The drive from Milwaukee to Minneapolis/St.Paul is about 320 miles, each way. Takes about 5 hours, you can do it in 4.5 if you push it a bit. The drive cannot really be called scenic, unless you put it in compare mode against Ohio, I guess.
I really wanted to see a barcamp outside India and there was no way I would this one in Minneapolis (since I was already in the area.)
So I got up at 3:46 am. The rest is sweet memories.
Minnebar (pronounced minibar) is in its second edition. It is a BarCamp organised by enthusiasts in the twin cities of St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota.
You can see the pictures here.
William Gurstelle literally blew us with his presentation on explosive underground technologies: potato guns, pumpkin throwers, tesla coils. He is the author of 5 books on how to increase the entropy of the unverse by factors of 10 or alike.
In some sense, the starCamper, if there be one was David Hansson. Jamie Thingelstad did an open 
interview which on a couch, that was so sinking, that they had to set on the backrest to let people be able to see them. I punched some notes and thought would post them, but I am so lazy that my brain is trying to make me believe that there is some strange beauty in the raw notes and that the act of cleaning them will rob the notes of their spontaneity and origninality. So, if you want to read the notes, drop me an email, I will send you the version verbatim and then if you have any questions, clarification, the notes are not clear blah blah blah, we can always talk over email.
Look carefully at the image below. A teen-shopper trying out a dress without wearing it. The image is projected on a thin film backed by a mirror so that it gives an appearance of being worn. She can change colors, sizes and send videostreams to her aunt in Germany and best friend in New Mexico, by interacting with the touchscreens that double up as mirrors (or the other way rouond?). They can realtime send here suggestions back, suggest new dresses and engage in an interactive shopping experience, all from the comfort of their web browsers.
Christopher Enright, CTO of IconNicholson, presented, what to me was the coolest tech presentation. The underlying concept is to connect the online and offline behaviours of people, so you do not have to go to second life to experience it. Chris already has a prototype up at Bloomingdale's in NY. Will this be the future of social retailing ?
Mike Janssen of the Distributed Robotics Center, Univ of Minnesota, gave a demo of the scout robots his lab builds. The picture below is interesting. 
I I thought I was waking a picture of Mike. What I didn't realise was that the robot was taking a picture of me, too. Look at the screen carefully. The guy in a light t-shirt (trivia: thats the BCB3 lemon-yellow t-shirt) is me. The other guy is Luke Francl, one of the organisers of Minnebar.
Scary.
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