(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Entry 7.99999

or: Will the real Clay Shirky please stand up?

Read it here.

(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):

Photos from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, part 2.

Read it here.

“My bitch, you will be.”

I found this via Coderman’s blog:

(In The Happiest Geek on Earth):

Photos from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, part 1.

Read it here.

The great outdoors

The hotel in which I was staying for the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference was located in the middle of a Santa Clara office park. There was nothing but hi-tech office buildings surrounded by immaculately manicured lawns and a nearby gold course. Only the empty lots nearby — future locations of officeplexes, no doubt — had any kind of growth that didn’t look gardened, genetically engineered or designed. Aside from hanging out on the pool patio for lunch and to catch some end-of-day sun, we were pretty much confined to the hotel, as there was nowhere to walk for at least a mile around.

How do people live and work in such a sterile environment, where the buildings are just bigger cubicles for cubicles? No wonder computers are the way they are.

I’ve just woekn up from making up for the sleep debt inucrred at the conference, and am getting ready to go to some campfire party out in Guelph. My friend Will told me about it; apparently it’s someone’s parents’ two-story cabin with a giant fire pit, and people are bringing musical instruments. Tonight, we share the glow of a fire, not that of an 802.11b wireless Internet connection. Both are great things, in my geeky eyes, but with a fire:

• the girl-guy ratio is better
• you can roast marshmallows

See you on the flipside.

In case you didn’t know, I didn’t come up with the phrase “anal sovereignty” — credit for that goes to Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy behind the online comic Goats and inventor of my another favourite phrase of mine, “ass finger“. The story of how I passed inspection at U.S. Customs did the rounds at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference; since that memorable phrase was used to end that blog entry, it became a popular expression for the week.

Here’s the strip in which “anal sovereignty” appears:

Click the comic to see it at full size.

And for the insatiably curious and butt-joke-fixated, here’s:

• a Google search on the words “anal” and “sovereignty”
• a Google search on the phrase “anal sovereignty” (currently, there’s only one result, and it’s mine.)

Now I think I shall step outside and do something a little more productive (and a little less disturbing).