I'm sitting out in the "lounge" area outside the conference rooms, trying to come down from doing my second talk. At least this time the screencast software worked properly, so I'm going to convert the video from iShowU to flash so that I can put it up on Archive.org

So, a bit about the talks I went to. First up I went to Brad Neuberg's talk on Google Gears. I only had a vague understanding of how Gears worked before but now it's a little better. I think I could implement a Google Gears app to talk to Rallyhat's web service when the time comes.

Next I went to Kate Milberry's talk on the use of Open Source software as a tool to force social change, usually for the good. She has an academic background so it wasn't your usual chat (lots of reading of her talk), but the talk was really good and dug at some of the key issues coming up late in the first decade of the 21st century.

I didn't find any talks I really wanted to see after that, so I bumped into Paul Reinheimer and got invited to join one of the C7Y podcasts. There's nothing like being the stupidest guy in the room.

After that, a quick lunch and then Kevin Mark's excellent Open Social talk. Just the thought of the Open Social API, that crawls through social networks mapping out relationships between people and allowing you to use other social network's registration systems. Way cool.

Next, I sat in on a talk on how to use Merb. The guy had a pretty dry delivery, but he was rock solid when having the shell, editor and browser open. I got a good glimpse into Merb, enough to take a look when the documentation situation gets better.

Off to have some beer and some food.