I have this observation to
/I have this observation to make: Tim O'Reilly is a fucking genius.
I have this observation to make: Tim O'Reilly is a fucking genius.
Beth is a blogging machine, I can see her about 8 feet from me, typing quickly on her tablet PC. She's got some great live coverage of Gnomedex, so if you're wondering what's going on here, check out her site.
I'm well rested, and ready for another day at Gnomedex. I'd blog more, if the wi-fi would cooperate, it's still flaky. Yesterday, Howard Butler spotted me wandering around looking for a place to eat lunch, so I wound up sitting with him, and some geeks from Minnesota. We swapped information about the various campus environments we work in, while eating tasty cake. After lunch, Rob Malda from Slashdot gave an interesting, if somewhat rambling, talk. I asked him who he saw as Slashdot's biggest competitor. He said he didn't think they had any competitors. I couldn't think of one either, which is why I asked the question. :)
Malda also said, when asked about Linux on the desktop, that he's doesn't think it's going to materialize anytime soon, and that Apple beat Linux to it with Mac OS X.
Kevin Ugangst from Microsoft's Media division gave an interesting speech, and showed off Halo, which is coming out soon for the PC and Macintosh. I already have Halo for my Xbox, but damn it looks great on the PC, with more weapons, vehicles, etc. thrown in. I hope it doesn't come out for a while though, as I have plenty of games to play right now.
I skipped out on the movie night to go eat at Spaghettiworks (thanks to alert reader Emily McMahon) with my wife, then we drove over to Clive to visit with some friends and see their new baby. According to Mike, I missed out on free beer, but I can handle that, as long as they didn't call my name for any prizes that I wasn't there to win, such as the Windows Media PC. I'll freely admit now that I'm picky about these sorts of things, but I really didn't want to watch movies projected onto a screen with a projector that wasn't quite bright enough, with mono sound. No thanks, I've got a 53" widescreen HDTV at home with 5.1 surround sound, and my living room isn't filled with fellow geeks tapping away at their keyboards. :)
Hmm, I don't see Rob Malda anywhere around, but Slashdot won't let me access the RSS feed, it says I'm abusing the feed by requesting it too often. What's really happening is about 150 people are online from one IP address, using NAT, so it just LOOKS like I'm abusing it.
Dan Gillmor is talking now, he's another smart guy, who really GETS weblogs, after Dvorak made it painfully obvious that he did not. They're not all about people's cats. I don't even own a cat. Gillmor is right about the need to verify things they post, and even has the Kaycee debacle mentioned in his slides.