Going home after a busy few weeks

So yep after a very busy few weeks I'm going home to London. I have enjoyed myself in the west coast of America but its time to go home.

How was the Emerging technology conference? Well it was good and I got to meet lots of people who I've been reading or had heard of. The actual conference its self was good but I was expecting something even bigger and grander that what we got. Afterwards when Ben asked me that exact same question, we figured out that it wasn't as busy as it was in previous years. The main hall was over half full on the Tim Oreilly keynote, which happened on a Monday morning (more about that later). Now I have only heard Etech's talks on IT Conversations but they had always sounded like something everyone would want to go to. This is why I was shocked to find out the keynotes happen 7:30pm on Monday night. I was told by some people its so people can fly down after work and go the conference keynotes. This may also explain why there were no social events on Sunday night (Although, me, Tom and Noor did go out for dinner). This culture of work also seemed to extended towards leaving to early on Thursday, so to be back at work on Friday morning. Likewise I was surprised there was no real end to the conference. In the timetable it said – Closing get together between 3:50pm – 4:30pm but besides the odd flavored popcorn and sweets there was just people wondering about outside the main rooms. A couple of us went to Frys electrical shop in north San Diego then came back for a dinner with Cory, Danah and others in some Thai restaurant just off the gaslamp district. So yeah, no real big finale or end talk, oh well.

Now although I may sound quite negative about the whole thing, I'm not. Actually I had a really good time and went to some cracking keynotes and sessions. As you can see before, I tried to live blog most of them but alas I'm not very good at that. So I'll direct you to the ones I rated and other peoples write ups. Monday

  • Monday
  • ETech Opening Salvos
  • The O'Reilly Radar
    New presentation from Tim Oreilly and it was well worth going to.
  • Secrets of Mental Math
    This was such a fun session and there was lots learned about calculating maths quicker
  • Tuesday
  • Amazon Web Services: Building a “Web-Scale Computing” Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business
    Heard pretty much the same thing at the future of webapps. Now if they got Jeff Bezo to do it that would be great
  • Creating Alternate Realities
    this talk was awesome, All about crossmedia games, stiring up real life and alternative reality gaming I wanted to talk to Jane afterwards but never got the chance.
  • Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? How a New Theory of Neocortex Will Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines
    This seemed like a good session but it was tons of detail in a very short period of time.
  • Making Offline Web Applications a Reality
    Vendor Pitch but reasonable enough to watch. Those Zimki guys have got it down
  • Successful Open Communities on the Internet
    Good balanced presentation using Wikipedia and Wikia as examples through-out
  • No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral
    Tom Loosemore was on fire with this one. Cory felt Toms box distracted from the real matter at hand and some people didn't quite see what all the fuss was about. But generally Toms Box is a box which uses Digital Broadcast TV to fill up a box which automaticlly joins a torrent network and shares with neighbours. Great idea and would love to see it working.
  • Birds of a Feather Sessions ATOM Publishing, Microformats and Digital Mixing
    As you can guess I was involved in the last one and although not many people turned up, the right people turned up and thats what made it a good chat. I need to do more in this area in the future I think.
  • Wednesday
  • The Coming Age of Magic
    I walked in late on this one, so didn't do much note taking, but honestly this was another one of those awesome sessions which you would only get at somewhere like Etech. 
  • Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life
    Like the one before, awesome. Stopped typing up notes and just listened for most of this. Never heard Danah live and she lived up to expectations. Although I would have loved to have had a european and asian point of view on the same thing.
  • The Core of Fun
    A lot of people I spoke to didn't like this one, but I did enjoy it although yes it was a little short on examples compared to the previous two.
  • Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!
    Chad did a good job showing how much fun it can be to be in a large company. Hackday was talked about, but Chad didn't mention or announce the first European Hackday which is a joint adventure between the BBC and Yahoo!
  • Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication
    Only stayed for half of this, but it seemed to centre around the reasons for Craft magazine and some of the projects in Craft.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Magic
    Interesting up till he started doing some magic. 
  • Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web
    This was good but the guys didn't show off pipes that well because of the lack of internet connectivity. They showed a canned demo video which worked but wasn't as good. The after talk of how it was built was interesting but like I said afterwards. This is the most interesting stuff Yahoo's been doing for years, they need to make it sound like it. More energy wouldn't have gone a miss. I did in the end meet all the 5 guys working on Pipes and I did suggest they should use Yahoo Widgets to extend Yahoo pipes on to the desktop. I was very surprised to find they had never thought about it.
  • Emerging Technologies from IBM Almaden Research Center–Koala & Spintronics
    I was late for this one but Koala is a macro recorder for your actions online in a browser. This means you can play back logins, actions, etc. Its all saved in text files and can be modified independently of the Firefox extentsion. When I saw this I thought wow, combined with Pipes, you could do some amazing things.
  • Make Fest
    A mini makers festivial, good fun but a little small for 2hours of its allocated time. Plus I really wanted to play werewolf.
  • Werewolf
    Finally werewolf and its actually on the schedule so the turn out is huge. The first game I play is something like 25 people in a circle and there were about 3 different circles or games to start off with. The first game I get killed off quickly because I'm one of the most experienced people in that game which is fine because they were playing reveal, which is fine if your all starting out as newbies but is ever so boring and frustrating. The 2nd game is much better as a couple of us move to a new circle/game. Danah is our moderator and shes pretty good except she plays the game differently in regards to voting. She seems to pick the first person who pointed the finger and works her way around in a clockwards motion watching for voting hands. I'm not convinced about this because like in the way we play it in London. If everyone votes at once, people tend to wacth for the most dominating people of the game to vote and decide to go with them or against them. This is also a good chance to look for werewolf type play or the undecided villagers. Yes I'm saying this is a great chance to get a idea of whats going on in the game.
    Anyway without going into details the games were pretty good and by the 5th game it was getting close to 1:30am. We did play till 2am in the end. I think somewhere along the 3rd game we hooked up with Heaverscent who had some disagreement with Cal in the previous game. She certainly brought some spark to the games following.
  • Thursday
  • From Pixels to Plastic
    Good talk from Matt Webb, well worth listening although I've seen and heard a lot of it before.
  • Apollo : Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop
    I didn't like this one not because of the presentation but because it was more like a tutorial that keynote. I was also dying to ask some questions but didn't get a chance. Oh that was a consistent problem across most of the keynotes. Not much a chance to ask questions straight after the keynote.
  • Body Hacking
    I was in two minds to watch this or not. Not because I'm screamish of body modifications but I am terrified of needles and metal stuck in the skin. I did record this session, and it was well worth going to. Specially the bit about that drug which can help you stay alert after 72hours. Crazy!
  • Sonic Body Pong
    I thought they were going to do a live demo of this but it wasn't to be. So yes it was cool but it would have been better with a demo.
  • Closing Get-together
    I have already talked about this in some detail above.

