Wow, what a first day at Foo Camp! I've never been to anything like this. The people are incredible and the atmosphere is electric. Everyone is excited about what they are doing, or have done, and want to talk and talk about it. So far I've met bunch of very cool folks. Notably I met Tim O'Reilly again and we spent some time playing slot cars. He is excited about Podcasting Hacks, which I got an advanced copy of. I also met with my editor on Podcasting Hacks, great guy. And we spent a while playing with a high end Meade telescope that, while it had every modern gadget including GPS and self-levelling, couldn't find the moon.
I had dinner with Larry Wall, Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, and Doug Kaye. And had a long conversation with Ward Cunningham about his newest work on cheap and easy to program microcontrollers. In fact, I would have to say that a large contingent of these folks either into cutting edge web services, or some hardware type thing. Or do one of those things in the day, and another at night. I also met Phillip Torrone, who was impressed with Podcasting Hacks and is going to plug it at some of his speaking engagements.
I'm just blown away by this. It's been, even on the first day, the most positive and inspirational conference I have ever been to. Even in how it's self-organizing it's unique and interesting. Take for example the fact that there is no set schedule. They simply block up the day by time and room on a big chart and people just take pens and write what they are going to talk about, on topics as diverse as religion to 3D printing.
By the way, here is one cool thing that was already talked about, Instructables which is a site like Slashdot but with instructions on how to make stuff from brownies to stretch bikes. Another is Smugmug which is a new photo sharing site. And finally there is Greasemonkey which allows you to alter the DOM of the document running in the browser from your own Javascript. And yet another is the Yahoo! Significant Terms stuff which I may end up using in the news analysis tool.
On a lighter note, there was a two hour poker fiesta last night where I made $40.
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