Today is the last day, and the keynotes were quite a bit more interesting than previous ones. First off was the CEO of Linden Labs, the creators of the amazing alternative world/economy/lives Second Life. It was cool to see the new tech coming to SL but I thought his points were rather vague and basically obvious. The founder of Wikimedia was next, talking mostly about how important it is that Wikia, an open source search technology, is to the world and how important it is that search and its data is “open.”
Simon Wardley was originally slated to give a speech about the open sourcing of Zimki, but as the owning company decided against OS, he gave a very witty and duck-oriented speech on why commoditization of infrastructure and IT is so important. I thought this was brilliant and not often said enough: every company spends way too many resources on solving the exact same issues (what he referred to as yak shaving), from networking and server processing power to email and file sharing. We should be pooling our resources into what is basically a grid. Nat Torkington, the conference chair, gave a cute set of keynotes on the psychologies of various open source conferences. And then James Larsson demonstrated some very novel and dangerous uses for older hardware, from an electrocuting monitor-based mousetrap to a leather fetishist’s version of Pong.
The sessions today were mostly a bust, honestly. I couldn’t find much to relate to work so I went to the Make editor’s talk on open source hardware and micro controllers. I was desperately looking forward to the OSS Robotics session, again non-work related, but work came to the rescue with an emergency that needed attention which pulled {Kimsal} and I out for 2 hours. And then the convention was over!
After some lunch, we decided to go visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I love science museums but I must admit that I was quite disappointed with this one. Unfortunately most of the exhibits weren’t working very well. The coolest part was definitely going on board the U.S.S. Blueback, the last non-nuclear submarine the US ever built (SS 581). The guide was really quite good and engaging. We later went to an OmniMAX movie, which is a dome shaped IMAX theater which probably covers a good 180 degrees of your vision. The movie was about the Bayou wetlands and Katrina, and boy was it a terrible movie.
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Our flight was around eleven so Saturday couldn’t really amount to much. We were going to take the MAX light-rail system to the airport, but got psyched out because all the arrival time boards said that MAX was out of service downtown (who knew where that was). So we took a towncar to the airport, flew to Phoenix and then got delayed about an hour because a window needed to be replaced. Replaced?! I’m amazed that is was as simple as an hour job. But we got underway and got back to Raleigh about 23:45.