In reflection I had a whale of a time but I was expecting even bigger. I did also get a chance to interview Tim Oreilly with Chris Valance for BBC Backstage.

My hotel I know was better and that the Hyatt or W. Simply because I heard the complaints from different people. Imagine paying 300 dollars a night for a hotel and then they charged 10 dollars a day for broadband access. Sorry but thats taking the piss in my book. The Bristol was a nice modern hotel with art deco styling, nice large rooms and free wired and wireless access in every room. Its once of the best hotels I've ever been in.

Something very strange also happened near the end of the conference.

I was walking up to the W hotel with some American guys after werewolf (my hotel the Bristol wasn't far off the W). And one of the guys commented that I'm quite different from the rest of the London guys. I asked what he meant and he and couple others started talking about the London Mafia. I was very interested in what these people meant. And it seemed to break down into how a group of London people tended to hang out together a lot. I won't mention names but I don't really see any harm in it, however I do worry about being automaticlly tied to such things. Yes I'm always proud to say I'm from London but I'm also on a learning about places like San Francisco. Talking of which…

San Francisco was something else. I met many people including the guys from  Citizen Agency, Ruby Red Labs, Adaptive Path, Technorati, The Obvious and Creative Commons. I also went to a couple of events including the SwapSF and SuperHappyVlogHouse which were both very cool. Thanks to Ben and Sofia for making me feel at home. Tara and Chris were also very friendly and we had a really good meal at there house on Tuesday. The obvious guys gave me a Tshirt in return for a backstage one and Citizen agency already have plans to hang the backstage tshirt in the tolilet next to all the others (check out the photos). Cheers to Photomatt and his girlfriend for driving us home late from the vloghouse too. The south park area is certainly a mecca for internet related startups with a good 30 or so in a 2 block radius of that small park. Its a bit like Clerkenwell Green (and funny enough about the same size).

