Foo Camp
DannyObrien, who kindly put me up at the last O'Reilly EmergingTechnology conference, writes about O'Reilly FooCamp in the latest NTK (NeedToKnow), his comment about the WiFi folks sounds soooo familiar :-). I'm pretty jealous I didn't get to attend (StupidStupid WetaDigital) but I guess we can't have everything now can we ...
In between the sex orgies, the guzzling of live bunnies, and the dance around the pyre of a giant DaveWiner shaped "Wiki Man" (joke (c) AndrewOrlowski, cheers kthx), it was a weekend of high-achievement dossing at the notorious O'REILLY FOO CAMP. Bram "BitTorrent" Cohen, having solved content distribution, announced he was now tackling other simple problems: reputation systems, version control and perhaps after lunch the NP-complete set. Reserving enough brainpower for this unfortunately involved forgetting his own birthday, which unbeknownst to him, was on Sunday. Similar problems beleaguered Gnome wunderkind NatFriedman, who almost absent-mindedly flew to the wrong city. Elsewhere on the stumbling edge, the geolocation folk led by Joshua "Memepool" Schachter and the RFID/barcodians led by MSFTian MarcSmith, struggled to either locate or track good solutions to their biggest bugbear - the hoarding of databases like the UPC and the Ordnance Survey. The WiFi-folk, glad to find a venue where they weren't asked to fall off roofs while troubleshooting everyone's connectivity, mainly got drunk. Above it all, there was a strong sense of handing-off-the-torch across the generations. Although with Bob "Visicalc" Frankston outtalking everyone 4:1, KevinKelly compelling gentle BrianBehlendorf to teach him how to DJ, and Jaron Lanier - yes, Jaron "bloody" Lanier - somehow coming from behind to outdo everyone with an avatar system that dynamically aped your every facial expression via a Webcam... it wasn't entirely clear which direction that torch was going.
Comments
Hell we get drunk even when we're on the roof! -LJS