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Some highlights from the first day of the Etech conference in San Diego:

• I got stuck in an elevator with Doc Searls, Steve Gillmor, and 7 other people after breakfast.
• The Applied Minds presentation was awesome. Danny Hillis started by showing some videos of robots and moved on to a video of a live projection map table and a Myst-like deforming map surface. The projection map table was basically a large touch screen table which allowed people to manipulate a globe-like map by touch, zooming in and out and overlaying different satellite and topographical data sets. There’s a video (local mirror) and press blurb available from Northrop Grumman. Apparently this table uses ArcGlobe and runs about $300,000 (ouch). The deforming map surface was a table which deformed to match the elevation of the topographical map being projected onto it. I cannot express how cool this looks. I want one.
• Sam Ruby’s “Just Use HTTP” talk did a good job of explaining some of the complexities in making RESTful web services. Slides are up.
• Werner Vogels’ talk on Interplanetary Scale services was good. He touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about for awhile now relating to epidemics and scalability.
• Later, I walked around a bit downtown:
  
• And went to the vendor reception:
  

At the moment, I’m in a room in a small motel just off the I-5 in Old Town San Diego. It has wireless Internet access, but no pool. Tomorrow, and through this thursday, I’ll be trekking back and forth to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Also, for a few hours on wednesday starting around 9:45 I’ll be manning the Apple booth, fielding whatever questions people ask of people like me at conferences like this.

The drive down, following roughly the same route populated by old Spanish Missions, was awesome, with perfect 72°F weather and green grass all the way down the coast. If you’ve ever considered touring California, this looks like the year to do it.