And More OpenWorld

Tuesday was a lighter schedule for me, but not without its drama.

My geek-speak Unconference session, which continues to bounce around Indian blogs, was at 10 AM, and I arrived in the room 40 minutes in advance, JIC. Good thing because I had forgotten the Mini DVI-VGA adapter for my Macbook.

For those who haven’t run into this or don’t have a Mac laptop, Apple’s hardware doesn’t have VGA outputs, which are standard on basically all the projectors you’ll find. So, you’ll need a DVI-VGA adapter, depending on the laptop, e.g. the Macbook Pro has a standard DVI out, the Macbook has a smaller, Mini-DVI out, and the Macbook Air has the itty-bitty, Micro-DVI output.

Luckily, there’s an Apple store right nearby Moscone Center. I’ve walked past it every day between the conference and my hotel, but I wasn’t sure it would be open at 9:30 AM. Taking a chance, I motored over there, working up an annoying sweat.

People were going inside, so I figure they’re open. Turns out they were, but only for Genius Bar appointments. Doh.

I managed to plead my way into the store to get the adapter and made it back to my session room with minutes to spare. Now for the irony. When projected, the black slides were basically unreadable, thanks to the sunlight pouring in through the windows.

I decided to run the slideshow off my laptop because there were only a few people there. Turns out I didn’t need the adapter, but now I have a spare I can carry with me to avert this crisis in the future. That makes me a feel a little less foolish.

What about the session? So, we started out with three people, Matt, Frank Bradley and a woman taking a conference call. We decided to chat instead, and then people began to arrive. The final tally was ten or so.

I think it went well, and I had fun chatting with everyone. It was a very formal session, natch, more of a conversation. Thanks for coming if you did. Feel free to use and add to the content. It’s shared with a Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike license over at SlideShare, and I’m hoping it becomes a working deck that evolves over time.

After geek-speak, I was done with my sessions for the conference. In the afternoon, Chris gave his Unconference session on Google APIs. As expected, it was popular, with about 20 or so people attending. This doesn’t sound very crowded, but with only 24 hours of promotion time, it was popular. I haven’t seen many other Unconference sessions, but I suspect that 20 is a nice number. I think we could have easily doubled that, given a bit more promotion time.

Chris covered a lot of APIs, and I’m hoping he’ll upload his slides to SlideShare (done). His talk made me want to geek out, and I now have a bunch of ideas rattling around my head.

Last night was our team dinner. Paul likes to do one whenever we assemble for a conference. Because we each work in different area codes (503, 510, 650, 925), we don’t get together very often IRL. The last time was in April at Web 2.0 Expo, and at that team dinner, Anthony ordered a giant prime rib.

Like a good solider, he sweated and worked at that steak for a long time. In the end, it defeated him, but not by much. This time, I guess he’d been training, because he ordered an even larger steak, about the size of his head.

He didn’t get very far, but I think his lunches for the week are good to go.

Afterwards, I hung out with the usual suspects (again). On my way back to the hotel, I ran into a guy asking for money. Not all that noteworthy, expect his pitch was transparency.

He explained that he wanted (not needed) money to get drunk, and he assured me that my money would absolutely not be used for food or any other purpose.

+1 for honesty.

We’re having some hiccups with the comments. Rich opened a thread with Disqus about it; anyone seen this? You can leave comments, but who knows if they’ll be around after we get this issue sorted.