Kevin's Weblog

Chris DiBona and others are talking today about wireless and conference presentations. By and large, I think the point is valid, and it reinforces for me some things I want to try to do differently at this summer’s conferences.

First, I do want to avoid IM and web surfing during presentations. It’s rude to the presenter and potentially rude to other attendees, particularly in those in-a-too-small-room presentations where some people who might actually be interested are standing or not in the room at all.

A corollary is that I want to try to pick my sessions more carefully so that anything I’m attending, I’m really interested in. Thus, I should be less tempted to do things other than listening to the presentation.

Finally, I’m probably going to do less of the real-time blogging thing. I still plan to blog the conferences, but I’ll probably take notes separately, then distill them into posts later. Last year, I think I focused too much on the trees and not enough on the forest.

Bruce Schneier posted today about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of ChoicePoint and Acxiom personal reports. I wasn’t too surprised, having gotten copies of all my credit reports recently after being informed that I was one of ChoicePoint’s lucky mumble thousand. But, what I really found interesting was the last paragraph:

The most shocking error was that two people out of eleven were listed as corporate directors of companies that they had never heard of.

I recently got a solicitation from CIO Magazine informing me that I was a company executive. Makes me wonder what sort of additional bits are in these reports for me that wasn’t covered in the credit reports.

(There are some suggestions in the comments on this entry that maybe people brought this upon themselves by giving bogus information to websites or surveys asking what their position was. For a moment, I thought that maybe I did this to myself, remembering grumbling about OSCON registration at one point, but it seems like at least there I claimed something vaguely accurate.)