The Glass Castle

Imagine, here we are on June 3rd, it’s pouring rain, and it’s so cold we can see our breath rising like soggy steam in protected lee of the parking garage.

People who aren’t used to New England weather, it drives them crazy. Like our students, one day we are telling them to wear sun block and hang out in air-conditioned shopping malls during the dead hours of the humid afternoons, and the next explaining how to dress in layers and what puddle jumpers and waders are all about.

We are drenched to the bone, just having walked from the Monster space to the parking garage to get our stress medicine. We spend a few minutes in a corner of the garage, under an overhand, watching the cascade ripple off the roof and hoping it will lighten up for a mintue so we can get back to the conference. No such luck.

The complex is huge, we have seen over a dozen large long buildings and they stretch on out of sight, reconditioned redbrick, once the mills that made Maynard famous, 100 years ago, weaving wool and cotton by the mile, bolt, ton, now home to a potpouri of high-tech, new-age, start-up and on-going companies, and the services that support them. There is a Gold’s Gym down the hall.

We navigate back to the cafeteria, de facto organizing zone for the BarCamp, and hurry on to the Sudbury Room, where, we thought, there was a session on Podcasting and new media.

Once in the room, seated at the table, plugged into the juice and on-line, we discover that once again, we were sadly mistaken. Turns out we are one of three particpants in an utterly obscure session on graph-writing applets, jar-code and javascript. This makes about as much sense to us as a Kabuki script in the original Japanese.

But it’s a welcome refuge in this storm of intellectual tempests, a place we can charge up our laptops batteries and post the present note.

Hopefully, we will find the podcasting and video sessions we are interested in eventually. We also posted a note asking if anyone was interested in discussing the OneNet movement and the pending legislation defining the future form of internet traffic, content and access. So far, no one is.

Sessions are mercifully short. Theoretically, if we sit here long enough, we will hear something we understand.