• NELL tweets each time it learns a new fact – follow @cmunell
• You can download the belief file (15 million total, 1 million that are ‘high confidence’)

Of the two, I’ll be curious to see which you find more interesting!

• FailCon. Billed as a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others” failures and prepare for success. Talking about and sharing failure is powerful, I think worth the $79 entrance fee.
• Quickly Remove USB Devices Safely. Essentially you can disable write caching. Not sure they’ve got it defaulted the correct way, does anyone really disconnect them using safe removal?
• Walk and Talk, The West Wing Reunion. A fun plug for Every Body Walk.
• 100 Must Read Books from the Art of Manliness. More than a few on this list I haven’t read.

Some more thoughts:

• I liked the sponsor/lunch area in Dallas a lot. It’s nice to have an area where you can sit during the day to chat, and it was a great place to hold the end of day raffle (which can get tedious if you’re standing in the Orlando sun!).
• Having Gelato at the Thursday night sponsor expo was nice, close to compelling. Quick to serve, easy to carry, and it drew people back to the room.
• The bus to Karaoke was a win, I wish we had done a bus in Orlando to our evening event.
• I liked the Orlando location better. Nicer facility,rooms closer together,felt slower paced and intimate. Walking in Dallas was close to Summit scale.
• Orlando didn’t have a volunteer wearing a jacket (Sri habitually wears one)
• I see more and more people using the Guidebook on their phone. It was amusing to see an update titled ‘session cancellation’, and then later another update titled ‘reverse session cancellation’! I wish it included more info on the schedule about meals and events.
• I was disappointed that there was no announcement or forecast on when and where the next SQLRally will be held. Last year we started late due to venue struggles and a first time selection process, I had hoped this year it would be smoother and would announce at the end of the event.
• I’m heading home less tired than from the Summit. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the Summit; I do. But a week in Seattle and the flight from Orland and back, by the time I get home I’m done.

I can’t say I put much effort into the planting plan. I bought plants that I thought we would eat or that seemed fun, and absolutely did a swag on the planting. Part of it worked by luck, such as planting the corn in a grid versus a row so it would pollinate, part of it no good when the corn shaded the tomato plant (and the squash shaded the mint).  We had what felt like a swarm of grasshoppers that finally yielded to soap spray, but sadly the soap spray also burned the corn (because the kids used all the good soap spray and whatever it was that I put in to refill the container…or the amount…was too much!).

I gave it all one shot of fertilizer and somehow, in spite of it all, almost all of it has grown. It hasn’t been a huge harvest – some ears of corn, one cucumber (one? didn’t get that right),some small onions,quite a few cherry tomatoes, a few squash (something ate the rest on the plant), and some pretty good broccoli.

I mostly watered by turning on the hose and spraying it every couple days, and that was – along with just going out to see how it was going – the best part of it for me. Gardening is slow by nature, no need to hurry.

Gardening isn’t a serious thing for me at this point, it’s fun and doesn’t take a lot of time. It wouldn’t be fun if nothing grew, but short of that it’s been a nice change of pace. We’ll plant another batch of stuff in the next month or so, and after that who knows.

But I did want 4G. Speed matters, especially when you tether frequently as I did using PDANet for Android. I started looking at phones early this year to see what was new and what was coming. The Droid Razr was one of those, thinner and lots of raves about how thin it was. Thinner is good, lighter is good, but not at the expense of battery life and that was the trade off they made. Then the Maxx came along with a larger battery and then it started to look interesting.

The other part I wanted was to see an upgrade to a newer version of Android. The Android phone OS ecosystem is a mess, in my opinion at least. Every phone manufacturer wants to tweak it, add a custom skin, and the result is that once you get the phone, you’re not likely to see many more updates. This is where both Apple and Microsoft do it better, at least so far. The Maxx comes with Android 2.3,with a public commitment (we’ll see!) to upgrade to the Ice Cream Sandwich (v4) soon. Originally soon was April,now it looks like May 21st as I write this.

So buy, or wait? I didn’t see anything else in the rumor mill that looked compelling, so it was a bet on the ICS upgrade. I hit Wirefly to see what the cost was, but it turned out that I could only get the early upgrade if I went through Verizon. Usually that means paying more, but in this case it worked out to be the same cost I would have paid via Wirefly. My guess is they are trying to capture some of the upgrade money and still keep the affiliate upgrade market going too.

Bottom line was $200 for the upgrade, so I ordered one that took a few days to arrive. It’s about the same size as the X, just thinner. The v2.3 OS is stable at least, and it’s nicer/smoother than the X, a result of accrued tweaks probably. For example, tethering on the Maxx is built in – just plug in the USB cable and enable, no third party software required. The camera response time is significantly better than the X, noticeably so.

It’s a bunch of little things, but overall I find it to be a better phone than I had, and that’s good.

I’ve gone to at least one major conference a year since then, often more. In those early years I kept going to a session every hour, every day, hungry for learning, but also wanting to treat it like work. Sessions are there, I should be attending – I’m getting paid to attend. It took a while,but I got to the point of understanding that missing a session,whether to explore the city, handle a problem at work, or just talk to someone interesting, was ok.

For the past couple years at the PASS Summit I don’t think I’ve sat through more than a handful of presentations over the three day event. It’s not that I know everything, far from it. Part of it is that I get some technical learning through out the year at SQLSaturday. Part of it is I know that I can watch it later on the DVD’s. Most of it is preferring to spend time chatting with people. That’s quite a shift from where I started.

That shift feels ok. I’ve gradually become more interested in the people side of work, and just a bit less interested in the technical details. Not that my interest in technology has waned, it’s just not enough by itself, more it is that I feel like I need to balance my portfolio, make the same kind of investment in people and networking that I have made in technology.

If I were to change careers tomorrow, I’d be writing checks to go to events, and I’d be soaking up the sessions. But I wouldn’t just be going to the presentations, I’d be reading the blogs, cataloging the speakers, figuring out who was who, and who I should meet. More of a balance from the start? Perhaps.

Lots for me to think on, then I’ll write some more.