And neither did some of the women in the room that came out to the event. It was a small gathering and its main purpose was to talk about the planning and ideas for the conference in New York to be held later this year. One of the immediate ideas was to move the conference from October to December 2008, for several reasons. The women in the room agreed that the elections are a big factor not only in technology and the DC area, but going forward as a country have many ramifications.

It seemed I was the only semi-associated Federal Government (albeit contractor) in attendance. But my cause was heard, maybe its because I am not afraid to speak up and actually would be happy to speak at any event should I be asked (this was a side [tangent] conversation of course that happened and we will continue to address).

I will probably help develop a track at the conference around Enterprise 2.0 in Government or quite possibly just speak about my experiences as a woman climbing the corporate ladder to become the Director of Technology for Navstar, Inc.

I have also agreed to help with the marketing and promotions of the event, as those of you who know me, know of my former life in the music industry. As such, this was something I was very good at and still continue to use these skills in my evangelism of social media in Government. So who knows, I might even take up the committee lead on that. We are coordinating the planning of the event through a wiki and I do believe I know my way around a garden

Most of the other women, were from non-profit organization such as DC Web Women, Women in Policy and Technology (WIPT – yes they are aware of how the acronym sounds), Care2 (OXFAM), United Way, and Women Thrive WorldWide, just to name a few. I think I made some great new friends and contacts and I am more inspired now for the cause to raise awareness for women in tech and all geekdom.

I want all my female readers to reach out to me in some shape or form if you consider yourself a geek in any way (not necessarily in tech, but maybe a scifi or D&D geeks). This blog is your sanctuary and I will help you find ways to find other women like you.

If you would like to find out more about this event, please feel free to contact me or search for yourself, by googling “She’s Geeky”. Hope to see you out in December in New York.

Fortunately technology is starting to catch up with the demands of the likes of us. We can participate in massive social messaging with sites like twitter, pownce, ping.fm, friendfeed and so on. And by using these services we can see our messages online. OK cool. Then there is something called Grand Central.

Grand Central is cool, as its in beta, I can choose my own phone number from anywhere in the country and use this as my “semi-anonymous phone number”. I use this in a few ways. Its the number in my email signature I give out via business email communications and eventually will be on my new business cards (along with my twitter name: immunity). But I can also use it to screen calls and forward calls to multiple lines at the same time. And where I can also check the voicemail online as it comes via email. Very nice huh?

But all that takes a little work to set up and disseminating those numbers and practices to your business contacts and tech savvy friends.

What happens if its your family and close friends, who might not be as techie as you. In fact, they are the ones that call YOU for IT support when their computer is b0rked.

This is where a service like Dashwire might come in handy. I recently stumbled upon the site, from a curious question posted by a fellow smartphone user on my twitter contacts. After reading some reviews on a zdnet blog and checking out the site, I decided to give it a trial run.

Dashwire essentially syncs up my smartphone (T-Mobile Dash) to a personal site for me so I can see all my calls, texts, pictures, and contacts. This is something T-mobile can do normally if I was using a sidekick, except for the text messaging. So this is why I like it. I can see the texts I am missing.

It’s able to make this work by sending text messages to the dashwire service, as a forward, so an unlimited text messaging plan is essential if you want to try this out. Additionally, be forewarned, this is a resource and battery drain, especially while synching. So while it maybe cool, consider this downside, especially if you are not able to charge your phone (charging in your car maybe a necessity).

Also to note, they didn’t have an exact match of the HTC phone for my dash, so I picked the closest model and it still works.

I started using this about 2 weeks ago and think I will give it at least one month more before I make my final call, but for this trial run (self-imposed trial, the service is free), its been very helpful.

I am so addicted to all things mobile and how it connects me to the world. I can remember the shortcode for Twitter (40404), but I can’t remember my best friend’s phone number. In fact, I can’t remember anyone’s phone number post 2002, when my father finally bought my very own cell phone. I was late to the cell phone game as most of my friends had been using cell phones for a few years by then, but even 4 years out of the Army I was still clamming for a hard line. Now even my alarm system in wireless and I haven’t had a home phone in three years.

So since 2002 I have been becoming dumber. And I blame it on the cell phone. I mean think about it, before you owned a cell phone, you probably knew all your friends numbers that you called from your private line in your parents house and you could dial those numbers fast as lightening. But now, every time you lose your phone, reset it, or upgrade, you send a message out to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or whatever ever social network to ask for everyone to send you their numbers again. Even those whom you have weak ties.

Why bother remember 10 little digits when your SIM card can do it for you?

So what happens when we rely on that technology so much, it fails us in life? We can end up looking like real assholes.

This was the case for me back in April this year for instance. I was flying up to spend some time with my best friend in New Hampshire before heading to Boston to meet with Andrew McAfee, of HBS and to sit in on one of his classes. As the plane landed in Manchester Airport, I turned my T-mobile Dash HTC Excaliber smartphone back on so I could text him that I was on the ground. I was able to see that he had txt’d me he was waiting just as my phone froze. I restarted again and my phone started going into what I call the loop of death. This had happened once before so I knew my only recourse was to hard reset the phone. This meant 30 minutes of unavailability to do anything with it, even make a simple call.

So without a phone, I had no number to let him know I was there and I would be waiting for him. Luckily after 30 minutes and just as my phone was normalizing as I was sitting on a bench outside, he walks up, furious. Why didn’t call blah, blah, blah. He said a true friend would have the number written down elsewhere and couldn’t believe I didn’t have it memorize. To which, if I had, asked someone in the airport to borrow a cell phone for a local call or go to a pay phone.

