This morning is really the first chance I've taken since I arrived to look around the bay again. I'm hoping the sun to burn off the fog enough for me to get some color in my shot.

Between early morning networking breakfasts and late night events, and the conference itself, there's been little time to moblog/blog. Walking between between conference sessions is evenfull too having brushed by the likes of Al Gore, Sergey Brin (Google founder), Tony Robbins (motivational speaker) Meg Ryan, Steve Jurvetsen (venture capitalist), and countless others. The TED blog is updating daily. Here's day two in quotes. There's also an official TED Flickr gallery.

Though it's most desirable to be in the main auditorium, especially for the live musical performances, I spent some of the sessions in the overflow simulcast lounge (2-3), which was quite comfy with a variety of couches and ergo chairs.

I thanked Mena Trott (5) for bringing MovableType and TypePad (with her husband) into the world. She gave a very personal, funny talk about blogging.

The drumming circle (7) was held Thursday night by the beach. There were something like 100 people gathered around a campfire pounding drums. It was a good way to shake the overload of the day off.

The guys from Inventables.com talked about their design materials subscription service where for something like $1000 a month, they send you an idea box of amazing new product design materials. They gave everyone at the conference a sample of crushable electroluminescent sheet. (8)

The last session yesterday was held out of the conference center at the newly-rennovated Golden State Theater. For the first time in years, all 1000 conference goers were reunited in one venue. (9)

The grand party last night was held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, (10) and I got my cliche shot of the jellyfish.

Well, it doesn't look like the clouds are going to open to give me a great sunrise shot. Back to the conference.

More pix are in my Flickr photo set.

- mike lee - monterey, ca

As a first-time attendee of TED, or a TED "virgin" as they say, I found the day an almost overwheming multi-sensory infusion of knowledge. My brain hurts so good. There's too much to thumbtype and precious little open time in the very full schedule to get on the Internet, so here are some fragments from yesterday:

One startling observation I have as an asian american interested in diversity is that TED IS WHITE. Looking out across the main hall theater yesterday and this morning in the simulcast lounge, there were very few minorities. Just a handful of asians, asian indians, and african americans out of 1000 attendees. Interesting.

I learned that our Timbuk2 messenger bag is a specially designed, not-yet-for-sale icon designed to completely embody "cradle-to-cradle" design principles. And it's a great bag too.

Nicholas Negroponte passed around a non-working mock-up of the $100 Laptop during his passionate talk. He's determined to scale his effort through force of will to drop these laptops around the world in developing countries by the tens of millions units. He's also long made the case on the bloat and complexity in today's laptops. He says 60% of the cost of a laptop is sales and marketing. 25% of the cost is the screen.

Hans Rosling gave a rousing talk on his new approaches to visualizing data on global trends to produce more powerful educational experiences. All of his interactives are linked above.

The performance by the Children of Uganda traveling troupe was an envigorating way to ease out the afternoon of highly technical talks on multi-dimensional space, and DNA.

The program ran long and then the Al Gore talk was moved up from 9pm to 7pm, so no dinner. But that was OK since Al's talk and slideshow on global warming was captivating. Much of his message can be found this speech and elsewhere in the Google index. There's a documentary on Al's work that was shown at Sundance this year.

There's more from the day in a Flickr photo set.

Now diving back in...

- mike lee - ted

I started lunch on the wharf over some chowder in a bread bowl, and read the TED "virgins" (newbies) section of the program. I was soon joined by some other TEDies who sparked some good conversation. The conference hasn't even officially started yet, and I have been talking about scanning electron microscopy, intelligent design, Untied America, and the future of converged news.

- mike lee - monterey

It's probably 55 degrees out and breezy. These are scenes of the plaza behind the conference center and Old Fisherman's Wharf by the bay. The conference officially starts at 2pm.

- mike lee -

Our CIO Tony and I got in line this morning to pick up the conference gift bag. It's a Timbuk2 messenger bag stuffed with books, DVDs, CDs, snacks and more. The red and white TED dog doll looks like something Target Corp. would have put out. Cianna will like it. Other goodies include a 128mb USB drive and the Untold Legends UMD disc for Sony PSP.

- mike lee - monterey

We got checked into the hotel and the conference. As a TED "virgin" I was given the don't-lose-your-badge-or-you're-screwed speech. I also adopted an orca whale for Cianna.

- mike lee - monterey, ca

Fortunately, the prop plane for the 20-minute second leg of our flight was running late too. We ran into Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and longtime director of the MIT Media Lab, and had a nice chat with him about, what else, the $100 Laptop. He's going to show the prototype tomorrow during his speech.

- mike lee - monterey, ca - waiting for what must be the one taxi that is running back and forth from the airport to downtown tonight

I did some one-on-one meetings with some of my team this morning to check status of some projects, and then logged into the introNetworks system run by the TED 2006 conference. I created a profile in the system a couple days ago and it matches you up with people with similar interests.

Then I grabbed a taxi to head out to Dulles Airport to meet up with my boss Mark to catch our flight to Monterey. Mark's in a world of hurt because he pulled out his back. I hope he has good drugs. The flight was delayed about 40 minutes because a clogged toilet.

I started to get bored 4 hours into the 5h 45m flight after exhausting my iPod and reading material. My cameras were packed deep in a carry-on bag in the overhead compartment, so I played with my Sidekick cam. Pic 3) is a close-up of the ice crystals that form around the pressure equalization hole in the window 4) I lasted 5 hours in my seat before having to stretch and go to the john. 5) I didn't have a clear view of the sunset, but I could distinctly see the wedge of earthshadow to the north. 6) My iPod battery gauge...

- mike lee - flight 219 approaching san francisco to catch a connecting flight to monterey

I finally got a chance to test out my iSight camera on my new laptop and found my old Unibrain Fire-i Digital Camera to clip onto my old laptop. Together with iChat AV on each machine, I should be able to video chat with the family while I'm in California this week.

Let's hope I don't have to deal with firewall hell.

The SightLight works well too.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Chris' post about Siva Vaidhyanathan (6) appearing on Demetri Martin's (2) TDS Trendspotting segment on social networking reminded me to go watch the video clip on Google. Hilarious stuff. I particularly liked the graphs of what young people like vs. old people. (2, 3). I may have to screen this clip for some folks at work. Google offers the clip in AVI or MP4 for download.

- mike lee - wheaton, md