round. One on end is the Capitol. On the other, the Washington Monument. Along the side, various buildings, including the Smithsonian museum.

As we walked to the mall, we headed left. It was hard, judging by the movement of the crowds, to tell where the blossoms were located. Once we were past the monument, we could see the cherry blossoms, surrounding the water, with the Jefferson Memorial on the far end.

Cherry blossoms are trees that bloom for a few weeks each year. They're impressive because their blooms are the palest pink. To see a ring of trees lining what's known as the Tidal Basin is to see a wreath of white. Look at the image link and you'll see the Jefferson Memorial. The circular lake-like thing is the tidal basin, and there's cherry blossoms all around.

I'd imagine that cherry blossoms would not fascinate many people. To be sure, there are probably many who wonder what the fuss is over a bunch of trees. That must have been my thought over all these years. However, plenty of people always show up, so much so, that it is extremely crowded.

I had Jay take a picture of me in a cherry blossom tree. Some kid was getting his picture taken so I thought I'd do the same. It turns ou the bark on cherry blossom trees are rather prickly sort, and hard to grab on, so I didn't get up nearly as high as I had wanted to. This brought a rush of memories of climbing a dogwood tree just outside of the apartment I grew up in, or the even taller pine tree beside it. I hadn't done that much tree climbing since then.

We circled around the entire tidal basin (it seems awkward for me to refer to it as that, since I am relying on Google maps to tell me what its name is), past the Jefferson Memorial which was having a small cherry blossom band thing sponsored by Target. I'd hoped there would be Japanese music, with kotos, but it sounded like blues.

As we past the Jefferson Memorial, we walked by the FDR Memorial. I had no idea FDR even had a memorial. It's a sprawling memorial, mostly walls, quotes on the walls, and some bas relief metal depicting the war. It felt more like walking in a zoo than walking past the traditional kinds of memorials.

We stopped by an FDR store where I bought some water, Jay got a tourist map to replace the one he had given some visiting friends to DC. It wasn't the cool laminated map that he once bought, but it was fine for now.

As we continued to walk around on this wind-whipped day, we passed by some structure dedicated to World War I. It was a relatively small structure, but Jay remarked that it was built during the Depression. Adjacent to it were people playing soccer. We had, walking past the Washington Monument earlier, seen people flying kites, players playing flag football.

I had thought the WWI structure was really the WWII Memorial, which I had been to a year before. It turns out that that memorial was close by. There was some high school band, replete with baton twirlers and flag spinners performing.

At this point, we thought we should head back. I had thought one or two hours of visiting would be enough to keep me happy, and we'd been there two hours. We wanted to walk back to the Smithsonian, but they closed the entrance off, telling us to take the next one over. It was mobbed.

Fortunately, Jay had his trusty tourist map that he just bought, and we headed to the L'Enfant Plaza metro. This turned out to be a decent idea. That metro is on the Green Line, as is Greenbelt, the metro stop we started a few hours earlier. Smithsonian is on the Orange and Blue Line. To get to the Green, we'd have to transfe r to the Red Line at Metro Station, then once again to the Green Line at Gallery Place/Chinatown.

By this time, it was close to 6 PM, and I wanted to get back to see if George Mason could work its magic once again against a team (Florida) that most people had thought was playing the best basketball of the remaining teams.

As we came back, I was weary, having walked all the way around the Tidal Basin, then jogged for some part as we tried to get on the Metro, then walked even more as we had to get to the L'Enfant Plaza Metro instead.

I came back and wanted to get something to eat, and went to Popeye's. It's greasy. It's spicy. It's a guilty pleasure. I brought the four piece chicken with diet coke (only they gave me Sprite, further reinforcing the idea that people who work at fast food restaurants seem to get about 1 in every 3 orders wrong--the failure rate seems abysmally high, mostly because the people who work there don't even bother to confirm the order, and mostly because they don't care--it's not as if they are flogged if they make a mistake, so the mistakes keep coming).

As I watched George Mason, I saw that Florida seemed to be doing a lot better. Mason couldn't hit 3's and found even shots from short range weren't falling in. They were down by as many as ten points in the first half, but closed the deficit to five points. They had been down by more to both UNC and UConn, so there was no reason to think they couldn't win in the second half. I was busily eating spicy Popeye's, more fried than chicken.

