bars. Yum.
And yes, the actual content of
the Developer
Relations Conference has been not only informative, but in
some cases, downright inspiring, especially the presentation from the
dude from O’Reilly titled Developers Just Want to Have Fun. I’ve been
taking notes for all the sessions I’ve managed to catch and will post
them once I’ve formatted and cleaned them up a bit.
So far, the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference has been quite good — information-rich presentations delivered by good speakers to a interesting and varied crowd — but I’ll save all the techie/marketing stuff for the technical blog, The Farm. I’m going to report on the more touchy-feely stuff here so as not to bore my not-so-technical readers to tears.
Rather than have lunch in some stuffy hotel conference dining room, they herded us outside to this lovely tent adjoining the hotel. In case you were wondering, it’s springlike (about 14 degrees C) and sunny in San Francisco today. Here’s a photo of the tent:
I was expecting the standard salad-chicken-vanilla cake fare, but was pleasantly surprised by what we actually got:
This is far better than any other conference fare I’ve ever been served. Mind you, I’m typically at developer cons, and food isn’t often high on the priority list, other than having plenty. I’m sure that “suitier” conferences have food on this level or better, but I’m a grateful geek for getting the “Food Network” treatment here. I salute Evans Data with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the lunch.
I’m currently sitting in a seminar at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in the Argent Hotel in downtown San Francisco. It’s a developer relations conference rather than a developer conference, which means that the event isn’t the “sausage party” to which I have become accustomed, but rather one with a more even male-female ratio.
The Windows/Mac ratio is still heavily Redmond-skewed. Until just now, I thought I was the only guy with a Mac laptop in attendance.
Noting this, I turned to Ross and said, “See? Only Mac in the house. I’ve just established myself as the rebel.”
“No,” he replied without skipping a beat, “you’ve established yourself as bait.”
My more technically-inclined readers might want to check out my entry in The Farm titled Notes from the Bell Mobility/ESRI Location-Based Services Seminar, Part 1. It’s the first of a series of notes I took at a seminar aimed at developers who want to develop location-based applications for mobile devices such as cellphones.
On the Saturday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend 2004 — shortly after Wendy and I became engaged — I told her I’d show her what I was rescuing her from and took her to the “clubland” area of Accordion City (the Richmond/Adelaide “meet market” part of town). A small group of us took Wendy out on the town.
For some reason, the male-female ratio was completely off-kilter that night: it seemed as though men outnumbered women 9-to-1 that night. I remember laughing at a remark made by a guy walking past us, who complained to his friend: “It’s all dick!“
Over drinks, we joked that if services like TorontoGasPrices.com existed, there should also be one that reported the male/female ratio at various “meet market” clubs. You probably couldn’t rely on the clubs to report honestly, but you might be able to rely on mobile tracking of people’s cellphones. Participants using this social software would tell the app “I am of gender X seeking gender Y”, and their location would be checked every 30 minutes. People who want to meet people would probably be a more reliable source of information than clubs who simply want to fill their space.
The working title for my application? Sausage Party.
Blogstravaganza in full swing! From left to right: Andrew Coyne, John Bowman, Yours Truly. Photo from A North American Patriot.
Let me begin with a shout-out to all the attendees of last Friday’s Blogstravaganza…
(If I missed you, let me know!)
My thanks to Bob Tarantino and Jason Cherniak for putting the whole thing together. It was good to catch up with old friends from previous gatherings and meet some new ones as well. The success of this event shows that the blogosphere is alive and well here in Accordion City.
It’s also compartmentalized.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog or a regular attendee of the GTABloggers gatherings, there’s a strong possibility that many of the blogs listed above will be unfamiliar to you. Likewise, this blog was unfamiliar to the bloggers whom I hadn’t met at previous gatherings of the local Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bloggers, despite recent links from a number of Technorati Top 100 sites and recent mentions in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Macleans. One attendee didn’t know who Andrew Coyne was, despite the fact that he’s one of Canada’s highest-profile newspaper writers, while another lamented that Toronto seemed to have more right-wing bloggers than left-wing ones, even though attending a GTABlogger party might make you think the opposite was true.
This sort of thing is to be expected. After all, the term “community” has the same root as the word “common”, as in “sharing some trait or quality”. There’s a natural tendency towards gravitating towards those who share your interests, and in these politically-charged times, towards those who share your politics. There are some advantages to this, not the least of which is that a community can often do what an individual cannot.
This also has its downsides. Consider the “echo chamber” effect, in which the voices of a community serve to amplify voices from within the community and diminish outside voices, forming a self-reinforcing “feedback loop”. This can lead to all sorts of problems, from a “tunnel visioned” mindset to a lack of new ideas within the community to the demonization of other communities based on stereotypes and prejudices.
I think that Bob and Jason did a very good job at attempting to reach Toronto bloggers of all political persuasions. Perhaps it’ll take a few more of these gatherings to bring out more local bloggers whose politics are “centre” and “left”.
Your opinions, please…
In response to the Monkey Knife Fight graphic that I posted along with my original announcement about Blogstravaganza (it’s the one pictured above), Damian”Babbling Brooks” Brooks wrote in the comments to Bob “Let it Bleed” Tarantino’s blog:
OK, the monkeys going all Jets-and-Sharks doesn’t bug me. Batman
standing over the little guy like that is a bit off-putting. But the
Wonder Twins swapping spit in the back? Ewwwww.
I pointed him to this Penny Arcade comic (click to see it at full size):
About a month or so back, I was in a conversation with a group of programmers when one posed a hypothetical business model question that started with “Is it evil if…”
Reg, one of the programmers and an all-round astute guy, jumped in before the guy asking the question could finish: “You know, if you have to ask, it probably is.”
What I decided not to bring up at that point is that I remembered once, back at Crazy Go Nuts University when someone asked me “Hey, Joey, is it, uh, incest if…if I…”
“You know, even though you haven’t finished,” I replied, “I’m gonna go with ‘yes’.”
(0100 is one possible binary representation of the number 4.)
Mathew Hoy at HellaBoss got tagged to make a few lists of four items. He then tagged Grant Hutchison at splorp, who made his lists. Grant then tagged John Martz at RobotJohnny, who made his lists. Johnny tagged Deenster at pony, who made her lists and then tagged me.
It’s my turn now, so here goes: