BarCamp Vancouver 2008

I spent most of yesterday on Granville Island at BarCamp 2008 and it was a blast.
Things actually started off Friday night at WorkSpace for the opening night party and then up bright and early for the actual ‘unconference’ on Saturday.

This year, I helped organize PhotoCamp which is one of the few pre-determined ‘tracks’ (the other being WordCamp). BarCamp is meant to be an adhoc-like conference where the sessions are proposed by whomever shows up on the day, not weeks in advance. Photo (and Word) Camps require a little more prep since it’s not just an open talk but the idea behind all of them is that the participants shape the conversations.

Photo by Peter Andersen

I ended up giving a talk in the morning about jailbreaking the iPhone 3G (why you might want to do this, what’s involved, etc) which was well attended and seems to have been well received. You can get the apps to jailbreak your 3G here as well as to unlock your 1st gen iPhone.

Then I headed to check out the remaining portions of WordCamp and ended up giving a talk (more of an overview) of the FAlbum plugin I use on this site to share my Flickr photos.

PhotoCamp
Derek K. Miller started things off by explaining a number of digital photography concepts using his collection of film cameras and referencing his excellent cameraworks series of blog posts on the topic.

Next up was Tris Hussey who discussed some of the online photo editing services like Picnik.

Another session I led was about plastic/toy cameras and Elizabeth showed some of her cameras and photos she took with them along with mine.

Then Cameron Cavers and I talked about lens adaptors and macro extension tubes. There seemed to be a lot of interest in these inexpensive addons and the conversation quickly turned to all kinds of cool hacks and things you can do to/with your camera.

As we were quickly running out of time, our last discussion was around camera bags. There was just about every kind and style of ways to carry all that precious gear in the room and it ended up being a show and tell with everyone showing what they use and why.

Unfortunately, there was a little confusion about the end time so when we finally cleared out of the space used for PhotoCamp, the other sessions had already finished but we did manage to meet up with a bunch of BarCampers, had dinner and then finished up with a short photowalk around Granville Island at dusk.

Strangely, I barely took any photos yesterday.

Thanks to everyone that helped make BarCamp happen as well as everyone that came out to hear what I had to talk to about - I hope it was as useful to you as it was fun for me to share. See you next year!

Update: Here’s Roland’s Qik video of my iPhone session (shot with his Nokia):

Update #2: Here’s Warren’s interview video from my iPhone session:

Back from Austin - SXSWi 2008 Wrapup

I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.

So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:

• this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
• I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
• 12 sessions per time slot does not work
• 10am panels are very hard to attend
• there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
  
• the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
  
• Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
  
• Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
  
• Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
• Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
  
• Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
• in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
  
• Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
  
• you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
  
• iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
• I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
  
• If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
• Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
• Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
  
• There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
• I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
  
• As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
  
  
• as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.

That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.

See you next year, Austin!

Last call for boarding

The countdown has begun to Thursday morning when many Vancouver locals will crawl out of bed much eariler than normal and head down to YVR to board their flights to Austin, Texas for the 2008 edition of South by Southwest. Many of us will be on the same flight which should make the trip that much more fun.

There is still a lot to do to prepare for the trip. I still have to go through the schedule of events while at SXSWi but may take it day by day instead of spending too much time planning every hour of the conference. There are many ways to see what’s going on from the official site, Upcoming, Facebook and the SXSW Insider on Ning to name few. If you’re planning on attending any events or parties, it’s probably a good idea to scope things out in advance and rsvp. While many events are open to all Interactive attendees with a badge, demand usually far exceeds capacity so get on a list if there is one and show up early.

While down in Texas, I’ll probably not be doing a lot of blogging around here until after the conference but will be dropping dispatches from Austin on Miss604, Flickr, Utterz and Twitter…and possibly other places depending on what I find and have time for.

As more of a backup plan in case Twitter implodes under heavy use during SXSW, I decided to setup my own pseudo version of it using the recently released Prologue theme for Wordpress. If you’re going to be down in Austin and want to try it out, drop me an email or direct message and I’ll add you to the list. Using this theme and a standard Wordpress install, we’ll be able to micro-blog what we’re doing without relying on other services to be available as well as not bombarding the non-attendees with tweets.

It’s pretty plain and simple at the moment (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it loads fast) and that could change if I get time between packing and getting ready. A nice feature of the theme is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everyone’s posts or just a specific person so I’ll probably plug my feed into a few services.

That’s it for now….gotta go find my giant suitcase.

