Starcamp

So, I spent a lot of the last two days caught up in Starcamp. All in all, it was pretty cool. As a result, I'm currently short of sleep, and work tomorrow is really going to suck, but so be it.

Some overall, not yet well thought out comments:

• Not setting up the computers on day 1 was a collective 'WTF were we thinking' moment
• Watching people play on the wii is really quite entertaining in its own right
• The 1st day was much more traditional conference than I expected, and probably required some pushing to get away from that mould. Having the lab up would probably have helped here, as there wasn't anything happening away from the main venue. The talks were quite interesting though, so there was no dead time.
• Free food + T-shirt was a major, major plus
• trying to get gtkboard to compile at around midnight with not nearly enough sleep was perhaps not the best way to prepare for the Sunday
• Getting the pentago hacking session going to took time, but we did get fairly far (for a generous definition of far)
• gtkboard is quirky, and it took some time getting my head somewhat around it. We are probably doing horrible things to it, but we may be able to find some nice generalisations that we can try feeding back to whatever's left of the upstream project.
• I really didn't get enough sleep.
  
• (did I mention the free food?)
• I need a new laptop badly
• That there was an active IRC channel during a couple of the talks mainly occupied by members of the audience says something about the community. I don't know what, but it definitely says it.
• My internal physics model is both vague and inaccurate. At some point, I should rectify this.
• I've forgotten pretty much everything I learnt in my 3rd year AI course, which is somewhat sad, since the course was fun.
  
• There are a lot of web companies in CT.
• There are a number of cool people in CT.
• (did I mention the free food?)
• 9am on a Saturday is early - not that we ever got going anywhere close to the scheduled time
• Being able to stay at the venue later would have been good
• I still maintain nobody warned us that they were about to unplug the power point my laptop was using. Since I don't have battery that works, I feel rather aggrieved about this.
• Talking and listening over loud music (the pub, the brass bell), sucks quite badly as a method of interaction
• I took surprisingly few photographs. Dying batteries played a part, but still. Fortunately, other people didn't hold back, so there will be a good photographic record.
  
• It's surprisingly easy to buy a toothbrush at around 10pm.
  
• The R310 remains an if'ish road at night.