One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes. I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

Holy cow, Zap Your PRAM was great. It would take some sort of endless series of biographical novels to explain it all. Basically it was roughly 50 super interesting people (and me) in a beautiful historical Prince Edward Island cottage slash hotel. All passionate, all thoughtful, all interesting, no shills. Even (maybe especially) when I didn't think their fields of expertise were things I was interested in, I wound up being fascinated.

Thanks to the adorable silverorange team for all the hospitality and amazing dessert per day ratio. I don't know that there's a nicer group of people to have yell “bum sex” at you on the street.

I was nervous about giving my first ever talk/presentation but it seemed to go well and lots of people said nice things about it. It was both awesome and intimidating to be talking to such a knowledgeable crowd. Seems like it'd be easier to talk to dumbasses, but the feedback wouldn't be as rewarding.

For a general list of what went on, Stephen DesRoches has an excellent write-up and some beautiful photos.

My camera actually died as I sat in the Ottawa airport getting ready to go. So all I have is a crappy cell phone picture of the metal cow in the Charlottetown airport. Which is above.