Well, there are certainly more than two – but two that are sticking out now – a couple of hours later. The first is something that Ryan Davis noted in the feedback – there wasn’t anyone hacking on code at 3am. And looking back, I didn’t hack any code at all during the un-conference. This was far more a discussion type event than a hack-together thing. Ryan found that a tad disappointing, but I took it as a positive sign on the diversity and attention on other people. I enjoy hacking with other folks, but I didn’t miss it.

And there was a session that I didn’t do anything about which I sort of regret passing on. I kept thinking I’d like to have a short discussion about storytelling and computing – and how you could make a good ‘story’ experience for 15 to 20 people where they all were their own main characters. Not the whole MMORPG thing, but something a lot smaller – more focused, and maybe just revolving around you and your friends. Of course, there’s always the Mind Camp 3.0…. so maybe in November.

Karen and I just returned home from MindCamp 2.0, where we both had a pretty darn good time. Completely as a surprise, Karen decided to she wanted to stay through the night last night (who woulda’ thought? At 11:30pm, she’s saying to ME “Yeah, go sack out – I want to stick around…:”. Heh – that’s unusual.

And while Karen was (I think) a bit nervous about “fitting in”, she didn’t have any trouble and I frequently swung back through common hallways or rooms to find her engrossed in a conversation with someone or nother.

Total attendance was something on the order to 190 folks, of which maybe 30 or 40 stayed the night, and I’m going to guess at 120 came back sunday morning. The talks were self-organized and an excellent mixture between raw chaos and “What’s interesting?”. The crew that sets up and runs mind camp does an incredibly good job at it.

Scanning through my moleskine, the big “notes” topics were on SEO and analytics; social networking and what people have done effectively (and sucked at) with mobile devices; attention as an economy that is more valuable than data; and some notes on location and how much wireless carriers suck for keeping their data secret/at a high enough cost that it’s useless for many small entrepenurial applications. Of course, that’s just my notebook – I’m sure there’s a ton of others. I saw a few of the familar faces, and met a good set of new ones as well.

I’ve got to say that this MindCamp was more diverse than the last one, to the positive end of the spectrum. A lot of different folks (although it seemed that half were microsoft employees at the introductions) outside of the “I code…” self-description. Toby Nixon came by on Saturday and talked for a bit, which was interesting. I don’t buy his viewpoints on several things, but I appreciated his candor with election reform (a sticky point with the last Gov’ners race here in Washington). Dave Winer was here too – but I hardly saw him. The local folks were far more interesting with thoughts and ideas.

The “common memes” were really media and mashups – mixing data and using it new ways (really – ideas about doing so). Seemed like there were a lot of “founder of x…” startup at the introductions, many of whom talked about media. It’s pretty clear that the Seattle tech community definitely has some roots in the audio/visual arts as well.

Lord knows I’ve a huge laundry list of urls to look up and mentally correlate. I’ll probably publish some of them after the fact, but I expect a huge number of them can be found by perusing the mindcamp wiki.

I just ate an incredibly poor lunch. The service was atrocious, the unagi donburi I ordered was smothered in uncooked onions and mushrooms (if you aren’t familar unagi is a pretty light flavor). And finally, when I paid they didn’t give me my full change because the waitress couldn’t be bothered to find any change.

And yeah, the waitress just got that 89 cents or something as a tip.

God, what an awful place. Bonzai  Bistro sucks. (and their website is screwed too).

Oh come on guys, “PowerShell“? Monad was a perfectly reasonable name, and it had the benefit of not sounding all defensive and “yeah, we really, really, really are doing scripting this time! See!!!”

PowerShell?

It is just too over the top.

Yeah, it’s all supposed to be smashed together like that.

I found an RPG for the PSP. I stopped by GameStop this evening, and found a copy of PoPoLoCrois used for a pretty decent price, so I picked it up. I played it for an hour this evening, and its pretty fun – very “16 bit” kind of graphics, spruced up a touch – and the game style is completely “retro”, which I’m loving. I expect this will keep me busy on the bus for a while…

You know, it may have been a a carefully architected succession plan as Sun calls it, but it was still a surprise to me. I like Schwartz (to listen to, I haven’t a clue what he’s like to work for) but he does come across as a bit “fast talking” and a “wild hand gesticulating” kind of fellow that reminds me of those professors in College who couldn’t really explain anything and often said “it is obvious that” or wrote “as an excercise for the reader…”.

I suppose he’ll be a perfectly legitimate CEO for Sun. It certainly needs a bit of an infusion, as I think it really got lost there in the middle of the last decade. Is he really the right guy? I guess we’ll see. I’m suspicious. And I don’t own any stock in Sun, nor do I really have any plan to buy some right now…

It dawned on my at the end of the evening that not everything was suddenly made hotter than usual today, but that I’ve worn down the skin on my fingers and they’re abnormally sensitive to heat. Sometimes, you know, they make the latte’s and such a bit too warm for me. But the soup at Metropolitan Market is pretty much the same temperature all the time – I can’t imagine it’s not set and left. That’s what finally clued me in.

I’m all stiff and a little sore today. I wonder why.

Karen and I have been beating the earth since 9:30am this morning. I’m bushed. (ha ha). I ripped out a hillside of sod, transplanted tribble-like grass bundles, transplanted a yellow-green cedar bush thingy, and dropped 4 or so trees into the ground. Somewhere in there I busted our pitchfork (bent it all out of whack), purchased a new one, and got the wheelbarrow’s wheel refilled with air at the filling station.

But hey, I’ve pics too.

The new front area – those lovely “drafts” of grassy tribble tufts are Karen’s design. She just told me which ones to “move” and which ones to “remove”. Removing, by the way, is MUCH easier.

The corner-on shot. If you’ve seen that corner recently, you’d realize that it has been completely denuded of grasses and sod. The vast majority of which Karen did. I just finished ripping some off. And the frontice-piece for the yard – that cute little cherry tree.

A little better closeup of that cherry tree. It’ll take a few years to grow in well, but I think it’s going to be a winner for the patio.

And Karen’s favorite pick – the mountain hemlock. I’m actually a little worried about how well it’ll do, but it definitely looks nice.

It is gross grand standing, but none the less intriguing and somewhat amusing to watch HP fire bullets into a RAID array as a means of “proof” of their redundancy.

I used to actually use the phrase “if the server were to take a bullet”, but that was mostly because everyone else started getting on me about how the meteorite was getting old. That, and there were some frustrating evenings that made it seem likely that some server was going to be used for target practice in the middle of the night.