I like San Francisco but not as much as I like Minneapolis. The bums on the streets can be ignored but its reminds you every time of the massive divide. I also saw lots of the same divide in race which I've spotted in the mid west. Different races mixing only with there own, not really mixing outside of there race. I know it sounds negative but I just notice this type of stuff a lot and I see it a lot in America where space is abundant. On a lighter note I did go up to the Bay Bridge and check out the Golden Gate Bridge. I would have liked to have hired a scooter so I could drive across them both but thats the way it goes. Oh talking of which, it was good to see a range of motorbilkes and scooters on the streets. I even spotted a Burgman 400 and Tmax 500. No Silverwings though… I'm sure it would be great fun to drive in California, next time I'll make sure I sort that out beforehand. San Francisco certainly has character but theres something deep rooted underneath which I don't really like that much. Maybe its the race thing or maybe its simply a class thing. When I was outside the Soma area, I got a better feel for how most live.

So all in all it was fun and I did enjoy my time away, but geez its good to be going home.

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Getting a late night taxi in San Francisco is simply a nightmare


Click To Play

The other night I spent 45mins plus trying to flag down a taxi on mission street. There were tons of taxis and lots had there lights on to say their for hire, but would they stop for me? Hell no!

So in the end I walked back to the hotel at 2am. Now although 10 blocks doesn't sound a lot. Bear in mind its 2am, I don't know San Francisco at all and I had only flew in that day. Its like someone saying you should walk from Chancery Lane to Aldgate. It maybe not be far but it can be scary at least, specially if you don't know the area. I have tried to map out a google map of how far I had to go to escape the wilds of San Francisco.

The footage above is taken yesterday (monday 2nd April) when I tried to film myself flagging down taxis in the South of the market area of San Francisco. This time I get a taxi within 5mins.

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Geekdinners LA style

spiderman%20large.JPG

I found this while looking around the blogging.LA blog. Why was I looking around? I met the organiser of LA Geekdinners, a women by the name of Heathervescent and we shared a lot of tips and tricks regarding Geekdinners.

Heather was not very popular while playing werewolf at Etech due to some bust up with Cal Henderson in a previous game. But she was very open and passionate about what she was doing. However there were strange differences in what we were doing.

  • Heather sets all the dates in advance at the start of the year instead of going by guests
  • She still has sit down meals, but since hearing what worked for us in London. Is considering buffet food in a bar
  • Shes also doing side games on different dates. We do Werewolf every 2 months while they do Powerpoint karaoke every 2-3 months.
  • I suggested we might do Delicious Petcha Kucha one day and showed her the salted script
  • Heather also does geekdinners at the start of the week like we do here because the end of the week is troublesome
  • LA geekdinners is currently using the BarCamp wiki, but she was consider other ways to do it.
  • Girl Geekdinners came up, but it seems the balance of women to men at LA Geekdinners might not be so bad?
  • LA Geekdinners also do not have guests as such, there more meetup style
  • We wondered who actually owns Geekdinner.com and is there something we could do to improve whats already out there
  • Is there a reason why LA, London and New York have geekdinners and places like San Francisco don't?

Since our chat I've been rethinking going to LA one day in the near future. Theres a lot we can do together and now Rachel Clarke seems to be running the New York Geekdinners maybe there is something we could all do together?

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Cubicgarden.com issues recently

So if you've not noticed already, cubicgarden.com has been up and down like a yoyo on a broken string. This was not the fault of Hub.org, actually Apache 2.x has been running flawlessly through-out the troubles. Thats why you could see the 503 error and not a 404.

Without boring everyone to death, I'm running on a virtual server FreeBSD (thats right Marc?) in which I'm running Resin 3.x and Apache 2.x together connected via jk or something like that. I then use Apache for static files and Resin the Java container for dynamic applications. Currently I have Blojsom, Cocoon and ZK installed in the Java container.

So what was actually happening? Well Resin was running out of memory every few hours. But why? It seems there was a problem with the crazy amount of spam I getting on my pipeline blog and so Blojsom was trying to load most of them into memory for analysis or something. So I have deleted all comments and trackbacks from Flow currently and made it a read only place for now. I was going to use Akismet on it too but decided actually it was better as read only for now. Those really interested will email me and spammers can just die.

