Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
I have my phone acting as a high-speed modem for my laptop via USB. Neat… I never tried this before, but this hotel had no Internet, so it was worth the frustration. Of course, I had to use the phone to Google the instructions, then keep switching back and forth.
Is flying cross-country all stuffed up with a head cold. I can’t hear out of one ear now.
Unfortunately, I have several more days of travel. I’ll be doing a panel at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment on Friday over in Boston.
Apologies for the downtime yesterday — my host decided to move me from one machine to another, more powerful machine. But they literally gave me no notice. I got the email telling me about it after the site was already unavailable to me! As a result I wasn’t able to warn anyone or put up any redirectors or anything.
Service seems to be back to normal, so we’ll see.
(Above, a photo of Ensenada’s harbor, with cruise ships docked, in the persistent light fog that is shrouding all of SoCal and Baja lately — you can click on it to get a larger image).
Yesterday I gave a magistral conference at CICOMP ’07, in Ensenada, Mexico. This was my first time to Mexico, first time driving through Tijuana, seeing Baja California, etc.
The talk was basically a reworking, in Spanish, of material from other talks centered on A Theory of Fun and game grammar. Given the audience of mostly compsci students, it was mostly new to them. It was fun giving a talk in Spanish — it’s been well over a decade since I had reason to speak the language regularly. I only had to fumble for words a few times.
I have many observations about the experience overall:
