It was great to meet people like Cory Doctorow and Ben and Mena Trott for the first time. Sucked that I almost completely missed brian d foy and Dan Sugalski.
Keynotes varied from fun (David Pogue) to interesting (Jordan Hubbard). I have video of most of them, and a couple of sessions. I'm enQuicktiming that now. I long for the day when you can save DV to Quicktime direct from the camera--my life will be much simpler.
Coolest trick learned: setenv TERM xterm-color. That was from Jordan, who said that someone had wired most of the guts of xterm into Terminal for Jaguar. All I know is that I can get cute colour effects on my mail if I do that. Whee!
Lots of late night talking, particularly with Quinn and Danny from Need to Know. Rael appeared at most of those sessions. David Wheeler and I talked a lot, coordinating the transfer of the video he shot at OSCON.
Comedy of errors night on Thursday: Mac editor Chuck wanted to return his TiBook to Apple before going on holiday Friday morning. So we locate the nearest Apple store (Sunnyvale) and embark. I screw up the direction on 880, and we end up driving for 80 minutes, ending up in Palo Alto (a brisk 20 minute drive away) via a bridge. We get to the Apple store, only to learn that all the Apple store hardware tracking systems are down, so they can't take his laptop. Chuck finally convinces them that they can, however, mail him a box to Vancouver, where he'll then mail them back his laptop. Oy.
The upside of the trip to Palo Alto was that we got to have coffee with Rael and Cory, who explained the details of the Jew-to-Jew joke exchange protocol. Oh, I forgot to say that Cory gave me a pre-release copy of his "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", which I'll review shortly. Brief synopsis of review: fun writing that reminded me in turns of Douglas Adams (for the pace at which he goes through ideas) and William Gibson (for the cynical futuristic writing), but which doesn't seem at all derivative. And it's short enough for me to read while waiting for a plane. (Admittedly, it was a long wait for a plane!)
I have a bunch of smaller thoughts that I'll be blogging over the coming days, but that was the overview of the conference. I enjoyed attending a conference rather than running it--life was so much more pleasant on the sidelines.
--Nat
