Julie Starr faced an interesting problem recently: how to explain RSS, aggregators, even Twitter to a room full of journalism students … without slides or a net connection. In attempting this, as she says, she “found a new respect for teachers this week”. As a recovering teacher (or, as we’re called when companies pay the bill and we have no pedagogic qualifications, trainer) I thought I’d give it a go.

I’ll be in San Diego for ETech, arriving in San Diego on Sunday and leaving on Thursday. If you’ll be around, look me up. I’d love to catch up!

I often joke that Foo Camp (“Friends of O’Reilly”) should be Font Camp (Friends of Nat Torkington) in New Zealand. I love typography and was delighted to find “The Font Scene in New Zealand”, a list of typographers and fonts made by New Zealanders or by New Zealand companies. My favourite so far is Feijoa (PDF), made by Kris Sowersby who was also featured in the latest Idealog.

Congrats to Sue Tyler and the Ponoko team, and all the others who were interviewed by Peter Griffin for the Idealog issue focusing on craft. The article (which will be online in a few weeks) has photos of various Ponoko-made goods, including a necklace of sheep which looked awfully familiar—Sue had given us one for our daughter when we were in town for Webstock! I hadn’t realized at the time that it came hot off the presses from the Ponoko team. Good on yez!

I’ve finally got around to moving my blog to WordPress (it’s what geeks do to avoid work). I’m going to see whether a web interface will help me blog more.

The weather’s great, but I’ve been really busy since Kiwi Foo to enjoy it. Occupying my time: Webstock and O’Reilly Radar blogging. I have hopes that I’ll get caught up just in time to go to ETech. My friend Rael and I are hanging out for a day in Los Angeles, catching up on life, then I’ll be in San Diego from Saturday night through Thursday night. If you’ll be there, send me some mail and we’ll catch up.

There’s a lot of talk about this Fortune article around Microsoft, Linux, and the 235 patents that Microsoft claim Linux infringes upon. Here’s my redux:

Microsoft is extorting patent payments from users of open source software, beginning with the customers who also use Microsoft software.

Microsoft has not identified the patents, neither to the customers nor to the makers of open source software.

Without a list of the patents and where Microsoft thinks they’re being infringed, the claims can’t be verified and so remain unproven baseless allegations.

I haven’t blogged in a while. That doesn’t mean things are bad. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Something happened around September, the end of my last trip away for 2006–something good. We just clicked. We went from feeling like strangers in a strange land to feeling like we were home.

It’s weird, I can’t point to anything in particular. It’s just that suddenly it became easier. We had friends, we weren’t unhappy, we were actually enjoying ourselves. At that point we lost the drive we’d had to connect back with the people we’d left behind: Jenine stopped mailing her friends amusing stories, and I stopped blogging.

About two weeks ago, my uncle Zom got a little carried away with some repairs in the cabin and drove the family fishing boat (“Foam”) onto some rocks. Getting it off damaged the propeller and keel, so ten days ago he and I took advantage of the time, tide, and weather to put it up on the sticks and effect some repairs.

For the next two days (during low-tide only, when the boat was out of the water) he bogged the keel with fibreglass while I painted. It was fun! I painted the bum of the boat all by myself, scraping off barnacles and working on the thick viscous antifouling paint. I did one side each day, the first with roller (rollers make it much easier) and the second without (because we only had one roller and it was well trashed by this stage).

I just got back from a week in the US for Foo Camp, where I had a great time shopping two ideas around:

• New Zealand can be a hub of innovation, and
• Kids aren’t being turned onto science and technology as careers

Re: the first idea, this interesting CNet news article talks about how the 1980s and 1990s saw Indian and Chinese technologists imported into Silicon Valley to fuel the great tech booms then. Now those technologists are returning home to create startups and build the local version of Silicon Valley. Ben Nolan and John Clegg from ProjectX are examples of this in New Zealand.

Before I left for my last trip to the US, I went to a school board meeting where a program called Super Kids was discussed. It’s a kids Christian program that wanted to use the House Of Learning (aka “library”) at our local primary school after school hours. I voiced my objection, asking why they would want to use the school when there was a perfectly good church and Sunday school one block away. The meeting ended with the board deciding to ask the program for more details.