Hopefully now cubicgarden.com and all the other blogs hosted on the same install of blojsom will be more reliable and I won't get the floods of emails saying your site is down again. Thanks to everyone who did write. Honestly I would have done this much earlier if I was in my regular timezone.

In the long run, I'm considering putting geekdinner.co.uk on the same blojsom install, but I'm worried this will screw up the other geekdinners around the country. And geez, everyone just can't get enough of WordPress. By the way Photomatt is a very cool, down to earth guy and well worth talking to if you get a chance.

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Body Hackingwith Quinn Norton

Body Hacking
Quinn Norton, Reporter, Wired New

Quinn talks frankly about her rare stone/magnet finger experience. The wrap for the rare stone broke and her body started to attack the rare stone and left over bits of iron. When trying to pull out the iron bits, it broke into pieces and made its self impossible to remove. After a few months, the pieces formed back together because their magnets. And was finally removed. But there is a good chance, there are still bits left and so Quinn can never be scanned.

Taking control of our own bodies. Lasik surgery is the only body modification which is widely accepted.

Vaccination makes us a super human being, whats a enhancement and whats a treatment? steroids bad lasik good.

Social acceptance is the problem but unlike previous generations we only have a decade at most to get use to the idea.

Rights to your own body? Rights to Medical records, procedures, social trangression, the myth of self and compliance to self and arbitary access to pharma. This is a mess and getting worst. What happens to home made hospital rooms? these have been found already. Post human medical tourism calls in the idea of ethics. If your country doesn't do it, go somewhere which will. The pirate bay of body hacking? People want advantages.

2 Choices – Non medical markets for body hacking or backroom modifications? Also what counts as being Human?

http://www.ambiguous.org

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Emerging Technologies from IBM : Koala

Emerging Technologies from IBM Almaden Research Center–Koala & Spintronics
Tessa Lau, Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Research Center
Kevin Roche, Advisory Engineer/Scientist, IBM Almaden Research Center

Koala Technology allows you to automate web interactivity scripts to log into sites, fill in forms aka do repeative tasks. This means you can finally automate stuff online. Tessa suggested using it for scraping websites, automated changes like your skype location.

I'm thinking this is a killer application for pipelines if you can automate this stuff. 

http://www.research.ibm.com/koala

http://www.tlau.org/research

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Sufficiently Advanced Magic

Sufficiently Advanced Magic
Seth Raphael, MIT Media Lab

The difference between magic and science? Science is about giving away the secrets to so we can improve it. A long time ago Magic was Technology and now recently its been magic vs technology. Denouncing the value of magic is worrying. The point of this conference is that our technology is like magic now.

The history of magic

Religon, science and magic were combined and demostrated by sharmans. Scientific projects became magic tricks like in the prestage. Then Religon split from the magic in the bible. Then split between magic and science with alcalaum. Science branches off into Chemistry. Was Robert-Houdin a hacker? He was a clock maker and built the orange tree trick which is seen in the illustionist. He also built Automatas

Chess and the Turk. The Turk could play real chess and beat people. Whats the difference between that and Deepblue which beat Garry Kasparov? The Turk was a real person not a machine. Elektro was built by the westinghouse company as a robot of the future but was a remote controlled robot not real. Mr Electricty was very alien to people at the time but now we tamed electricty. Magic invited Cinema because they were trying to do ghost like effects.

Current day magic. Punchcard tricks. Marco Tempest is doing video online on You tube. Magications being using RFIDs for ages. Decks of card, tables, the whole lot.

And now some technology tricks

magicsethi.com

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The Core of Fun with Raph Koster

The Core of Fun
Raph Koster, President, Areae, Inc.

Things which work have a underling structure. Structure is deep but fractal, it breaks down into many levels. Raph uses jazz and blues music to demonstrate deep structure. Songs are made up of songs, games are made up of games.

Fun is a chemical response, we are all drug pushers.

4 Types of fun

  • hard – Solving hard puzzles and challenges
  • easy –
  • visceral – Roller coaster type fun
  • social –  Gloating

Magic Ingredients

  • Where?
  • When?
  • How?
  • What?
  • With?
  • For?
  • Few?
  • Phooey – Failure (fun comes from learning)

Much more at http://www.theoryoffun.com

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The Coming Age of Magic by Mike Kuniavsky

The Coming Age of Magic Mike Kuniavsky, Co-founder and Principal, ThingM

So generally a good talk but the best ubiquitous computing/ambient intellengance objects are magic like devices. Magic as a metaphor for ubiquitiy.

