ANVL » Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 Brain Dump

In semi-chronological order from this past weekend:

Jack Bell says that Vivace on Capital Hill has the best coffee. Apparently, the guy/owner there “wrote the book” on espresso. The secret? Fresh roasting. Jack showed us how to roast our own beans during Coffee Hacks 2.0.

Learned about the Kids Programming Language (KPL). Open-source, freeware (at least for version 1.0), and pretty neat. Not sure Alex (he’s 6) is quite ready for this, but someday. The demo of the texture mapped 3D spaceship written in <50 lines of code was slick.

Two links from the random whiteboard : Dorkbot Seattle and HackerFriendly.

During our session on “Del.icio.us Inside the Firewall“, we discussed the “del.icio.us lesson“. Personal (selfish) use comes before shared use (which leads to personal value). Dave had some comments here.

A random hallway chat with H.B. Siegel from IMDB.com educated me that Shred-it ~~hosts~~ hosted a “community shredding event” at local Walmarts. Hope they do this more often - besides backing up our data and computers, shredding our personal docs (and random credit card solicitations) is one of the most important things we don’t do…

During a great dinner-time conversation with Lion Kimbro we discussed:

The CommunityWiki is working to implement direct save-to-wiki via SVG. Very cool.
“Lion’s Timeline from 2004″ and how its playing out now. We also talked about Kevin Kelly, and his Long Bets site.
Lion recommended reading “Manna” by Marshall Brain. That’s next on my list after I finish “Blink” and “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.

The “Good Thing Rapid Discovery Slam” was great:

A very cool video on “multi-touch interaction experiments” from Scott Berkun.
An example of harmonica beatboxing.
A great short video entitled “Cubic Tragedy”.
Computer drawing/music/performance art mashup from Ario.
I talked about how I love Orb, and demo’d it on my SMT5600.

During our session on GTD software/solutions, we talked about:

Is there a way to leave yourself voice notes and have them “magically” turn into text? Personally, this is a bit of a holy grail for me (and others voiced the same desires). I think the speech-to-text capabilities are close, but maybe not all of the way there. We talked about Evoca and GotVoice during this conversation.
We talked about idea/task collection strategies, and Buzz suggested stamping blank 3×5 cards with your personal data. Then you can give them away with notes to other people. Another idea was to use a highlighter to color-code the edges of your 3×5 cards to denote categories. A color-coded HipsterPDA!
Buzz also commented that he would like to “meet” the guy who designed Outlook to only support 1 Exchange server for a single profile (as in “meet in a dark alley…”). I’d like to participate in that - I don’t grok the limitation, and it’s a royal PITA!
Mike Wilkerson showed us his GTD solution using MindJet MindManager and ResultsManager. Looks great - wish I had won one of the licenses they were giving away at the end of MindCamp…$350 is a bit steep for me at the moment. Guess I’ll stick with the GTD Outlook plug-in…

During Alex’s session on Attention we talked about:

Then, Sunday morning at breakfast, we discussed how to use Tor to support access to Gmail outside of a corporate firewall (among other uses).

At the geolocation/mapping session hosted by Brady, we talked about getting topo data for a Google map mashup from WAGDA.
I also noted these sites:

The Go Game looks like something to investigate too.

Finally, Dave Winer told us that OPML 2.0 is getting closer, and feeds.scripting.com is going to make a comeback.

(Also, Chris Pirillo told me that gada.be was working on a very-cool-earth-shaking new piece of functionality, but wouldn’t give details. Guess I just have to wait…but if you need a beta-tester Chris, just holler…