This was not the first or the last time we had issues getting in touch because of not knowing each other’s numbers. I thought we had rectified this because we had exchanged business cards and (we are best friends mind you) that maybe by now we would have remembered or at least keep the numbers in our wallets.

Um no. It happened again. He lost his phone. His billfold is in storage where he thinks my business card might be. He had no access to get online (the Internet seems to be a novelty for laid back New Englanders) and thus excuses, excuses, blah, blah, blah.

OK so this is a long story to make a point. But as I sit here, many paragraphs later I can only remember the first three digits of his number (603). I still cannot muster up the remaining 7 with absolute certainty and it kills me. I mean I learned Arabic to fluency (which I have also mostly forgotten now), but I cannot remember 10 numbers.

My cell phone does all my day to day brain work for me, besides store numbers. It also emails me my daily calendar from google, I get my news, weather and traffic (see @thebeltway on twitter) via FriendFeed, twitter, and text messaging. I even read interesting feeds while getting iontophoresis during physical therapy in the mornings. I even email myself quick directions for meetings from google maps and in bad traffic on 95 I used Windows Live Search for finding alternate routes home.

Essentially its like my brain saying, try as I might, since some device that fits in the palm of my hand can remember all that information for me, why should I retain it in my head? I mean I don’t know how many times I have gone to t-mobile.com to look up the number of someone whom you would think I would have the number engraved on my knuckles.

Next up … getting my text messages online ? Say it ain’t so.

Update: My friend Mike B. found the clip, I am standing next to Steve and his soundbyte made it, but mine did not. Next time eh?

After that, I sat in on Joseph Smarr from Plaxo’s presentation “Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web“. I saw Joseph earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps in MIami. This time he had more time to speak and talk about the direction in which the social web is going and the ever growing need for our connections to travel with us, instead of re-friending your friends. I also saw Kevin Marks again from Google and I met Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin.

I spent a lot of time back and forth in blogtropol.us and on the expo floor. I was really impressed with the Tell Me app that works with voice on your blackberry to keep your hands free when looking for information. I also got a demo of saleforce.com powered by google apps and the possibilities I can take with me back to Navstar. I still have 4/5ths of the floor to explore. A little each day.

Most of the time spent here is actually networking and talking to developers making cool hacks, scripts and apps. But the afternoon we got to listen to the Keynotes of Day 2 (Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky surely were the standouts).

So far the new apps I have been working with since I got here Fireball, powered by Fireeagle. Alertthingy, a desktop app for friendfeed.com. And ribbit, another way to make your phone do so much more for you.

The conference is being pulled all together by the social networking site crowdvine. This is my second time using crowdvine as my guide through a conference and this time it is dramatically better. I was able to guestimate my schedule of panels and sessions for the week as well as fill out a little information about me and link all my rss feeds that I will be generating about the conference, to include twitter.

I am tagging everything in twitter with the hashtag #web20expo and following @w2e on twitter. I have uploaded and started a group on Flickr (Web2.0Expo08 San Francisco) for this event for all my pictures and hopefully others will contribute to as well.

We will also be posting video podcasts and vignettes throughout the week, so stay tuned to this blog for more information and links. I already posted a video last night of The Unicorn at the Digg Party last night on youtube, check it out. Thanks to Kevin Rose and the people at Digg for an awesome get together.

I will still blog over here on my personal blog, but my professional voice and opinion can now be found over, there. So check it out.

Wikiflying

When a super gardener on a wiki is wikifying so fast, their wikiflying.

It was cool at first, but thanks to Mashable.com with their recent blogs (this one and that one) on the tool I found something better and cooler to fit my needs. It is called TripIt.

TripIt is a personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans. TripIt is free and makes it easy to…

• Quickly organize your vacation and business travel – no matter where you book
• Automatically get itineraries with all your plans, weather, maps, restaurants and more
• Easily access your itineraries via paper, email, personal calendar or mobile device
• Share your trips and see where you overlap with friends and colleagues

And it mashes up real nice with the following websites:

	Google maps and directions
	NOAA weather
	SeatGuru airplane seat advice
	Wikipedia city information
	Eventful current events
	Flickr city photos
	OpenTable dining reservations

Add on to the fact I can email it my itinerary from multiple email addresses (so I can send it my business and personal travel), and it hooks in with many of the travel booking sites and hotels. The coolest thing about it to me is the .ics file it creates from all my trips and I can create that as a new calender feed in Google Calendar. Love it!

It also alerts my friends when I come to their town. Great trick because it always hits me when I am leaving the city I am visiting that I actually know people there.

I also love that it is totally mobile smart phone friendly. I have checked it out on my T-Mobile Dash and its working so far without any hiccups.

I am still playing with it, so I hope discover more about it and hope that you out there in web 2.0 land are using it too and help me use it to its full potential. So chime in, let me hear your thoughts.

Update 

The only thing now I need is my facebook plugin application to replace my dopplr. I think I am going to widgetize my blog if I can with my “dream travel conferences”.

DC Meetup

2007-07-21 17:00 EDT

Who should come? You should. Really.
If you are interested in Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, regardless of your level of experience or involvement, or if you are otherwise involved in with free content you are invited and welcome.

What, Where, When, and How?

• What? : DC Wiki(p|m)edian meetup

• Where? : Uno Chicago Grill, Union Station, Washington DC
• When? : Saturday, July 21. 5 PM — until it ends
• How? : See the directions.

These are just a few of the little things you can do to help Save Our Earth.
Find out more and make the pledge

Blog Readers: Tell me what you are doing to make the change?

I can’t believe I just saw the Spinal Tap reunion with every bass player in the world. If that can happen, we can make the world a better place.

And don’t forget, save water, shower with a friend!