  • Nabaztag as a enchanted rabbit
  • Ambient devices globe as a crystal ball
  • Wonds already exist – Nintendo Wii anyone. Sony has a patent on a wond type of device for gaming.

Good magic should not cripple or hide its power. It should be open and adaptable.

Someone made the point that magic is rare and you had a hierarchy of wizards. Mike makes the point that magic wasn't democratised and this is the time for that to happen.

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When Unlimited does not mean unlimited

When your a UK ISP like Demon advertising to the public. The advert above for 8meg business enabled broadband at 24.99 pounds a month is exactly what I have had for the last 3 plus years. When Broadband first came out, Demon offered only one option of 512k broadband at 24.99, then has upgrades came along they split the line up into a cheaper 19.99 a month one which had no access to things like Newsgroups or static IPs. Fine I thought, Home Office is good for me, I don't mind pay extra for some of the above. However, when 8meg Broadband came along Demon changed the AUP. There was no mention of a limit on Broadband download use or anything till they changed it. Now it reads.

The THUS FUP* applies to Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 Broadband and variants of these products Customers only.

It is in place to ensure that THUS can continue to provide an acceptable standard of service in terms of download speeds, to the vast majority of our customers.

THUS will continually measure the performance of our broadband network and take steps to restrict the download speeds of very heavy users during peak periods, should their activities significantly contribute towards the risk of reduced speeds being experienced by the majority of our broadband customers. The peak period is 9am to 10pm .

All users will be monitored on a continuous basis. Only customers that consistently download exceptionally large amounts of data over a rolling 30 day period will be affected by the THUS FUP. THUS expects that less than 1% of its Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 customers will be affected by the THUS FUP. Any Customers who are affected will be notified if their speed is being restricted.

Speed restrictions will only apply during peak periods. Should a Customer's usage return to acceptable levels, adjudged on a rolling 30 day period, speed restrictions will be removed.

Now bearing in mind I've been with Demon for 13 years in some kind of form, you can understand why I'm pretty pissed off. Also you don't get a warning letter, they just do it and send out a letter. The letter which I don't have right now but keep meaning to type out (although we did read it out on geek and geekhag podcast number 6). In the letter they say the limits which are not specified in the above AUP are 50gig for home users and 60gig for home office users. I went over by 4.85gig at 64.85gig last month. So the upshot of all of this is that me and Sarah have been restricted to 128k broadband between 9am – 10pm every night. This wasn't so bad at the start because it only applied to weekdays. But then it changed to weekends too. I asked Demon many times to prove what they were saying by giving me a breakdown of the traffic but they never did (I'm going to leave out the many nasty stories of talking to Demon Customer Services – I hope to record them one day soon, when i get back from the states) So in the end I got the number for Demon Customer Care Support (yes there different and UK based) from the ADSL guide forums (you need to be logged on) which is 08000279190 for anyone who actually wants to cancel there account with Demon and get the MAC code so they can move somewhere.

But this is the problem, almost every ISP now has a AUP but their not being upfront about the actual limits and they still advertising as unlimited. Two ISPs which I was considering are pretty upfront about everything is Zen Internet and UK Freesoftware network.

So anyway, I'm obviously not the only person to have this trouble. Glyn pointed me to a register post about the same issue and a nice link to an e-petition about ISPs using the word unlimited in all advertising.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Insist that OFCOM and the ASA stop Broadband Providers  advertising 'unlimited' services that are in fact limited in the small print or by un-defined fair use policies

So far 2,427 people have signed up including myself. The petition is open till June 10th, so I would get signing soon. As for now, when I get back from the states, I'll be switching to UK Free software network which don't packetshape or restrict beyond whats been described up front on the site. Now if only others would do the same.

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Opening Keynotes on Monday evening

Tim O'reilly live

So after a brief talk by Rael Dornfest, We're into Tim's talk. He's doing his radar talk but not using his usual quote. This time he uses the pulling your weight quote. Then talks about hackers pre-production and pre-business. Mentions Snowboards, makers, Chumby and quick to produce hardware. Didn't know O'reilly was an invester in the Chumby. Made in China.com came up because theres lots of parts being made and others creating interesting bikes. Tim calls it opensource for hardware. Then points to a few talks like Matt Webb's and Adam Greenfield's talks. Moving on Tim brings up the Digg model for threads – Threadless.com. The future of manufacturing? Maybe but Tim did say something interesting about how you can make only the right amount of things. So labor costs and environment costs can be calculated a lot better.