Second half rolls around and Lee Humphrey takes over the game. Who? Well, that's probably your reaction if you don't follow Florida basketball or any basketball. If you've paid attention to the George Mason hype machine, you're now familiar with their lineup of Tony Skinn, Lamar Butler, Jai Lewis, Folarin Campbell. Their starting five play the majority of minutes since they have almost no bench to speak of. Florida can go quite a bit deeper.

Humphrey is a Tennessee boy having been born in Maryville, which is maybe an hour away from where I grew up. Folks around there call it something like "Murr-ville", the "y" barely pronounced with a Tennessee southern drawl.

He had grown up a fan of Peyton Manning. Even though Papa Manning had his heroics at University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") and the Manning family lives in New Orleans, Peyton made his fame at University of Tennessee. He played all four years, the first year mostly because of an injury to the quarterback and lead Tennessee to the SEC championship. Twice he was up for he Heisman. Twice he missed, the second year because they decided Charles Woodson was more deserving. Woodson was a defensive player who played both sides.

Tennessee won a national championship in a mostly unforgettable matchup with Florida State whose quarterback, Chris Weinke, was injured and so a rookie QB had to play. They won with Tee Martin. However, it's Peyton Manning, and his success at the NFL that people remember.

Humphrey grew up admiring Manning, and wouldn't you know it, the final four was being held in Indianapolis, right where the Colts, the team that Manning quarterbacks plays. Manning came out to support his man, Humphrey.

His man didn't disappoint. Right out of the gates, Humphrey knocked down three 3-pointers, stretching a lead from 5 points to 14 points. Florida would keep this healthy lead to the end of the game. In hindsight, the Patriots should have fouled Humphrey whenever he touched the ball. As hot as he was hitting three pointers, he's actually a horrid free throw shooter, barely above 50%, a shocking number from a guy who can bomb it in from long range. Humphrey hit 6 of 12, the whole team 12 of 25. Mason missed the first 9, hitting 2 late. Florida's plan was to make Mason work for their 3's, a strategy other teams had missed because they felt GMU's strength was inside.

And inside, Noah created havoc, altering shots, swatting away others. The magic carpet ride, as Larranaga had pointed out, had ended (this reminded me of my own blog entry).

I was disappointed at the result, and was starting to get tired from all the walking and all that chicken. I didn't even bother watching the second game, and when I saw it on my laptop a half hour later, UCLA was on top. When I woke up a few hours later, UCLA had won. One guy in our local pool had been trailing, but he had UCLA in the final, and that made him winner by one point.

It would be cool to tell you that I am writing this at our local coffeehouse, College Perk. Indeed, as I woke up, I wanted to get out some, head out to eat or drink. College Perk is just down the road. I remember visiting it within a week of its opening. I had known a former student, who lived with one of the folks that was a close friend of the person who started up College Perk (it seems to have changed ownership since then).

It was mostly empty when I arrived. I knew it was daylight savings. I had just lost an hour. College Perk isn't the typical coffeehouse. It doesn't attract the bohemian artist set. I think of a place like the Victrola in Seattle or maybe this coffee place in New Haven, when I think coffee house. It really does resemble a kind of rundown Central Perk, from Friends, which old couches, and books and magazines no one wants to read.

I had wanted beer, but they'd stopped serving alcohol. I ordered chili and coffee instead. Nice on an empty stomach at 4 in the morning.
A copy of the NY Times was sitting around. They had released tapes of 911 on 9/11. That's nearly five years after the fact. Of course, in hindsight, the advice they gave was all wrong.

Stay put. Someone is coming to help. Don't leave. They had no idea that the towers would actually collapse, and leaving was actually the best idea. This was perhaps one of those things that haunt those answering calls. They played some on the radio, and it's remarkable how calm both sides were. There's smoke outside, something's crashed into the building. People on the OnStar network have panicked more.

But I didn't bring my laptop with me on this nippy night in College Park, so I'm typing this back at the comfort of my own room.

I'm now going to take an about face to talk about the topic I was originally going to talk about. That's ETECH.

I had meant to blog a great deal about ETECH while I was there. However, shoddy wireless connection (due to everyone wanting to use wireless) and trying to pay attention to what was going on meant I did very little. It would take longer to blog about ETECH that ETECH would run.

