Cubicgarden.com…

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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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 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
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
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 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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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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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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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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