So between this mornings multi-touch interface demo and the session on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, my laptop died. At least, the display did. Sometimes I can get it to work for a short time by closing and re-opening the lid. But in the constant jostling environment of a confernce audience, getting it to keep working has proved impossible.
Of course this couldn't happen while I'm at home with convienent access to the help desk. I'm at the Emerging Tech conferences for pete sake!
I would have just bought a laptop at CompUSA or something, but that qualifies as a captial expenditure and my boss wouldn't sign off on it (primarily because of the paperwork he'd have to fill out). Luckily, CRE Rentals was able to get a machine over to me in a few hours so I'm back online. I guess I won't be doing any more coding this trip, but I guess I'll survive.
More from ETech later. In the meantime, check out Ray Ozzie's blog entry on Wiring the Web. I may be biased, but it's the coolest new thing I've seen here so far (though the multi-touch interface is pretty awesome too)
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