To understand why I was at ETECH, I need to wind back a few months. My company had made an offer for any employees to attend No Fluff, Just Stuff. This is a traveling band of speakers that visit maybe 20 cities twice a year to update folks on the latest ongoings in Java. This appeals mostly to the web community. Topics like Hibernate and Spring are covered. However, Ajax was popular, and Ruby on Rails was similarly popular.

Speakers are selected based on their speaking ability. People who attend the conference rate the speakers. I met Jared Richardson. You could tell, from his speech, that he was a Southern boy. Turns out from North Carolina. He's a likeable guy, though being a newbie at No Fluff, I thought he mentioned his credentials a little too often, but then, maybe it's part of the deal to come out on talks--he needs to plug his company. This was the second of his two tryout gigs, and he said it was successful. He'd be able to stay on tour.

No Fluff is sort of the Lollapalooza of technical conferences. Its goal, by its very name, is to get you skills you can use in your daily job. Now I don't work for a place that does web development (and by that, I mean a site that has need to use J2EE or similar technologies, not just a pretty page with information).

The conference is worker friendly. You take half a day off on Friday, then the weekend off as well. You lose only half a day's work overall. Turnout is therefore a lot better than if you held it three regular workdays.

It turns out it was quite informative for me. I had been teaching for a few years before that, and wasn't even aware of this conference which has been held for a while. Even though I do very little of what this conference aims to do, it gave me insight into the industry, and was an eye-opener.

The king of the speakers is Dave Thomas. He's written two books on Ruby. One on Ruby itself. Another on Ruby on Rails. He's British. He doesn't run a burger joint. He's very entertaining, as well as educational. It's worth going to one of these things just to hear Dave talk. I went to all of his talks, which amounted to five talks (they have about 4 each day).

After this, I was reading Joel on Software where he said he had asked his crew which conference they wanted to go to. He'd pay for everything. They got to choose. They chose ETECH.

I pretty much signed up knowing nothing about ETECH nor its history, and was blissfully ignorant about it, even as I arrived in San Diego, the Saturday before. I hadn't even known that there was a theme to this year's conference, the attention economy.

I did, at the back of my mind, wonder if I should try to find Joel Spolsky. It's one of those things I debate with myself. On the one hand, why bother someone who's relatively famous (at least, in some circles). On the other, why be a coward?

I had signed up for two tutorials the first day. The first was given by two speakers, Jesse James Garrett (the guy who came up with the name "Ajax") and Jeffrey Veen. They had been working for a user experience company, but Veen had since switched to Google. The talk was about how to build applications for "Web 2.0", which they said was the evolution from web pages as hyperlinking entities, to applications that were more desktop in nature. They talked about how to design the entire architecture.

It was a good talk, which I found fine, even if some might have branded it fluff. In fact, you could almost call ETECH, No Stuff, Just Fluff. I was to discover that this was more of an ideas conference than a true tech conference.

I then sat in a Rails talk by the Rails guy himself, David Heinemeier-Hanson, or DHH for short. It's one thing to sit and watch Dave Thomas code in front of you. Thomas knows something about learning theory, and knows how to keep a crowd entertained. DHH speaks an odd form of English. That's the problem listening to someone who has a Scandanavian background. Their accent comes closest to Americans, and yet, there's something strange about it. DHH would throw in twists of phrases like "on the other leg" or complain that he used the word "leverage" ("I hate that word" he muttered after using it). It was disaster if you didn't know basic Rails, and enough of the audience didn't know it.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, attending ETECH is a bit like a psychologist attending a prestigious computer science conference. You know that there's perhaps some "famous" people there, but you don't know who. I knew of DHH, but had never heard of Jesse James Garrett (I keep expecting him to bring a six shooter with a name like that).

I knew this was more of an ideas conference when I heard Bruce Sterling give a talk. If there are two names that are famous from the cyberpunk era, which was a phase in science fiction from the late 80s and early 90s, it's William Gibson, then Bruce Sterling. (OK, there's Neal Stephenson too).

Orson Scott Card, who had a disdain for cyberpunk, since its worldview was relentlessly dystopian, admired Bruce Sterling, who wasn't nearly so dark as Gibson. Gibson's view of the SF universe contrasts greatly with, say, Asimov, who wants to do two things. First, as he freely admitted himself, he wants to be clear. He doesn't peddle in dense phrasing, obscure semiotics, nor subtle symbolism. He explains like a teacher. Second, Asimov loves a discussion with two smart folks that discuss the give and take of a certain topic. He also likes to deal with the big universe, the movers and the shakers.

