Reboot 9.0 Linkwrap

I grabbed a Moleskine from the shelf on my way out the door to [[reboot]] a couple of weeks ago; as chance would have it I grabbed the same one that I’d used to take notes for reboot 7.0 two years ago. So on one page I have written “Caught the 21:42 train just as sun was starting to set” from 2005 and on the next “Humanism 101” from 2007. Here’s a random assemblage of notes and links from the 2007 pages:

• Sapere aude — from Adam Arvidsson’s Humanism 101. Also “humanity is a project; note something we have but rather something we do.”
• From While We Wait for the Babel Fish by Stephanie Booth: some people are “language bridges:” they knit together communities of different languages with their ability to speak/read/write multiple languages.
• Tom Raferty spoke very practically about creating a carbon-neutral data centre in Cork. The session was dense with useful technical morsels: 1U servers use 220W of power; a 40U rack uses 20kW of power; Dublin bandwidth costs 15 EUR/meg/month (Cork is much more expensive); a Second Life avatar uses 1.75 kWh/year (as much as a person in Brazil); servers are commonly rated in “Watts per $1000 spend”; in Ireland the peak demand for electricity is 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.; wind power in Ireland meets 0% to 30% of demand; 21 degrees C and 45% humidity is the ideal server environment; average exhaust from servers is 30-40 degrees C. And for some reason Ireland has had the right to grow sugar beets taken away from it.
• I noted vizi.nl but I cannot remember why.
• Someone raised the notion of “T9-friendly URLs” which is something I’ve thought a lot about (T9 is a system for typing words predictively on a mobile phone numeric keypad — see t9.com for more).
• The Availabot is, ironically, still not available. But it’s still a neat idea.
• I’ve a sense that Fred, from Webreakstuff, is a very interesting guy. Which prompts me to take a look at Goplan. Nicole did an interview with Fred.
• Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols was recommended.
• I really enjoyed the micropresentation by Jeremy Keith on “hypertext.” It was perhaps the session that made best use of the “15 slides, 20 seconds each” format. Here are the slides themselves (PDF).
• Somebody (who?) said “it’s not where you are, it’s what you do about it.” I like that.
• Somebody else (must get better at attribution in the notebook!) recommended The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
• The presentation by Matt Jones on Dopplr was interesting. I’m not convinced of Dopplr’s utility, but I might not be in the heart of the “travels all the time” market. No, hold on a minute, I am.
• Jyri’s talk on Microblogging demonstrated yet again his skills at divining interesting order from chaos. He is so at home on the stage.
• Ordinarily I would find talks like Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic by Stowe Boyd a little too ethereal for my tastes. But somehow I took a lot out of it, mostly that industrial systems, like present-day schools, will do everything in their collective power to prohibit peer to peer communication — Stowe called this the “war on flow.” I brought up the example of the banning of electronic devices in PEI’s Eastern School District and Stowe’s response was, in essence, “yah, that’s it.”
• Lee Bryant’s session on A Town called Kozarac.ba was refreshingly grounded in a real situation with real people using the web to do practical stuff (like raising money for fire engines in their community).
• I would like to hire Ewan McIntosh to come and be a teacher at [[Oliver]]’s school: this guy knows where it’s at, and reminds me why I originally wanted to be a teacher.
• Guy Dickinson, the hardest working man at reboot, did a demo of ThinkFold, a web-based collaborative outliner. I only caught the tail end of the demo; Guy has promised to demo it online (what better way?) sometime soon.
• Someone (yes, I know, attribution) pointed to Night Driving, a VW campaign. It’s enough to make me want to become a serious driver again. Almost.

I said to [[Olle]] after reboot was all over that it seemed to me that the evolution of a reboot participant over several years involves the realization that it’s okay to skip stuff and, indeed, that by skipping stuff you increase dramatically your chance of random conversations with interesting people on the lawn (or in the hall, or around the urinal). I’m not quite there yet, but this year I made a better job of it than last, and I relaxed into the warm embrace of reboot rather than trying to wring every morsel from it. I had fun, and I’ll be back.