Northern Voice 2008 Wrap Up Part 2

A few of us have been noticing that there hasn’t been as much chatter on the internet about Northern Voice during or immediately following the event. As well, the page views on Flickr seemed to be a lot lower than last year. Personally, I think it’s just that everyone hasn’t fully had a chance for it all to sink in yet. As I’m finding by new followers on Twitter, new contacts on Flickr and a bunch of new feeds I’ve been reading, it’s slowly gaining some momentum after the fact.

Let’s face it, a weekend of conferencing takes it’s toll on people and especially since most of the attendees have normal day jobs that they returned to almost immediately. It takes awhile to get your head around what you participated in and find a way to record or publish those thoughts. Not to mention taking care of all the things you didn’t tend to during the conference.

So in that vein, I thought I’d followup my somewhat brief recap with a few more cool things I’ve found since the weekend:

• my pal, Duane Storey, pulled some awesome out of his hat with his amazing photo mosaic of all the tagged photos in Flickr he could hoover down. He called it 1600 reasons to love Northern Voice and I’m sure he’ll have to rename it as that photo number keeps growing as attendees get out their card readers and upload more shots to the Flickr stream. As Gene said in his post, if you can’t find yourself in those photos, you weren’t there.
• I twittered about it a bit and mentioned it in my first recap but I keep coming across blog posts and photos of people that I wish I had a chance to either spend more time talking to or even just meeting at the conference. I guess one of the cons of going to a conference in your own town, with a lot of friends in attendance, is that you don’t get outside your circle as much as you would if you were somewhere you didn’t know many people. That and there is never enough time.
• I wish I had an opportunity to chat with Stewart Mader whose presentation about Wiki’s I really enjoyed at last years NV and missed his this year. He’s been rounding up some great links and comments from other people as well as doing a great job liveblogging a lot of sessions
• Another missed meet/chat was with Alan Levine who gave a great presentation on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” in which he outlines some of the amazing web tools out there you can use to tell a story. Something he did with all 50 tools and the same story. Alan also managed to capture one of my favorite open mic sessions at the Opening Night party by Scott Leslie called Trackback Love.
• Bobby Dassler took an awesome set of polaroids that turned out really cool…and I’m even in there
• DaveO’s amazing “F*ck Stats, Make Art” session is now available via Audio (MP3) thanks to Cosmo and Matt’s keynote audio is here although he says that it may not be a great experience without the slides. Stewart has a transcript as well.

There is a ton more stuff that I missed that I hope makes its way online eventually. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to next year already.

Check out the Northern Voice wiki for other things you (or I) may have missed.

Update: Looks like videos of Miranda’s natural light talk and Reilly’s modified light talk have been posted. Both are great parts of PhotoCamp. Great video capture job too!

Northern Voice 2008 Wrap Up

Just like last year, I had a great time at Northern Voice. Like many (good) conferences, there is always too many people you want to talk to or meet and simply not enough time. Maybe next year there should be a scheduled block of ‘hanging in main hall’ just so you have a little more quality time between sessions to chat.

This year I convinced a few friends that might not ordinarily go to a conference like this to come out and I think they had a great time like I did. My favorite session easily was Kris Krug’s PhotoCamp and still think (like I did during BarCamp) that it could be it’s own stand alone conference. Dave Olson also had an outstanding session about making art instead of worrying about “fucking stats”. Looking forward to hanging more with these guys in Austin real soon.

I enjoyed all the sessions I attended (check out Rebecca’s always awesome liveblog posts of many sessions) but if there was one negative about the conference (which happens to all of them) is that there were a couple of sessions happening concurrently I would have liked to attend but had to make a choice. Judging from the results, Rachael Ashe’s session on light painting looked fantastic and I really should have went to it. I really like the mix of art that has worked its way into some of these tech(ish) events and it’s inspiring to see people doing really cool stuff right in front of you.

Using a cool trick Derek Miller shared at PhotoCamp, here is my Northern Voice wrap up in pictures:

I’ll try to tag as many of the photos as I can but feel free to tag yourself if I didn’t.

Special shout out to Jennie (who flew in from Pittsburgh!) and Dan (from Toronto) for coming out west for a few days. I wish we had more time to spend together.

I completely forgot to pick up a “Bloggable” T-shirt during the conference….maybe Boris can help me buy one. Maybe next year Basco5 can do some t-shirts too.

