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Busy, blurring, and behind
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- 7/31 11:59 PM
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More than a month has passed, with nary enough time to reflect, process, and synthesize all the days' happenings into a sensible narative. Searching just my thoughts and memories rather than my archives, a few things come to mind.
BarCampSeattle
BarCampSeattle was excellent. The trip involved facing a few personal challenges, which I took as an opportunity to push myself further and lead two sessions on more experimental topics: "Buildering 101" on Saturday where a bunch of us climbed the Fremont Troll, and "How to be a superhero" on Sunday where I led a discussion on the many dimensions of what it means to be a hero, and how superheroes are different in each of those dimensions. Surprisingly, not only did I find that a lot (most?) of the sessions participants related to the topic in a very personal way, but also strongly encouraged me to propose it for SXSW Interactive 2009.
Supernova 2008 and Open Flow
With just a flight and a night to reset and recover, I met up with Jeremy Keith and hiked through the transitional badlands of China Basin to Supernova 2008. We serendipitously ran into most of the other panelists fo the Open Flow track and wrapped up final details. The next day the track itself exceeded my expectations thanks to the incredible panelists and their upfront and no-holds barred discussions.
In particular I want to thank David Morin, Joseph Smarr, and Kevin Marks for their direct and honest dialog (even if got a bit heated at times) which was the hilight of not only their "Whose Social Graph" panel, but perhaps the whole track. All three of these guys are smart, believe in open standards, are working very hard to make implement them, and are fighting a lot of short-sighted fear and pressure inside their respective "big companies" to do so and should be commended for their accomplishments in the face of such inertial opposition.
Microformats.org turns 3
Microformats.org's 3rd birthday was celebrated humbly with a gathering in San Francisco's Westfield food court, and a birthday cupcake, assembled from a coconut cupcake and green M&Ms, purchased moments beforehand at the Bristol Farms in that very food court. In addition, I kicked off a series of weekly microformats meetups to help with community dynamics. I've noticed that people are nicer to each other online when they've met in person, and thus the hope is that by increasing the frequency of such interactions, we can grow a more sustainable and increasingly healthier and stronger microformats community.
July
I last month I knew June was going to bring new levels of personal challenges and it did, to and thru the very end which culminated with yet another intense LifeCamp. And that was just June!
I was traveling and away from home for half of both May and June, thus I decided to "work local" and stay home for both July and August which was absolutely the right decision.
July I had the opportunity to host and hangout with a few friends that were traveling through town, and it was a nice change of pace to spend some quieter more indepth time with them, talking about a wide variety of cares and concerns. No conferences or speaking in July and yet, so much of this month was a blur, I have trouble recalling much more. I did visit my sister's family in Mountain View to celebrate Nephew 2.0's birthday where he attacked his chocolate cake as only a one year old could.
I still feel like I have a lot that is unresolved (certainly as indicated by the remaining size of my inbox.txt file), mostly personal. Looking forward to August, I'm not sure how I'm going to process (much less actually complete) it all, especially with speaking opportunities coming up at both WordCamp and An Event Apart San Francisco - each of which I'm preparing new talks for.
Start
In addition I've volunteered to help out my good friend Jeff Veen at his new Start Conference, which promises to be quite the event, judging from the quality of speakers and topics alone. The home page makes the message quite clear: "Quit your day job." and encourages "smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies." Perhaps they'll provide some inspiration to start focusing on dreams instead of worries, to spend more time building instead of just reflecting and resolving.
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