I spent last week in Belfast for the Build conference, so I did.
The fun kicked off with a workshop on responsive enhancement which was a lot of fun. Toby has written a report of the day outlining all of the elements that came together for a successful workshop.
The day of the conference itself was filled with inspiring, uplifting talks full of positive energy …except for mine. My talk—All Our Yesterdays—had an underlying sense of anger, especially when I spoke about the destruction of Geocities. If you heard the talk and you’d like to explore some of the resources I mentioned, here’s a grab-bag of links:
- Stock and Flow by Robin Sloan.
- Archive Fever by Matt Ogle.
- This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor on Damn Interesting.
- The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation.
- Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape by Radiolab.
- Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger.
- Lest We Forget or Why I chose the World Wide Web as a repository for archival material by Simon Pockley.
- Cool URIs Don’t Change by Tim Berners-Lee.
- “The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.” on Long Bets.
- Game Web 2.Over? by Meg Pickard.
- Link Rot by Connor O’Brien.
- Ugly and neglected fragments by Phil Gyford.
- Yahoo!locaust by Jason Scott.
- Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart on the Pownce blog.
- Why you should have a website: it’s the law! by Steven Pemberton.
- The Domesday Project by the BBC.
- Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services by the Open Planets Foundation.
- Swiss Fort Knox.
- Validation by Owen Briggs.
- [whatwg] several messages about HTML5 by Ian Hickson.
- Accelerando by Charles Stross.
- Microsoft and FairUse4WM by Bruce Schneier.
- Forever by Mandy Brown.
I thought I had delivered the talk reasonably well only to discover that my American friends in the audience misinterpreted my quote from Tim Berners-Lee as “Cool your eyes don’t change.”
Still, it was wonderfully surreal to be introduced by Jesse Thorn.
My appearance at Build was an eleventh hour affair. Ethan was originally set to speak but he had to cancel. Andy asked me to step in. At first I didn’t think it would be possible. Last Thursday—the day of the conference—was the day I was supposed to fly to San Francisco for Science Hack Day. Luckily I was able to change my flight.
That’s why I was up at the crack of dawn the day after Build to catch an early-morning flight to Heathrow where I would have to dash from the lowest to the highest numbered terminal to get on my transatlantic hackrocket.
So you can imagine how my heart sank as I sat in the departure lounge of Belfast International Airport listening to the announcement of a delay to the first flight. First it was one hour. Then two.
When I did finally make it to Heathrow, there was no chance of making the flight to San Francisco. I was hoping that perhaps it too had been delayed by the foggy weather conditions but no, it took off right on time. Without me.
As my flight from Belfast was a completely separate booking rather than a connecting flight, I couldn’t get on a later flight unless I paid the full fare. So I simply accepted my fate.
C’est la vie, c’est it is.
It looks like Science Hack Day San Francisco—to the surprise of absolutely no-one—was a superb event. There’s a write-up on the open.NASA blog outlining some of the amazing hacks, including the cute (and responsive) Space Ipsum and the freakishly brilliant synesthesia mask: syneseizure.
