Perhaps it's because I'm tired. Perhaps it's because I just want to be home in California. Perhaps it's because I'm uptight or picky or demanding. I don't know. What I do know is that this "Megan" crap continues. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the about page. If you email "Megan," don't expect a reply from me. I have no idea who she is.

Wouldn't you know it, I'm still in Boston. And while it continues to be sunny, it's gotten quite a bit colder and I'm wishing I had a heavier coat with me. Some additional meetings have caused me to postpone my return until mid-week.

I've posted my presentation, Weblogs as Peer-to-Peer Journalism from the O'Reilly P2P & Web Services Conference. The slides are rather sparse but you'll get a sense of what I was saying. It's (of course) much better in person. 🙂

Oh no. An American plane crash this morning in Queens. I've flown American twice in the past week, and am scheduled to fly again. I feel badly for American employees, they have been so nice and so thankful on my recent trips and over the phone when I've rescheduled my ticket. They just keep saying, "thank you so much for flying American, we really appreciate your business." No matter what caused this crash, it's another terrible blow for American, and for all of us.

I saw a commercial tonight for Out Cold, a movie written by a friend of mine from high school. It's coming out (at least here in Boston) on November 21 (I think that's what it said). I can't wait to see it, even though it loooks like a silly flick about snowboarders. But Jon Zack (the writer) is so g-damn funny, I'm sure it'll be great.

It's so nice to be in Boston. The sky is so blue and clear and sunny. The air is crisp. There are leaves everywhere. And it just smells so nice. It smells like fall. It smells like home. Today, walking from Charlestown to Beacon Hill and back again, I wonder why I choose to live anyplace else. Fall in New England, even late Fall, is magical.

Tomorrow I'm going over the river and through the woods to my grandmother's house. Honestly.

While I'm at it, I should tell you about how my flight yesterday from Washington National to Boston flew right over the Pentagon and I could see where the whole side of it was smashed out by the September 11 attack and subsequent debris removal. It was unreal. By the time my little plane passed over NYC it was dark, and all I could see were the floodlights at Ground Zero. Still, seeing it, and knowing what was missing, made me cry.

I'll probably post the rest of my thoughts about the P2P Conference and my slides from my talk when I return to San Francisco next week. I'm not likely to be online much before that.

Off to a slow start on the final day of the conference. I'm beat, and stayed up too late at a party last night talking with some really fascinating folks. I'm getting a little sad that the conference is ending today (at least for me, there's a day of tutorials tomorrow). Off to Boston this evening to visit family and friends.

At the conference there's wireless in all the conference rooms and public space. While it's wonderful to be able to pop open a laptop and be connected wherever one moves, the internet access in the actual conference rooms is a little distruptive. I've observed a good number of people (including myself) taking advantage of the web, email, and AIM during panels and presentations, which seems slightly rude to the speakers. Though people think they're listening as they code (yes, I saw someone programming), respond to mail, or carry on an IM conversation, they're really not listening as well as they could. Same goes for people who are trying to blog the session live (Wes and I were discussing the difficulty of doing this).

I'm not sure if anything should or could be done about this, of course. I don't think the solution is to remove the wireless access, because it's also really great to be able to pull up more information on something a speaker's referencing. I guess it's just important to be cognizant of the multi-tasking myth and be aware you can't really do two things well at the same time.

Meanwhile, I continue to be embarrassed by my laptop, which insists on hibernating when the battery level goes below 50%. Then when I try to restart, it craps out, emitting a high-pitched beep that turns heads, and serves up a display of strange colored lines. Only by removing the battery can I get it to respond and boot successfully. This, unfortunately, has happened several times in the middle of someone's session. Talk about rude!

Great panels continue here in DC. Both of mine went smoothly, though I nearly missed my presentation because I thought it started at 2:15 when it actually started at 2 pm. But I rushed down and made it, enjoying a lively conversation with folks about weblogs and peer-to-peer journalism and trust and media as business, among other things.

Also attending a panel called "File Sharing and Copyright Law: Basic Principles and Guidance for Developers" given by Fred von Lohmann from the EFF. It was fascinating and very impressive, Fred's a wonderful, engaging speaker. I plan on making a long overdue donation to the EFF when I get home, you should too. It turns out that the EFF only has 5,000 members. I'd always assumed it was much larger than that simply by the amount they seem to accomplish. Anyway, best quote from Fred on all the lawsuits and judgements that have been happening, (paraphrase because I didn't quite get it all down in time), "These cases aren't about piracy, there aren't even any pirates involved (note: because companies are being sued, not individual users). These cases are about industries trying to control technologies until they can figure out how the technology works with their business model."

Another gem: regarding the Napster decision, which effectively changed the architecture of the application, "do we really want the courts dictating architecture?" All I could picture was Sandra Day O'Connor in her black robe with white collar saying, "I'd really hoped we could do something with SOAP here, could you do more to open up your API?" God. Could you imagine? I learned some valuable, but troubling things at the great panel. Thanks Fred!

Today's the big Day of Talks, half an hour until Collaborative Journalism. Should be fun, though I'm tired. This getting up at 7 am is hard work, as is all the talking.

One of my favorite expressions so far, gleaned from the "Military Applications for P2P" panel yesterday was decision superiority. The armed forces are always looking to gain decision superiority apparently, and now I want to as well. I think that would be really helpful in most situations.

Another expression used yesterday that I loved came from Cory Doctorow in his "A New Way of Understanding P2P" presentation. He talked about the concept of an imagination proposition, or the idea that people get involved in something simply because it's interesting. An example he stated was the huge number of people involved in SETI@home vs. P2P projects searching for cures for AIDS or cancer. While the value proposition for an AIDS cure is higher than the search for extraterrestrial life, it's simply more interesting to people to dedicate their spare CPU cycles to the search for aliens. Imagination proposition. I love it.

My head is swimming from everything and everyone here at Day One of the P2P conference, and I'm remembering why I love conferences (good ones): it's amazing to have so many smart people in one place, talking up cool stuff. I've gotten so many great suggestions so far about, well, nearly everything. Two thumbs up! And oddly enough, I'm getting less nervous about doing my talk. I'll try to do a better summary later.

Woo hoo! Woo hoo! Woo hoo! Now that's some good baseball. 🙂