Back from AC 04.

I've got a lot of things to say about it, but I'm busy reconnecting with my work and such, so I'll just say this. Going to conferences all the time is probably a mistake, but going to at least one is a very good idea. I may not attend any more conferences this year, but I'm very glad I went to this one.

An additional note, if there are any young, undirected transhumans, or old undirected transhumans, try going to an Accelerating Change Con. I had people trying to hire me, business ideas falling from the sky, high powered folk, idea folk, high powered idea folk, interesting new research. If I didn't already have the most interesting job in the world, in the biggest problem area, I would have really really come back with a fistful of dollars(or contracts at least). So long as you talk. There were plenty of people who just didn't talk with others at the con, and they missed quite a bit.

As it is, I may do some after hours consulting and work with the fine people I met, just out of sheer interest. There are so many things happening, so many more near term projects, I felt like a blue-sky researcher next to many of these people who just wanted to make something cool now, or make a quick good few dollars.

Some cool people I made friends with, never mind interesting research and business opportunities, which I'll list later:

Nova Barlow, of the Themis Group, community management and state of play writer. Went to dinner with her after her talk, and she had lots of interesting ideas.

Gregor Rothfuss, met him at Tech Night, he works for Apache, and is developing some very interesting middleware, with XML and SOAPish stuff.

Jeff Shwartz, of Disruptive Strategies, we participated in a debate on Globalization, he of the pragmatic set, and me of the 'people are hurting' set. He seems like a really great guy, we exchanged business cards, and I have to shoot him a follow-up email. His concept of disruptive technologies seems to dovetail well with my idea of leveraged work. He also was very well spoken, and really pushed me during the debate.

Christopher Allen, of too many things to list, but at least go check out Life With Alacrity, we talked about many things, of security and future trends and wikis and god knows what else, I definately need to follow up, he's a guy with varied and interesting opinions and applications.

I sat during many of the presentations with Eric Nehrlich, a physicist who has jumped fields and is investigating all this stuff. He works for MDS SCIEX right now, but I'd love to hook him up with maybe these other guys as well, there are just so many interesting projects here, if I had the time. He's a very smart, very funny guy.

I also ran into a lot of my LA crew, Paul and Jeff and Durant and Troy and so on, which is always fun.

I got to meet Samantha Atkins in person, Peter C. McCluskey, Tyler Emerson, and on and on, it's lovely to match faces to names.

Two major regrets, didn't talk to Cory Ondrejka of SecondLife directly very much, and didn't talk to Helen Greiner of iRobot directly.

Of all the speakers, two major highlights, Wil Wright, creator of The Sims, BJ Fogg, of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. There were many many others, which I'll go into if I have more time.

more Google strings: Peter Norvig, Jamie Hale, David Brin, Shai Agassi, Peter Kaminski, Gordon Bell, Richard Marks Sony, Steve Jurvetson, Bruce Hall DARPA, Clark Aldrich.