Gibson is nearly the anti-Asimov. His languages is cool, shimmery, full of dense technobabble. Asimov explains all the details so you miss nothing. Gibson pretends that you know it all, as if he were talking about a cellphone or a microwave oven. He refers to the stimsim without telling you what it stands for, relying on your intelligence to figure out that it's a stimulator simulator. When you figure it out, you're even happier with your acumen because it rhymes. Gibson works in the seedy underbelly of SF near future, extrapolating the evil that companies do, people who buy and sell technology (Johnny Mnemonic is about a guy who has some valuable information wired to his brain).

Sterling's books, by contrast, always seemed to be lighter in fare. He wasn't so relentlessly dark. Card liked him because Sterling seemed to know something of the way the world worked now. He knew about internalizations, and could write stories that weren't so white. He could bring in nationalities all over the world, showing he had some idea of where America was heading.

Still, it's a bit odd hearing a science fiction writer like Sterling. Why does he come to ETECH? What does he know about technology? It turns out, a fair bit. He keeps up well enough to brandish the terms Web 2.0 and Ajax.

He stood up, dressed in a leather jacket, looking like the hippie brother a la Arrested Development of Roger Ebert. Long white hair, voice like Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Truman Capote (the Oscars were held the night before).

He wanted to talk about the Internet of Things. And this really summed up, for me, what the conference was really about. I don't mean the ostensible subject, i.e., the attention economy. No, I mean the giving of names to technological trends.

People in the know will tell you that the idea behind Ajax (asynchronous calls to the server, which send down modifications to the DOM) was nothing new. The ideas behind them had already existed. Yet, it took both a name and Google's application of that idea to make it really take off. People had given it other names (like dynamic HTML, I think), but none stuck like Ajax.

That, in a nutshell, is the power of naming things. Sterling went through a list of names other folks had come up with, in particular, Everywear, at least, that's what I think he called it. This was the ubiquity of objects available on the Internet.

He talked a bit about artificial intelligence and how are obsession with AI has made it difficult to make advances. Google, he felt certain, would have come along much earlier if we thought of computers as they truly are. Things that computer, tag, sort, search. It's mundane, but it's what they do well.

He extrapolated the idea of Google finding information on the Internet to being able to tag everything. He imagined objects being created in a computer, then having form, then dying, all the while trackable, queryable by us. He could type in a query asking where his stuff was, and it would tell him.

He wanted to give such objects a name, and he decided to call these things spimes which he said were a combination of space and time. At any point, he could query about spimes and get an answer. (My friend said "they call those things that take up space and time 'objects'"). Point is, he wanted to give them a name, and in so doing, have something to refer to them.

As he gave this talk, all I could think about what, "where does this guy think up all of this stuff?". But then, that's his job. He's a science fiction writer, and not only a writer of the distant future, but of the speculative near future. For him to write about it, he needs to have some idea of where we are now, and imagine where we'll be in fifty years. He just happens to be very good at what he does.

I'd see Bruce Sterling walking around, but I wouldn't approach him. I wouldn't even know what to say to him. ("Man, I loved your book, Neuromancer?" Of course, that'd be me acting like an ass, since Gibson wrote that, and I'm sure he'd say something far too literary cool and I'd slink to my corner.) I'd see him hang out at breakfast eating with, well, whoever didn't feel all that nervous eating with Bruce Sterling.

Tim O'Reilly, who was hosting the conference, seems a bit like the Weinstein brothers. The Weinsteins used to head up Miramax. Their biggest coup was convincing the voting academy to select Shakespeare In Love over Saving Private Ryan. Harvey Weinstein, like many an executive, believes that since he has money and controls the company, that his creative input is more worthwhile than most. He slammed Rosie O'Donnell for telling him that maybe he should let M. Night Shymalayan figure out his own artistic ideas without his input.

For some reason, O'Reilly reminds me of that. Here's a guy that publishes books. Now, what he did was rather remarkable. He publishes books on topics few people would ever write on (he had a whole series on X Windows, back in the day) and has turned this into an empire of tech books. They were the pre-dummies books, and by all accounts are anti-dummies books. They vary a bit in quality, but have always been aimed to people who weren't so afraid of technology, and wanted a thorough accurate tome.

