HOPE is over in physical space, but it's still going on, here in my mind.

That was an amazing conference. I met so many wonderful people from so many interesting countries (e.g. the German who for some reason put up with my caffeine/mate haze, if I gave you my card and you're reading this, I never got your email, write me). I got really involved in the hackerspaces community, this is some deeply inspiring stuff to me. I have a lot more to say on that subject, but later. The summation is: I always find cons inspirational, and this one did what DefCon always did for me in that regard, but there's another, deeper level of inspiration at work here, or perhaps more of a meta-level inspiration, involving on one hand the sociological implications of the creation of communities in a physical space that more accurately echo the ones we love so much in virtual space, and on the other with the increased focus, with microcontrollers and things like the Arduino becoming more ubiquitous, on actually creating physical artifacts of the hacker nature. I guess it's all about the manifestation in meatspace. If we're going to change the world, it probably helps to actually interact with it.

Anyway, I have two immediate other side-effects to report. One is that I woke up this afternoon (at the apartment where I'm supposedly staying for once as opposed to somewhere in the hacklab as it has been the last several days) in a panic, my mind groping to remember which talks I had missed from getting up so late. Then I realized that there were no talks to go to, and became sad.

The second is: This is your new god in beverage form. Add this to the list, already long after this weekend, to consider moving to Austria.