Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley this year, I decided to go check out (it s actually a two-day event so I ll be back for more today). I doubt that there are too many CT readers who would participate in something of this sort, but if you happen to be there today, do let me know.
Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo!
products such as , and now even . The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we ll get to hear descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who s such a fan of some of Yahoo!
s products.
The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some . Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert.
I finally met Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we ve never met in person.
The surprise of the evening was the concert ( as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event).
The performance included of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr ( , ) and there s also a not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet s visit to Sunnyvale.
Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo! s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.
I interviewed Michael B rub by phone over the weekend for a now available from Inside Higher Ed.
As you might expect, B rub is well-spoken. Alas, the gremlins were just as efficient in doing their work, for there is a certain amount of hiss from the phone line. Here s hoping some people will try to listen past it.
My colleague Elia Powers made heroic efforts to remove the noise. I m told that this made B rub sound like a robot. Which, come to think of it, might have been pretty cool: A case can be made for doing all interviews with a Vocoder, la .
As it is, though, we did get in a little bit of Long Black Veil as covered in 1985 by , with B rub on drums and Ian MacKaye (in transit between Minor Threat and Fugazi) on vocals. For the full recording, go .
Word is that suspects are being rounded up for an online symposium on What s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?
later in the semester. It s understandable that the book should get the lion s share of attention. It s from a trade press.
But the other one, , from the University of North Carolina Press, will be a lot more interesting to many CT readers.
You would be able to see why, had the good folks at UNCP provided the table of contents, instead of .
it set me thinking about the way that old technologies get referred to in popular song.
There s no end of trains, especially in country music, but even horses and ferries get a lot of attention. Old technology is homely and part of the shared cultural experience even of people who hardly use it. By contrast, digital technology hardly gets a mention, and when it does the results can be embarassing.
from one Tim O Brien:
My hard drive it went soft, my application coughed,
and I m a runnin out of memory for you.
Ugh!
played a Guy Clark song tonight called Analog Girl .
It was pretty good, and managed to mention email and websites without making me want to curl up and die. But of course the whole point of the song is that its heroine is authentic because she eschews all contact with the digital world. Other non-embarassing mentions of computers, technology and the internet in popular song?
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