Every since the blogosphere grew (I was at modestly bad talk with 7 people discussing graphs about the Internet, one guy in particular, who had 2 minutes to speak, felt to urgency to complete his talk, which was tedious, then followed up by a mindless, but fun, talk about how a guy tracks the volume of email he receives, and how he thinks of vacationing in between schmoozing with clients. Anyway, one of the talk was a visual/aural growth of blogs in he blogosphere, which was cool, if again, mostly useless), Tim O'Reilly has joined the fray, and realized it's often more fun talking about technological trends and naming it, then actually making the technology possible. I'm sure Tim O'Reilly is a perfectly nice guy, but this is how an engineer like me thinks. Just another idea guy. Sterling, to be fair, does the same kind of thing, but he seems so much cooler presenting his ideas.

Now, let me quickly roll into day 2 of ETECH, so I can toss in the word TechSmith, so Betsy Weber can read this entry, buried many paragraphs beyond the cherry blossoms, after George Mason, and so forth.

The two key days of ETECH, which were Tuesday and Wednesday, started off with a bunch of keynotes in the morning, followed by lunch, followed by sessions in the afternoon. I have to say that most of the sessions weren't all that good, and random picking of sessions to attend worked out pretty well (often, I picked the one I could get a seat in).

Tuesday's lunch was held outside, and I thought to myself, I wonder whether I'll see Joel Spolsky. I thought it was rather possible he'd be eating off on his own somewhere. Turned out not to be the case. At his table sat maybe 6 other people. Three folks from TechSmith. Betsy, a guy that I was later to find out was the founder of TechSmith, and two others employees. They were talking about seeing the Arizona, or some ship of importance in the last war, and skipping out on some of the afternoon talks (which included Joel and Betsy, incidentally). The other three guys were Brett, Babak, and Ben, all working at Fog Creek. I had been hoping to see the Aardvark guys, but I knew only one had already joined the company, and was unsure of the rest.

They were talking about the exceedingly small numbers of computer science majors at Duke, where Ben had just graduated. Somehow the discussion went to math, and Joel was saying how he found math much easier as he went along. Math seemed so much tougher in the intro level. I was thinking that math can get real tough real fast, and that he just hadn't hit it yet. A friend said there was a Peter Principle of math. Eventually, you rise to your level of math incompetency (the Peter Principle is this rather 70s idea, saying that each person rose to his level of incompetency in a company) where the math is too hard to follow. I think Joel's bf is a math type who explains math to him. Brett (or someone) speculated that maybe he was a good teacher (my thought as well), but Joel dismissed that idea.

I'll say what I blogged about a few weeks ago. It's a lot of fun to hang out with the Fog Creekers since they talk about more than just video games (my lunch conversations often devolve to that, which is made worse since I don't play).

Anyway, since I've blogged about Fog Creek a bunch, I want to get back to other ETECH stuff I found interesting.

Perhaps the best talk I went to was by this woman on games. Her name was Amy Jo Kim (Kim? is she married to someone Korean?) of Shufflebrain. She wanted to show how websites use features of games to keep people coming back. Now, women, stereotypically, don't play video games. However, I'm told that MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) are often half-women. To her credit, she pointed out games such as WoW (Worlds of Warcraft) and Japanese games. Right now, there are popular games in Japan called "brain games" which are supposed to reduce your brain's age (that's, in theory, a good thing). The Japanese are into all sorts of interesting games that are educational in nature (how to sing, how to cook).

What fascinated me was how these ideas applied to websites like Ebay and the hideously ugly myspace.com. By allowing people to rate items and gain status, people come back. Ebay congratulates you when you sell your first item. Heck, some people come back because of the most trivial of things. Joel said he goes to Reddit because he wants to see what the Reddit alien is up to, even if that has absolutely zero to do with a website.

I attended a talk about RFIDs, which one of my housemates talks about a lot. This is radio frequency IDs. This was not a well-attended talk, but was interesting anyway. People talk about going to grocery stores buying items with RFIDs, going through a checkout line that automatically scans everything and charges you. No more lines!

Except RFID technology isn't there yet, and yet they want to put this in new passports. It's been a minor disaster for those using RFIDs for people visiting the country for short periods of time.

