Julie has put up her three part summary of Northern Voice. I'm going to try to make do with a single post.

We headed up there for Moosecamp -- with the exception of the Photocamp track, I mostly hung out in the hallway with the girls, so that Julie could go to sessions. I spent some time hanging with Avi Bryant -- it's only the second time I've met him in person, but he's fun to hang out with, and we're definitely coming from the same place, so it's nice to have someone to commiserate with. This time I also got to spend some time with Avi's partner in Dabble, Andrew Catton, hich was also a pleasure.

Over the course of the few days, we ended up spending a sizable amount of time (in blocks) with Eric and Rose Soroos (and their son). This is another sad instance of people from Seattle needing to go to Vancouver in order to see each other, but that's just how things have worked out. Eric is a camera and Python guy, like me, and we had some fun hanging out an talking. I got to try bolting my 50mm onto my 100mm macro thanks to a cool adaptor ring that Erik was carrying, and for like $8, it's too cool not to make its way onto my equipment wishlist.

We've been slowly getting to know Chris and Ponzi over the last year or so (we first met them at Northern Voice last year). So this as a good chance to get a little better acquainted. In particular, I had no idea that Ponzi is a budding camera freak like me. That ended up making for a fun lunch conversation one day.

I had a bunch of nice personal photos that I shot of these folks (and some others), but the laptop theives have those now. At least Flickr still has some of the good ones.

Ok, on to the topical material.

I thought that the idea of PhotoCamp was incredibly good. When I started looking at the pages, I was kind of jealous of the VanDigiCam group. I'm not aware of anything like that in the Seattle area, much less here on Bainbridge Island. While I enjoyed the sessions, I think that there could have been so much more. There was a wide range of skills in the sessions, and I think that there is a huge amount that you could do. The prospect of a day long Photocamp is pretty enticing, given the right time. I was also astonished to learn that Kris Krug has only been shooting for 4 years. Perhaps there is hope for me yet.

I've seen several suggestions that Moosecamp be after the main conference, and I agree with that. I think that having the structured event up front can lead to a better unstructured event afterwards (although Moosecamp was already fully scheduled before it started). This year the PyCon sprints are after the conference instead of before, and I think that will be better than it has been in the past. We'll know the answer in about a week.

Julie's already written about her talk, and I won't comment, because you won't believe anything I say because you know that I love her.

The Blogs in the Bedroom panel. I had no idea how this was going to go, and I was kind of nervous about it. All the other participants on the panel have fairly interesting situations. Chris and Ponzi had a very public dispute, Maryam and Scoble have a very high and spicy profile, and Jen Wiederick is chronicling her dating (mis)adventures. In contrast, Julie and I don't fight much, we have kids, and we're pretty much non-controversial. It seemed like the audience was much more interested in the other situations represented around the table, which was fine with me. Even so, I thought the everyone on the panel had something to say, and no single panelist hogged the mike. Right there that made the panel better than many panels I have seen (which is too many).

As for the rest of the conference, well, I missed a lot of it, as I was in the kids room for a while. The one presentation that I regret missing was Nancy White's. One of these days I am gonna get to see Nancy go full bore. It's on my list.

That's 2 conferences down, 2 to go.