This past Sunday Gillian and I headed into San Francisco to attend BoingBoing Ingenuity, sort of a TED like meetup for readers of the BoingBoing blog. I won my ticket in the first giveaway, and Gill managed to score hers in one of the latter ones.
It was a really fun day. Early day; we had to leave the apartment at quarter to eight to catch the BART into the city, and we were lucky enough that the first train was a couple minutes late so we didn’t have to wait around. On the train ride in we saw a Ringling Brothers circus train just before we went under the Bay.
The event was held in the old Masonic Lodge on Sutter. We took a ride in the original elevator, which still has an operator, up to the third floor and the big stage. Beautiful room. Apparently all 31 backdrops are original, and they had a scene from hell on stage, complete with devils tormenting damned souls.
While we were waiting for things to get started the lady sitting in front of us turned around to introduce herself, figuring that the kind of people to get invited to this kind of event had to be interesting. She was pretty nice, she makes props and scenery for photographs with her art partner.
There were a lot of great speakers, and a few okay ones. I liked the opening speaker, Ferdanando Buscema, a
Between speakers, and during some of the breaks the organist kept us all entertained with a variety of sci-fi tunes. I recognized the Eleventh Doctor’s theme, and the original Star Trek, and I think bits of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.
The final block of block of presenters was a mixed bag for me. Up first was the music duo Barn Owl, who did electronic drone music. If it had been about a third the volume, or if I hadn’t had the first stirrings of a headache, I might have enjoyed it. As it was I rushed out of the room clutching my stomach, nearly ready to vomit. I stood in the lobby by an open window until they were done, and I think I may have loosed the tide because I saw several other people leave and hang around the lobby until they were done.
After Barn Owl finished Adam Savage came on to give the closing talk. He gave a brief rundown on his career as builder and then outlined his ten tips