I don't think I attended one good, conventional tech talk. Well, the Web 2.0 tutorial by Garrett and Veen was pretty good, even if it was fairly general.

What I should comment on is something that O'Reilly really should give a conference on, but won't, because it's far from sexy. That's conference presentation. First, it's a complete pain to have to pick one of four talks to attend, when you barely have an idea what each is about. I attended a talk on bit literacy which had a huge walkout when people discovered it was on a topic they simply didn't care for (managing email volume).

Then, speakers used variations on Powerpoint, which mostly sucks. Then, wireless Internet was flaky at best, since practically everyone decided they didn't want to pay full attention. (In fact, one of the more interesting keynotes was given by Linda Stone, who coined the term "continuous partial attention" about people who are always paying some attention to, say, their email, their cell-phones, so that they never pay full atttention to you. This was very astute, since half her audience was off doing something else, even as she spoke. The irony of the attention economy is that the average person has decided that, whenever something is boring, which is nearly always, they can do something else).

I heard some talks about attempting to commodotize attention. I think there was something about things like attention stocks, as well as tracking what you keep attention on, and how you might use that information.

I was surprised at the number of talks pushing products of one sort or another. The coolest product that's available was some APIs for using some next generation Flash by Adobe. Yahoo was also providing some APIs as well. But there was Foldera and Zimbra, both pushing next-gen Outlook tools. There's Microsoft talking about next-gen cut-n-paste. There's EVDB (events database) and Plum (forgot what they do). There's this guy who was talking about patterns in discussion groups (comparing/contrasting Slashdot with Buffy fans discussion page).

If I had to sum it up, this was an ideas and products conference. As an engineer, I'd probably be happy with stuff I could use, but I think it's good to be exposed to ideas too, even if the conference seems to be all about trying to come up with the next great idea, rather than deal with some mundane issues that need someone to care (such as, how best to run conferences).

I'm curious to see how the conferences themselves will evolve. At ETECH, many people had laptops, and were tethered to wall outlets like some umbilical cord. Wireless connectivity was a key problem throughout. But the conference more or less ran like a conference. You met people in the hallways, and really, there were far too many people to really meet adequately. The reason I talked to folks from TechSmith and Fog Creek was to focus on a few people, rather than randomly talk to many.

(In addition to them, I talked to a guy who teaches distance learning in Alaska, a guy who is getting transcriptions of Supreme Court hearings on a website, Tom Nguyen, a techie from Reuters, some guy from Yahoo who happens to read memorandum, a website started by a former Maryland grad student I know, a guy from England who works on user interaction for companies, such as banks, a guy who was a teacher, but then went on to start his own web business, a guy who was from Charlotte who did some kind of network admin stuff, that I sat by during the first evening's keynote--I almost forgot about that, even though we talked about two hours that first evening. There was some guy in the Microsoft booth who had been at Microsoft for 12 years! He had been working as a high school student. Another guy, who was either a teacher or prof at UCSD showed up with one of his students, who he had helped get a job at EVDB, the events database that made an announcement at ETECH. This guy vaguely reminded me of someone I knew teaching at Maryland. He was planning on interviewing for a position at Microsoft, and wanted some advice.).

I find it's good to talk to people a second time, if possible, at a conference.

I only had a taste of what was going on at this conference. There are people knee-deep in this. Gabe, the guy who started Memeorandum (and told me that he was starting a new site, which he did, called "WeSmirch" which uses his blogging aggegration software to track Hollywood gossip--it's hard to tell how serious he takes it), quit his job at Intel and now travels the blogging circuit, where he ends up on panels with guys like Dave Sifry (who gave a shout out to Gabe in his talk), the guy who started Technorati.

Half these names I was unaware of when I went to ETECH, and to be fair, there may be a huge number of other folks I have no idea about that was milling about. I sat at a table with this guy at breakfast who said this was his third ETECH, though he hadn't been in about two years, since it had been getting a bit repetitive for his tastes. He pointed out some largish fellow who was basically shaved except for a spiral of hair that was cut out like some crop circle. That guy apparently had made some music website?

I've blogged on all these mundane details in the hope that, should I read it again sometime, I'll have some idea of what went on. I haven't even properly catalogued all the talks I went to.

Oh well, I'm in like hour 3 of writing, and I better stop. I admire your tenacity, if you've managed to get through all of this.