ETech

I had a blast at ETech in San Diego.

At every turn there was somebody interesting to meet, chat with or listen to.

I took a ton of notes, with good intentions of turning them into a blog post, but that’s not going to work out.

Instead here are four random/great quotes from the week:

  • Steve Cousins, responding to a question about his proposed open source platform for personal robots: “In the civilian robotics area we don’t really use the words ‘killer application’”
  • “Exercise – the poor mans plastic surgery” – from Kathy Sierra slideware.
  • Nat Torkington, via Twitter, in response to an Ignite presentation by Noel Dickover from the US Department of Defense: “General rule for ETech speakers: ‘decreasing the kill chain’ tends not to be the goal of the average attendee.”
  • Tim Ferris, explaining why his PDA doesn’t have an internet connection: “I don’t trust an inbox in my pocket any more than I trust dark chocolate in my house.”

And, one quirky website:

Finally if you have six and a half minutes to spare, you should check out Saul Griffith’s Ignite presentation on Howtoons (which I can recommend if you have some young kids to entertain) from the first night of the conference:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wyLHOTwvzf4

Saul is a super smart but friendly Aussie, who also did a keynote later in the conference on Energy Literacy, which was also excellent. I really hope this will be available online sometime soon so I can link to it. In the meantime this interview gives you a bit of the flavour:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wbwxF47x5ss

Blog bankruptcy

I now have one million half written blog posts in my drafts folder (more or less).

I suspect this is a pretty common situation.

This morning I’m declaring blog bankruptcy and accepting that I’m never likely to have the time to finish many, if not most, of them.

There are a few which are pretty much done, but have just never been published for various reasons. I’m going to keep these, and push them out over the next couple of days.

In keeping with my theme of the moment, the others are toast.

Deleting them is a big relief. If I’d known that I would have done it much sooner.