Going to Barcamp was awesome. It was hosted at the Mahalo HQ in Santa Monica from Oct. 25-26. Lots of people showed up and the talks that they gave were very informative and educational. It was my first time at one, I missed it last year because I heard about it too late. So what is Barcamp LA? Its a social gathering of technology oriented people that want to share their knowledge and understanding with each other. I felt right at home.

Some of the panels I joined in on were the “Programmers vs. Managers”, “Social 3D Enviroments”, “Lucid Dreaming Techniques” as well as many others. I also met a few familiar faces (twitters) as well as made some new acquaintances. It seemed that everyone there had a different shape/size/type of portable computing device; from laptops, to palmtops, to iphones, to touchscreen tablets, to OQO’s. The generous hosts also were able to supply free food to the entire group – salads, pizzas, sandwich wraps, and drinks drinks drinks.

I can’t wait for next years meeting, as I’m sure its going to be just as if not more fun. I initially wanted to give a talk about iPhone application/webapps but got there a bit too late. Oh well, theres always next time.

And one last note before I close. I was convinced at Barcamp that I should probobly switch over from Blogger to WordPress. I’ve been wanting to for quite a while but was unaware of the tools that wordpress introduced to import Blogger posts in easily. I also hear they have a WordPress app for the iPhone

Oh, and … HACK THE PLANET!
lol, ok just had to get at least one “Hack the Planet” shout in this Barcamp post.

I went to go check out the Star Wars exhibit at the California Science Center today even though it doesn’t open up until Feb. 11th 2007. It was really cool I must say, there were plenty of models, videos, and interactive areas that caught my attention. unlike many other art gallery’s that don’t really catch the excitement of the actual thing they are displaying, this one seemed to do the trick.

As you walk into the CSC (California Science Center) you go to the 3rd floor and to the back. I took actually a picture of every single piece in the exhibit but I think I will hold back on showing all of them since I highly encourage everyone to really experience the hard work they did in putting this up and getting it all together.

I’m a star wars fan, and of course not the HUGEST knowledgeable nerd on Star Wars trivia, but I’m sure there are a few people who would like to see these pictures and videos of the exhibit before it opens so, without further ado, the exhibit…

Pictures:
(scroll down to get to video)

Video:

There was also this area of the gallery that allowed interaction with “space stations”, so for example, you would have this booth area you could sit at and a round table in front of you. A small pile of “digital cards” in front of you that you place on the table that detects what kind of card it is and displays the representational image of that on the video screen above you. It was TOTALLY awesome, and the way it worked gave me the impression that future games will rock when they implement this technique into them. (can you image starcraft or other strategy kind of game that uses this? OMG 0.o)

This was another part of the gallery, where they had a video up near the X-Wing model talking about its history. There were videos like these all over the gallery explaining stuff about Star Wars, wish I could record them all but I ran out of memory on my memory card. =P