Monthly Archives: October 2008

Storytelling is hard

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I did a lot of thinking about storytelling this weekend. Marketing is good stories. “Stories my dad can tell” is my benchmark. No story has hit that mark better than Skype. His enthusiasm for it, and the simplicity of its value offer was refreshing.

Talking to an American who’d moved to Sweden and taught himself Swedish, I realized this. We, the IT community, need to come up with a virtualization story that he could tell. About why VMWare images (or the equivalent) are so practical and useful. It’s a packaged appliance, already “tuned in to the right channel”. No configuration. No setup. That kind of thing, but good.

FSCONS: Smári McCarthy on abundance

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Smári McCarthy Originally uploaded by Wrote

The man in the picture is Icelandic, outlandish, with lots of fancy words.

FabLabs (a set of machines to make any plastic object up to 1 meter in size) point to a future, and McCarthy talked about that future. No scarcity, everything “non-exotic” (which is not imbued with aura, like say, the Eiffel tower) is… available.

The intersection of hackers and anarchists: substantial, but not complete.

Freeganism got a mention in the talk. And “turkey sandwich”.

He got a government grant to run his FabLab. He said he’d looked around him, seeing only fishing industry. Digital fabrication might be a future for a place like that. A clean break with tradition.

Open Farm Tech was mentioned. OS tractors. Smari is credited with the prototype code for CNC (you know, extruders and such) on the website. The tractor is called LifeTrac. Design-for-disassembly. I’m very taken with this project. Update: See comments for direct links to videos and such.


FSCONS: Conversations are the conference

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Just had an interesting micro-conversation, with a man who spoke with a slightly Indian accent. Cambodia: No landlines, but quite developed mobile phone networks, never bothering with the previous stage of tech. Leapfrogging. Related: Ericsson deployed a solar-powered mobile base station there. That press release hits all points in the last paragraph of the leapfrogging article on Wikipedia.

Now a guy from a company called Redpill Linpro will do a talk called “Hidden gems of PostgreSQL”. Full-text search (what used to be called tsearch2 is now called FTI: full-text indexing). Pretty neat. You can specify a language setting. Stopwords in English might be regular words in another language – is means ice in Swedish.