Northern Voice Keynote Speaker announced

Tickets are almost sold out to this year’s Northern Voice conference. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg, creator of the Wordpress system that I use to power this site, will be giving the keynote at the conference…although there hasn’t been a post about Matt on the conference site, he blogged about it on his so it must be true.

I’ve had the chance to see Matt speak twice now: at SXSW last year and at WordCamp last summer. Like Larry Lessig, he knows how to give a great presentation. He also happens to have one of the coolest personal domain names : http://ma.tt although it sounds like it was a bit of an ordeal to acquire. Someone beat me to the one I should have gotten.

This year’s conference is shaping up to be a great one! See you at the Waldorf for the opening party!

BeerCamp

My buddy Duane is cooking up a cool idea currently called BeerCamp which seems appropriate to me since we met over beers at the SuperHappyDevHouse last year.

The idea is that a bunch of people camp out for the weekend with the goal of creating a company from scratch during that weekend.

Head over to Duane’s blog for the full scoop and post in the comments if you’re interested in participating. All the usual event stuff will come if there is enough interest.

Update: Looks like it will be called StartupWeekend Vancouver…there will still be beer in attendance so calm down.

MobileCamp Vancouver

On Saturday, I attended the first MobileCamp Vancouver, held at Workspace which makes my second visit there in two days…if I didn’t already have an office, this is where I would set up shop. It really is a cool place.
There was lots of things to talk about during the event - too many to blog about. I particularly liked John Boxall’s session on iUI for the iPhone which I’ve been playing with. It’s very easy to work with and works in most browsers (except IE, of course). 

Check out the rest of my photos from MobileCamp.

DemoCamp Vancouver 03

This Thursday, October 4th is the next DemoCamp event at Workspace in Gastown - a very cool place and the home of BarCamp as well as this Flickr story.

As I mentioned a few months ago, DemoCamp is an event where people show up, pitch something they want to demo and the rest of the attendees vote on who gets to give their presentation. It’s a great place to show off something cool you’re working on to a group of smart people. Last time, I got to see and play with an iPhone - possibly one of the first ones in Canada as it was just days after it’s launch.

So if you’re interested in attending, signup on the wiki or the Facebook Event….who knows who or what cool thing will end up at this week’s event?!

Update: Back from DemoCamp (and a few beers with Peter). No big wrapup (see Rebecca’s excellent live blog for the full scoop), just some iPhone pix from the event. I swear these events get better and better everytime!

PhotoCamp 2007 Wrapup

During BarCamp this year, Kris Krug hosted PhotoCamp which was actually a session within the BarCamp program and not a longer event as I had originally thought. I touched on it very briefly in my BarCamp wrapup post but thought I should elaborate on it a little more since there was lots of good stuff in there.

Andrew Ferguson started things off by giving a talk about running a photography blog and the amount of effort it takes to keep an audience - basically you have to post daily or at least regularly because there are so many photography related sites out there, fresh content is (and always will be) king. I just started reading Andrew’s blog as a result of PhotoCamp and he’s got a lot of great stuff for photo geeks on there.

Matt Trentacoste was up next and gave a talk on ‘Computational Photography’ which was very interesting. He talked about what advantages digital photography gives over traditional, film based photo editing. While I do love messing with photos in Photoshop, most of my stuff is left untouched. I did love playing in the darkroom back in high school (where I first fell in love with photography) but like Matt says in his slides(PDF), darkroom work is hard work….and also quite expensive compared to the cost of decent photo editing software. He also talked about different software that can help correct issues caused by optical distortion or noise. His last part was about wavefront coding which (if I understand it correctly) is basically the ability, in software, to correct things like blurry images - basically (or maybe optimistically) an unblur filter that would allow you to fix blurry images (assuming you had the right camera gear to take the image in the first place) without affecting other variables in the image. Really cool stuff.

Duane Storey gave a talk about his HDR photos and went through the process to get the great shots he does like the one above. He does it via post-processing software called PhotoMatrix. I still haven’t had a chance to really play much with HDR yet but want to even more now.

Kris wrapped up the session with basically an open Q&A about various software and camera techniques, managing your photo workflow (Lightroom, iPhoto, etc), what lens to buy, etc…too many nuggets that I didn’t capture.

All that got squeezed into just over an hour and a bit. Seems to me there is probably enough cool stuff to talk about, smart people to give presentations and interested people to have a stand alone/full day event for photography geeks.

Thanks to kk, Andrew, Matt, Duane and everyone else for a great session.