The future of Attention. The attention recorder comes up but Tim talks about how people are putting out more details about themselves and shows off Twitter and Twitter vision. No one knows why its interesting it just is – promiscuous attention. Talks about Jyko? Looks like twitter. Tim says something is bubbling up here which he can't put his finger on quite yet.

Web 2.0 and Wall Street? Tim talks about Cathy Sierra and how the stalker has kept her away from the conference. Good on you Tim. transparency. Now hes talking about Limewire and Limebrokerage. Now prediction markets in inkling markets, just in time for a quick plug for the new magazine release 2.0.

Right now Peter Rip's: Web 2.0 over and out. Tim talks about what different about web 2.0. What Distinguishes Web 2.0 Uses System that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. Tim now brings up a screenshot of Aljazeera  and the page translated by Google. And makes the point that translations haven't got better, there's just more data to parse. Brings up Freebase then wonders where is the web 2.0 for credit cards and address books? Wesabe and Mint come up, how do we harness collective intellegence into old economies like banks and building socities.

Finally he ends up talking about online and offline and Adobe Apollo for about one minute.

Good talk Tim

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Live and direct from the Emerging Technology Conference 2007

Etech schwag

So when I bought my Dell laptop with the extended battery, I was thinking about conferences where theres usually very little power. So now I'm at Emerging Tech or Etech2007. I'm thinking I should really take advantage and try live blogging from the conference. Now don't expect beautifully written notes like Rachel Clarke (who does a awesome job of note taking). Mine are going to be rough and ready. I also tend to writedownthings which are totally new or very interesting to myself, so if your after actual conference news, this isn't going to be the place for that.

So whats happened so far? Well besides going out clubbing on Saturday night (yes Sarah is certainly not pleased with the photos either and Ben thought these were the tame ones, and that I actually had more). Getting my conference pass early and meeting up with Noor and Tom Loosemore yesterday inthe Hyatt,Honestly not much else has happened. I did go for a walk down to the bay/docks part and took loads of pictures. And was tempted to go looking for the FreETech unconference thing and somewhere to rent motorcycles but decided against it all. The Etech2007wiki isa little quiet at the moment except Phil Windley has posted up his notes and I'm staying off the IRC backchannel for now.

The social events are pretty much sorted out already. Monday (today) theres a load of special sessions including ones from Tim O'reilly and Rael Dornfest. Tuesday is the EFF pioneer awards, Wednesday theres the MakeFest and yes Werewolf afterwards. Thursday night theres some unofficial get togethers. Depending on how many people are left over on Thursday, I might throw a backstage werewolf social event because frankly 2 hours of werewolf isn't enough for us English.

Anyway, there's not much more to say right now. I'm going to charge my laptop and cameras up now. Go find some late lunch then head down to the Hyatt for the rest of the day. Oh my hotel – The Bristol Hotel is about 12mins walk from the Hyatt and is ever so cooler that those stuffy boring roomsin theHyatt. I'll take some photos of my room tonight but its nice and big, reliable free wireless through-out the hotel including the rooms, restaurant and lobby. If you don't have wireless they also supply ethernet connections free of charge and if all else fails you can request a modem (this is what the lobby staff were telling me). Oh just to note, there is no block ports and you can skype, vpn and use bit torrent without a problem. I bet Tom Coateswisheshe was here. There's also a 7-11 which is open 24hours a day everyday just around the corner along with wendys and some other stuff. Horton Plaza is the odd shopping mall and I'm only a short walk from the lively streets of 4th, 5th and 6th streets (gaslamp area).

Can anyone tell me why my GPS on my new M700 phone doesn't work here? I'm on Cigualar while here and yes some guy in the bar on Saturday did ask if my phone was the iphone – which i was not pleased about. He saw me wondering around using Google maps with my finger and must have assumed I was on a iphone or something.

meta-technorati-tags=etech07, etech, mobile, iphone, m700, san diego, werewolf, conference, sessions

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My first night in California

Yes there real lady

So what would do after a 10 hour flight to San Francisco then a transfer to San Diego 3 hours straight afterwards? Easy, go clubbing right? What? Don't tell me you would crash at your hotel, moaning about Jetlag!

