Monthly Archives: December 2008

Happy Holidays!

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It’s Christmas day, and I’m down in the Bay area (Palo Alto to be precise, at my cousin’s house). Jessica flew down with a friend, and convinced me to come down as well, and since Uri’d never been here before, he joined me on my drive down. We’ve done a few touristy things, but since our budget is fairly tight, mostly we’ve been just exploring the area. We spent a day in San Francisco, which was arguably the rainiest day we’ve had the entire time we’ve been here (alas!), but we still had fun and got to explore a bit (we’ve done both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges… also did the crooked road). We also took a day and drove down to Santa Cruz via Half Moon Bay and Route 1 — really gorgeous drive, and surprisingly light traffic.

I’ll write a more involved post later, but I did want to wish everyone some happy holidays, and that we’ll be back around the 29th!

LiveBlog: CyborgCamp

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9:43am: Currently in the Forum at Cubespace, waiting for opening remarks on CyborgCamp, Amber Case (@caseorganic appears to be MC’ing.

9:50am: there are several extras for following what’s happening with CyborgCamp (#cyborgcamp): CyborgCamp Backchan.nl, CyborgCamp LiveStream, Twitter Tracking.

Should definitely check out the sponsors at CyborgCamp.com.

10:00am: Still going through sponsors, each is getting a chance to get up and sort of give their spiel as to what they do. I’ve yet to see any that aren’t worth checking out.

Explanation of an unconference — a mixture of established presentations, and blocks of time where you can create breakout sessions — if you have something you want to discuss or present, just put it on a card, put it on the grid. The point is to make these conferences to work for you. There is no commitment as an attendee — go where you’re finding value; if something isn’t what you wanted, go somewhere else.

10:12am: Okay, starting to organize the unconferences and meeting back here in 30.
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“Icky Speech”

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Neil Gaiman expounds quite clearly on why even “icky” speech needs to be protected. This is in response to a comment regarding the Handley case, where a Manga collector is being prosecuted for owning obscene materials. Something I would add to the dialogue personally is a favorite H.L. Mencken quote:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. (H.L. Mencken)