When Microsoft couldn't get me to TechFest as planned, we decided we still wanted to go to a conference about emerging technology - how handy that O'Reilly was running one that week and that a friend reminded us at just the right time. It's like spending a week mainlining gadget blogs, New Scientist and Usenet but with other people in the room - lots of really smart, really interesting people. I wish I could have got to more sessions and sometimes I picked the interesting (food hacking, Violet Blue on constructing online sexuality) over the professionally interesting (understanding debugging, open source hardware). There's a big writeup over on Tom's Hardware of what we did see...
From nanoscale processing to measuring and simulating crowds, from phone calls inside your browser with Adobe’s Flash-based Pacifica service to Google on your phone with Android, from Google predicting the future to the Department of Defense taking nine months to build a wiki to speed up procurement, ETech looked at what might emerge next.

At the San Diego Marriott for Etech, finding the session on visualization both fascinating and an extension of things that have been well known elsewhere; the democritisation of development can lead to some principles being discovered all over again. We need to educate people in visual grammar, so image manipulations and distorting graphs are as obvious as specious arguments in other forms becuase the visualizers will not always be pure of heart.
The restrooms here are labelled both m
en and women, ladies and gentlemen, side by side. wonder what the extension of the irregular verb men perspire, ladies glow is for restroom activities. Ladies flush?