Pata Macedo one of the students in my "building dynamic websites in a ridiculously short amount of time" class told me about this conference in MTL in early may.

http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/

We bring together developers and users of the best of free software graphics applications - Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus, and more. 2007 promises to be a fun ride, with tutorials and presentations of applications, and lots of time and space to chat, meet up with old friends, make new ones. Plans will be made, hacking and drawing will be done, fun will be had.

Sound good to me, I am so addicted to Photoshop, maybe this will be the kick in the ace I need to stop relying so heavily on Macromedia image editing tools.

I went to this conference over the week-end

Trials and tribulations of Internet Research

Favorite speakers included:

Negotiating Roles: Researching MMORPG’ s -Marinka Copier from the university of utrecht who studies WoW and teaches an entire masters course in-game. She was wicked, and had a really nice way of looking at her practice as wholistically tied to her work as an academic, and by practice here I am referring to her gaming. I am going to email her a bunch so I can apply to do a summer study program at UU. Add it to the list.

I just bought the Custom Closet Kit at Canadian Tire. So Clearly this day has been brought to you by the hard C sound.

The good folks at Copycamp sent me an email to clarify the pricing structure for the conference.

Far be it for me to scandal-monger so here is the real deal with pricing for Copycamp.

One thing I want to clarify- $495 isn’t the price if you apply for a bursary. The price if you get a bursary is (in most cases) free. $495 is the early-registration price for people who pay their own way.

We’re inviting a lot of different groups to this event who have different financial means and resources. Our hope is to charge the people who can really afford to come (lawyers, bureaucrats, people representing large organizations) and use that money to make the event free for a bunch of other people (artists mostly) who we really want there and for whom we understand that price to be prohibitive. If our budgets work out as we hope, the free spots will likely outnumber the paid spots.

Laura Scott wrote an excellent summary of the day 2 session I was incredibly lucky to participate in.

Geeks speak, and everything changes, if only a little bit.

I also thought the panel was one of the most enjoyable and not to sound to trite, totally rejuvenating experiences of my summer.

My hat goes off to the memorable woman who said; "I know how to play hardball with the geeks, I have a darwin fish tie and I wear it - But it's not the whole picture of who I am!".

"For today everybody is press" -Lisa Stone

Questions? Concerns?

Arrived Yesterday at 11:00am with Mél.

We're staying at the Green Tortoise, which is a hostel in the strip club/Chinatown restaurant district. Mel brought one pair of pants and a full multimedia production suite in her backpack.

I forgot my busines cards : ( .

We spent yesterday at the Office Depot (ordering new business cards) and in the Mission district where Mél sat arouond and read the paper while I looked at clothes.

Our bedroom has a bunkbed, and a teeny weeny sink.

This morning we are heading down to San Jose to meet up with the rest of the Blogher experience and start conferencing. I's hard to believe that right now, I feel like I am on a shoestring budget vacation.

If I don't get the hella started on packing I won't *be* doing anything except sleeping through my flight announcement.

This year at Blogher I will be particpating in two different panel/workshops.

The first is called Design/Style/Customization and I am co-training with Tiffany Brown.

We've been working really hard and I think there's going to be a great Presentation waiting for you on Friday afternoon.

The second session is called a ROYO which stands for Room Of Your Own. I will be sitting on a panel of pre-eminent geek girls (Yes it's flattering, it certainly is..).Get Deeply Geeky is exactly that, a chance to come and show us all your twelve-sided die or your favorite pocket calculator, whatever floats your geeky boat (but especially Open Source) come on out and let's get nerdy.