At 23C3

I’ll make this short as I have a feel­ing that this­place might be the most dan­ger­ous to use a wire­less inter­net connection.

I’m at 23C3. I went to a cou­ple of ses­sions last night, but felt tired after all the christ­mas meat-eating, so I went home early — and got up really late. But now I’m here.

(Just now, in the mid­dle of me writ­ing this, Bicy­clemark just said hello, sport­ing a 21C3 press pass pegged onto his shirt. Guess I’ll have to get that story later. Go lis­ten to his pod­cast — it’s really good stuff!)

Like last year the male-to-interesting per­son ratio is totally skewed. I’m not say­ing there aren’t a lot of pony tails. It’s just that… well, you know. I’m strangely fas­ci­nated by the cul­ture here — being no real part of it as opposed to a lot of the other con­fer­ences I attend. I’m not a mem­ber of this club, I don’t stand out­side the build­ing with the rest of the par­tic­i­pants exchang­ing ‘yeah, we know it all, don’t we’-smiles (out­side this buld­ing you can smell the weed). I get what’s going on — but I don’t ‘get it’. While geeky as hell (dress­code: cargo pants, i-don’t-care hair, shirt with geek print, sturdy shoes, important-looking cables in hand), it’s a nice atmos­phere and you can just tell that cre­ativ­ity is burst­ing from the tip of these people’s fin­gers). And while the sched­ule reflects the sur­round­ing world’s adop­tion of social web tech­nol­ogy (the peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing that wave like myself are eas­ily rec­og­niz­able by their inabilty to under­stand the geek jokes at pre­sen­ta­tions), most ses­sions and work­shops are pretty hard­core and refresh­ingly free of a lot of the buzz I get tired from so very eas­ily in my daily involve­ment with dig­i­tal technologies.

Oh, and ide­ol­ogy and pol­i­tics is big here. At a con­fer­ence. Nice. Think about it.