Well I hit the streets of San Diego look for the low down on the city. By talking to bouncers you can find out everything you need including places to avoid and places to go at certain times. In the end I settled at a Bar called Henry's Pub (5th and Market street). It was playing a mixture of music including some quite funky house. Anyway I got talking to one of the bouncers (sorry forgothisname) and before long I ended up talking to a bunch of women who seemed to adore my accent although not exactly what they had expected in the middle of San Diego.

What was weird about chatting with these women was first there lack of maturity. Some of them were older than myself but acted more like teenagers that women. I gaged from a couple of them that they were all from a catholic school which kept them till they were 21! Most of the fake hair group were nurses and one of them was a teacher for high school (secondary school). There was also lots of talk about fakeness. They explained how in LA lots of women are completely fake and in San Diego its not likethat, bara few clubs outside of the market street area.There was also this odd look when I said I was going to San Francisco later in the trip. A couple of the women, talked about how there were lots of gays there. I found this very odd, and would say how there were a lot of gays everywhere including London just to freak them out a little. After to speak to one of more on this topic, I wouldn't say they were exactly homophobic, just slightly ignorantt because they were going by what they had seen on TV not reallife. Butwhat do you expect being locked up in a religious school till 21. The same women (the teacher) then mentioned she was a science teacher in biology. I had to ask about the whole evolution thing. She said her school was quite progressive and didn't band evolution but they've also allowed creativism into the classroom which in her mind was screwing everything up. It was odd because she was quite religious, like shetold meshe had only slept with one guy and that was her to be husband on the night of their engagement. So I'd assumed she might go for the whole intellngent design stuff. Just before we finished our conversation she mentioned how America is a new nation and will make lots of mistakes but it will get better.

Generally the women I spoke to were quite progressive and although somewhat religiouss, only about things like sex before marriage. The guys on the other hand were, well lets say not so progressive. No one I spoke to supported Bush but I certainly didn'tt want to push it.

So yeah good night had, didn't get back till about 2:30am (all bars and clubs shut at 1:30am in San Diego by the way) mainly because I walked the wrong way and decided to look for late night food. I think tonight I'll take it a little easier as its the day before Etech. But hey my Jet lag is gone now.

meta-technorati-tags=san diego, clubbing, america, women, bars, drink

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A review of Belle and Herbs in Newcastle

Belle and Herbs cafe

Belle and Herbs has been recommended by Meri, Elly, Gareth and Molly. So I checked it out with Meri and Elly when I was down in Newcastle the other day for the Backstage University tour. Its got a strange 60's vibe to it allwith odd shaped chairs and tables dotted around. The menu is used in the myspace page for the cafe. But once the smoothie comes out, you know your in for a treat. I ordered the berry which was Cranberry and something else. It was certainly lush and I had it not been for the size of the glasses, I would have ordered another one. Then the breakfast came out… I think I ordered the American.

American breakfast for myself

  • 2x Hashbrowns
  • 2x Bacon
  • 3xSausagess
  • 2x Fried eggs
  • 4x thick as a piece of toast pancakes
  • 2x pieces of toast

Yes seriously I couldn't manage it all although it was flipping awesome. I'll certainly be back one day soon. If your ever in Newcastle and can get to Heaton which is east Newcastle then go to Belle and Herbs. Its fantastic value for money and great tasting food, Thanks to Meri and Elly for the morning breakfast there, it was great.

meta-technorati-tags=breakfast, belleandherbs, belle and herbs, newcastle, heaton

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So busy and tired recently…

I have not blogged for quite a while. This is down to a few things.

  1. Ecto is simply doing my head in, as it keeps loosing draft entries and screwing up on the spellchecker. I paid for the software and I'm back to using W.blogger again.
  2. I have been out and about across the England and Scotland recently. I have actually been to more places up north that ever before. My Flickr account is full of pictures from different places. I also need to find the time to sort out all my pictures.
  3. Wireless has been patchy in some places and after a day of working and night of socialising, I actually do need to grab some sleep.
  4. When I'm at home, i've been preparing to go somewhere else the next day or so and the broadband has simply been a nightmare due to Demon's restrictions (more about this later).
  5. Last of all, when I do find the time to blog, the blog is down because Resin has shut its self down on the server. I then spend a little bit of time trying to work out what the problem is instead of blogging. This has been a real pain and I know your as pissed off as myself about this. I'm totally lost why after months of perfect service, why this has just started happening.

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