Tim Bray just finished his keynote. It was a good overview of blogging, some do's and dont's. What I found even more interesting (and Tim was quite intersting) was the crowd. The room was full - standing room only! 220+ people. There were about 20 people in the crowd who don't blog (but are curious). There was even one person who hadn't heard of "Sun Microsystems" - "Is that related to the newspaper?" Quite a different group than I'm used to at conferences, but it's absolutely amazing to see the diffusion of blogging. Robert Scoble just got set up. I'll pay attention now...

I crashed the Northern Voice pre-conference blogger's lunch at The Fish House in Stanley Park today. That was pretty cool. Met a whole bunch of people that I only knew online before, and met many more new folks. I was pretty much blown away by the turnout. Brian says there are over 200 people registered in the conference tomorrow. Not bad for something that began as a locals-only blogging-awareness festival!

The conversation over lunch was great. Looking forward to the sessions tomorrow!

I'm tagging along with Brian today, and he's doing a panel session at a conference for music librarians (I didn't even realize there is such a thing as music librarians).

The session is titled "RSS and current awareness for music librarians". Everyone is getting into weblogs and RSS. It's basically a brief intro to the wonderful and wacky world of content syndication, a distilled abstract of NorthernVoice, which runs tomorrow, about 3 blocks down Robson street from here...

I realized that after the Pachyderm development team has been talking about the Big Pachyderm 2.0 Demo today, that nobody outside of the project has seen this particular beast. You may have heard something, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a screenshot of the screen editor, which is basically a fancy schmancy web page form, with boxes to enter text, and widgets to select media and links. The particular screen type shown here is called "Variety of Media" - and it can handle images, video, and text (hence the Variety in its name).

I just got an email from my dad telling me about this cool new audio tool he found for making phone calls on the computer for free. Skype, he says, sounds pretty cool.

My dad is turning 70 this year, and really enjoys tinkering with his iMac. He's got a (now aging) blueberry iMac, and it's tricked out with extra RAM and MacOSX 10.3.

And he's finding stuff like Skype.

So, I just added him to my contacts list, and we played around a bit. I called him on Skype Out, and he was pretty impressed. I'm even more impressed that he's able to find and use these things, and that he actually gets it. I hope I'm still doing new things when I'm 70... :-) (woah - just realized I'm just over half way there.. )

I'm heading to Vancouver a day early for Northern Voice. Planning on hanging around Vancouver a bit, maybe take in the BlogWalk, and relax with Brian (D.J. Wiki) Lamb. Should be fun.

I'll either be blogging more often, or less. Not sure... Someone is likely to be blogging the conference, though... :-)

Crap. It's official. So, I guess we'll be turning back to our official national sport: lacrosse?

Come on guys... How much money is enough (for either side). It's a freaking GAME, people. You're getting/making millions of dollars to play a freaking GAME. Perspective might be a good thing...

If you're going to be at WebWise 2005 in Washington DC, stop by and check out Larry Johnson demonstrating Pachyderm 2.0. The software isn't quite done, but you'll get a good idea of what Pachyderm 2 is, how to use it, and what it produces.

The next chance to see it outside of the Bat Caves will be at Museums and the Web 2005, in Vancouver (April 13-16 2005).

PS. I realize I'm taunting the Demo Gods. Hopefully they are forgiving... We've been paying our dues big time on this sucker...

Actually, I upgraded my WP installation when I saw that 1.5 was final (yesterday?) Looks like I borked something while updating, because it was impossible for people using IE on Windows to see my weblog without getting a scary security download warning. Oops. Sorry about that, folks!

(I think) I've fixed it now, with a fresh install. (delete all non-config files, upload fresh copy of WP, run upgrade.php)

Remember to RTFM...

If you're working at an institution that isn't a member of the New Media Consortium, you might want to check out their freshly posted membership invitation.

It's a really great group of people, from an amazingly varied group of institutions, working on some pretty cool stuff. The Summer Conference is always informative and energizing, and members are on the inside track on initiatives like Pachyderm and the like.

Membership isn't free, but it won't break the bank, either. And no, I don't get commissions... Hmmm... I should check into that! :-)

Boris Mann just posted link to an iCal Schedule for Speakers at the Northern Voice conference this Saturday. The iCal calendar was compiled by Northwest Noise.

Excellent. I've already subscribed to it in iCal, so it will sync onto my iPod calendar next time I drop it into the cradle. Handy way to keep track of the conference schedule...

Thanks, Boris!

Brian's MovableType install blew up pretty badly last month, when the BerkeleyDB database that was serving as the back end basically crumbled under increasing spam crapflood attempts.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Brian's team (especially Ken Pratt and Michelle Chua), they were able to resurrect the misbehaving database and migrate it safely to MySQL. Now, it should perform much better, and be easier to backup and repair if needed. I'm hoping Ken can be persuaded to document the process he concocted to help save future victims of the same problem.