The Definitive Blog on All Things Vague

I think I am kinda special. Not quite like Paris Hilton special, but getting a  chance to attend two Barcamps separated by 8000 miles in a span of 3 weeks has got to be some kind of special stuff. I think the big guy above is smiling at me. Invest in my equity. This is an article outlining some of the interesting differences I saw between the barcamps in Bangalore (BCB3, 31 March -April 1, 2007 ) and Minnesota(Minnebar 2007, 21 April). This is not an article intended to compare or pass a judgement. Just throwing up some observations, fwiw . I am not offering explanations, I am not a socio-anthropology by training. Some of these do not require a degree to arrive at the reason of causation, but I want to keep this blog close to what I saw, not what I think. At most, some "could-be"s. Both the barcamps have a local flavour and preservation of local flavour to me, is inherently good.  Consider food, for example.  A predominantly South Indian buffet spread for lunch ...

  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 Hans...

There is a lot of talk about the last mile problem in developing nations as to how people do not have access to the Internet. Today I feel that some parts of the apparently civilized world are not yet broad-hearted enough to let you get on the Internet seamlessly. Compare this:   Hotel Homestead Marriott Downtown City Brookfield (tiny town) Indianapolis (large city) Rate/night $36 $150 WiFi in room Yes No Cost $5 per stay 10 per night   Downtown Marriott, Indianapolis sucks. Somebody is going to hear an earful from me today.

Identify the three campers at BCB3. No exciting prizes. HeadlessException Hint: This is the photographer at the time of the shot. The one with the camera the above shot it a few seconds before. "Ssssh children, His Holiness is Clicking". The caption makes sense only if you see the whole picture at flickr by clicking here .

www.slideshare.net seems to have a large loyalty base in India. So much so, that a dropdown list on their registration screen has quickfinds for USA and ....   I never knew we had so much national fascination to create powerpoints (ok, also Impress presentations).

Rakesh and I shared some thoughts on unstructured innovation such as unconferences and codejams in large, well-structured (and somewhat paradoxically) very innovative companies.       Technorati tags: barcampbangalore3 , innovation

Bambi is a small coding-fest that we organise in our group at GE Healthcare. It was inspired by Yahoo Hackday after I heard about it at BarCamp Bangalore last year. I still remember, I came back all charged up after BarCamp and with some help from Arun B, we put together the first version of Bambi. Ours was a small team, roughly about 60 people, so spreading the news was not much of a problem. Getting people out of their workload was a bigger problem. The load is high and the work is, I guess, somewhat exciting ;-)  It is sometimes tough to lure people out of writing indexing algorithms for proprietary image databases or mitral-valve plane adjusters for segmentation of the human heart.     Today we had the demos for Bambi 2.0 The quality of demos were much improved and people came on the last day with some utterly cool demos. Unfortunately, I do not think I can write about them in detail owing to Intellectual Property issues but a mash of  Biometrics, Blue...