Notacon: Not to be Missed
In just under a couple of weeks, the fifth annual NOTACON will be held right here in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio. You’re going, I know; you’re super-über-cool like that, and you don’t need to be reminded of your coolness. But I’d like to mention the show here for posterity, so that our descendants will know just how completely they missed out.
Notacon straddles, like a Colossus built entirely out of recycled motherboards, backtech chips, and loops of soldering wire, the middle ground between regular conferences and BarCamps (though Notacon predates BarCamp by a couple of years). It’s not free to attend, but it is very inexpensive. What it lacks in slick advertising and corporate sponsors, it makes up ten times over in raw, unfiltered geekiness and fascinating material. This is the kind of event where presenters will hold forth on the depths of digital security, the physics of wireless networking, homebrew chip architecture, the coolness of HyperCard, online society dynamics, and more. There’s a running contest called Anything but Ethernet, where you get bonus points for having one of the links in your network architecture incorporate barbed wire.
Yeah. It’s like that.
The speakers will be as wildly diverse as the audience. The lead engineer for the C64 Direct-to-TV (a C64 in a joystick!); the man behind The Daily WTF; some of the folks putting out 2600 magazine; the woman behind CrochetMe.com; and many more. I’ll be there as well, talking about the bleeding edge of CSS and web design, ripping apart some recent projects of mine at top speed while discussing where I think we’ll be in three years. Plus Drew Curtis of FARK fame will be back, as he always is, this year sponsoring a FARK party. The mind fairly boggles. Boggles!
As you’re no doubt gathering by now, it’s hard to describe Notacon in a quick, concise summary—and that’s a big part of what makes it so awesome. For my contemporaries: see you there! To you future historians: okay, you missed out, but drop everything right now to find out when the next one is and I’ll see you there!
