Art Rhyno: I have to admit that throughout my life, up until Art’s speech, I have thought that libraries, and the people who tend them, are boring and uninteresting. I think this may have something to do with the fact that the library was always the room in my school where I had to be quiet. Art managed to weave quotes, facts, personal stories, and opinions into a marvelous thread about the role of information in our society, and the responsibility of the library (and librarian by extension) to maintain that information in society. (Read Art’s full talk here)

My Talk: No one has really commented on it so far, so I hesitate somewhat to be the first to do so. I thought it went well. There was an enormous amount of participation by the audience and things flowed very naturally. We discussed the startup of silverorange, the detailed inner workings of our shop, and the business models behind it.

Buzz: (He doesn’t even need a last name. He’s like Madonna and McGyver). Buzz is the evangelist (once you meet him you agree that this is an accurate term) for a product & company called ActiveWords. ActiveWords, in my own short description, is a program that grabs your keystrokes before your OS does allowing you to program your computer to behave in the way that you would like it to behave. Here’s a simple example: I can create a simple command that when I type the keys DJ [space][space] my full name Dan James appears. The seeming beauty of ActiveWords is that because it sits between my keyboard and my OS it works WHEREVER I am typing. So if I’m filling in a web form I can use the same keyboard shortcuts that I would in a word processor, that I would in email, that I would in DOS, etc. Because of its unique placement directly below the keyboard it becomes an application agnostic tool. Buzz completely sold the concept to me. I’m going to give ActiveWords a go and get back to you with a full report after a few weeks of use.

Peter Rukavina: Unfortunately I had to run around and do conference resort type things during most of Peter’s talk. From what I gather it was a great talk. He spoke about the process of running a provincial election on open source technologies. Throw in a hurricane story or two and some great questions from the Zap crew and you have as much of an idea as me of how it went.

John Muir: There are sometimes in life when you see someone who fulfils a stereotype so well that you sit in awe and absorb everything they say. John embodied the free spirit practical hippie radio station manager that we all imagine exists but never actually have met a real live one. He’s the manager/director/in-charge-guy at Trent Radio. If you ever get a chance to meet definitely do so. Passion oozes.

More updates and some photos to come.