In the morning, Ed and I looked at GraphViz and talked about Gettings Things Done by David Allen. Ed does a better job of managing his inbox than I do, but Ed has motivated me to make some progress and I hope to reduce my inbox by 50% or more by the end of the week. Most of my inbox is old messages that need to be appropriately filed. Later in the day, I think someone mentioned a Thunderbird extension that helped with “getting things done” but I didn’t hear its name. Please comment below if you know of such an extension.

We also talked about technology-oriented organizations such as the Ann Arbor IT Zone, GLIMA-WALA, AACS and others. There really needs to be an online calendar for the area that covers the technical events held within each of these organizations as well as at the local universities.

For lunch, we went to Eastern Accents. The crowd for lunch included: Ed, Lou Rosenfeld, David Bloom, Alan Guiterrez, John, Larry Kestenbaum, Mark, me and a few people I didn’t know. Larry shared the new directory of city, township and county officials. We took turns introducing ourselves and telling where we had met Ed or in what communities we had lived. I saw Carrie Hensel and Catherine Hayes from Inner Circle Media but I didn’t have a chance to say hello other than with a wave. The nice people at Eastern Accents made a special cake to celebrate Ed’s birthday so we sang and enjoyed the cake.

In the afternoon, we met at the Ann Arbor library in a reserved room. We pulled chairs into a circle and talked about open meetings and brainstormed some topics. The circle included: Ed, Mark, me, David Bloom, Murph, John, John from the library, and Matt Hampel. We listed interesting software. We talked about Ann Arbor, communities with universities, Ann Arbor vs. Palo Alto, how some people are attached to a place than others, and so on. It was interesting that so many of us had either:
* received jobs offers but refused to leave the area or
* lived in the area, moved away and returned.
I shared some copies of Dan Cooney’s “The Simplicity of the Semantic Web” which I had printed onto postcards. Thank you for the beautiful artwork Dan!

Later Ed asked people to go into the library and retrieve interesting books. Some of these books Ed would take home (others were taken home by the person who selected them). We talked about the books. There were many books and I didn’t capture their names. Karl Zinn joined us near the end of this conversation. After I introduced him, we talked about the current production by UM Gilbert & Sullivan Society “The Sorcerer.” Murph had worked on the lighting for a previous production of the show and was especially interested in details of this year’s show. There was talk about Gilbert having differing views from Sullivan on tenors.

At this point, the group planned to move to another location and I needed to leave to meet up with some other people. It was a very enjoyable day; I hope we’ll have another “camp” in the area soon.

Happy Birthday Ed!

I have known Ed for many years dating back to when we were both students and employees at the University of Michigan. My colleague Kathleen Brade worked with him on the Student Conferencing Project when she was at UofM. Since that time, Ed has been involved in many pioneering ventures including MSEN (a very early ISP), First Virtual Holdings (first Internet-based electronic money transfer and payments system), and Socialtext (the first commercial Wiki company). He is currently focused on his own company, The Vacuum Group, where he takes on interesting projects and gets things done.

Ed recently posted a nice photo on Flickr that shows Pearl Comments being used in conjunction with the Ann Arbor District Library’s online catalog. After you take a look at that, check out his Vacuum blog which is filled with well-written and thought-provoking content.