WWDC continues to plow along. Yesterday was a fairly slow day. I only went to one of the five possible sessions during the day. It wasn’t that there weren’t any interesting sessions, but more that I’ve reached saturation already, and have started being a lot more picky about what I’m going to attend. Usually this happens about Thursday during the week, but this week it came early. Then again, I think maybe it was Wednesday when I hit the wall last year, too.
There are other things I’ve been thinking about too. While all the new technology is interesting, I’ve been noticing (and I’m far from alone in this) the lack of gals at the conference. On Tuesday night, during “Stump the Experts”, the show was running behind, and there were too many prizes to be given away in the remaining time. Someone in the audience suggested giving a prize to every woman in the room. While there weren’t quite that many extra prizes, it was a close enough thing that Fred and Mark actually thought about it for a bit. That’s a fairly depressing comment on the state of the geek community. And yeah, some of the women were offended by it. It’s tough to be a gal in the geek world, I guess.
That’s not to say there are no women around here, but many of the ones who are here during the day haven’t been going to the “geekier” sessions or sticking around for traditions like “Stump”. I don’t know what to do about it, but it seems that there are more younger women than older, and I fear it’s a matter of women leaving the field as they get older. It doesn’t seem right to me, but I have been encouraged the past couple years to see more college-age women attending WWDC.
Enough philosophical rambling for now. The other thing that happened yesterday was a busy evening. I had drinks with Dan Lyke after I was done with the conference for the day, and Ingrid stopped by with a couple of her developers
. It was a great evening, especially Zebulon, the bar that Dan took us to, and while it wasn’t that late of an evening, I find myself thinking that just about the time I finish adpating to left-coast time, it’ll be time to head home. I’m not relishing it, but I figure the fact that I’m taking the red-eye home will do a pretty thorough job of resetting my body-clock anyhow.
In any case, if you’re wondering if Dan is a real person, I can verify that he is, and he’s a heckuva guy to boot. We had some geektastic conversation, plus some more real-world talks, and I’m pretty happy to call him a new friend.
Well, that’s the update from me. Thanks again to Dan for the swell conversation and for being a great native guide to San Francisco, but now it’s time for some links, eh?
- NASA’s been working on automated Antenna Design, and have come up with some pretty cool stuff. Fun for the radio geek in all of us. [boing boing]
- Even though it wasn’t the Kerry campaign that was doing it, here’s another reason not to vote for Kerry. As Conrad points out, the Kerry campaign had damned well better get involved if they don’t want a storm of negative publicity out of the deal. [gweilodiaries]
- Here’s a fun little story about a FOIA request, and the DOJ’s response: Our Computer Ate the Info. Apparently they’re storing the information in a database that’s so fragile that simply making a backup copy could make the entire computer explode. Or something like that. [wired]
- The EFF Publishes Patent Hit List, aiming at the top ten gratuitous patents they want to see overturned. [wired]
- Woo! The FTC mulls bounty system to combat spammers, offering twenty percent of the damages they recover from the spammer. Okay, maybe it’s not the best way to combat spam, but I think it’s another tool, and one that might help get a few people shut down. [slashdot]
- What’s brinigng on New Media's Age of Anxiety? A bunch of bogus stories that have been published as news. In the first of a weekly series, Adam L. Penenberg takes a look at media in today’s world. [wired]