Well, the preparation for leaving on our journey to Sunnyvale went pretty well. The drive down, despite the threat of WMD’s (hey, when you get pulled over at 2am in a foreign country, that gun threat WAS a WMD - ask BUSH!), went smoothly, and even our attempts to find where we were staying was pretty seamless. We stayed up pretty late and coded a reasonable facsimile of what we wanted to create using a variety of different API’s. When it came time to present, I started getting a little nervous, but it wasn’t really a big deal. Then, I went to test my computer on one of their monitors. Suddenly, my computer wasn’t cloning onto the other screen. Not a big deal, extend the desktop and make it happen. Well, apparently there was a problem with the timestamp we had setup on our application, and I got the Yahoo! screen of death. When I went to refresh the page, I forgot that I had extended my window, not cloned it, so whenÂ? I went to refresh the page, I refreshed the wrong window. … all in all, it went pretty well. The man with the bell gave me a little pause, and I only pushed past his imposed extended time limit a few seconds, and it seems to be fairly well received. After that, I was able to get some pills for the cold I’m coming down with, grab a quick bite to eat, and settle down to enjoy the creations the rest of the hackers have come up with. There was even a special presentation just seconds ago by Patrick Stewart. Nice work…

Update: Adding to the Ooops title, when I went to publish this post, I forgot to add the Yahoo! Open Hack Day tag, so I quickly added it and hit ’save’ again, forgetting of course that it would post the article twice. …

It’s like magic, but it’s not. It’s flash.

With the deadline approaching quickly, Team HackDay eh has officially called it a career as far as Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2006 is concerned. Silent Rob never did end up sleeping, Peter curled up on a bench for a couple hours, and me, well, I ended up fading away and having a few hours of sleep in the backseat of my car, and boy did I have weird dreams! Our Hack-app, dubbed Tripr, did not get completed, but the proof of concept is probably going to be sufficient to get our point across. We ran into a few difficulties, which slowed our progress at several different points in the night, and the success that we did have is a testament to the two gentleman who were kind enough to let me be a part of their team, Rob Ellis and Peter Sawka. I probably didn’t look good enough in a mini-skirt, and my coffee making skills are definitely lacking, but I guess it was my car and they might have felt a little bad if they made me sit there and wait for them while they did real work.

In a couple hours, my cousin should be giving me a call and we’ll meet up for a quick meal. Shortly thereafter, we will make our way out of Sunnyvale and headÂ? back to the Great White North. What an experience this has been. I’ll definitely miss poor ol’ Rob - I’m not really sure he’s going to make it through this yet.

The Time is Now: 5:22am. As a team, we’ve been hacking away at a variety of different Yahoo! API’s since about 8:00pm last night (September 29th). There have been several different instances that have helped us grow together as a team, or, given us reasons to poison each other’s RedBull when someone turns their back.

The night started out in an incredibly strange fashion. How many people can say that they were interviewed by NBC, CBS, and ABC all in one night? And that doesn’t even begin to mention the two or three representatives from German media outlets, one from France, and several other more discrete on-lookers that snapped away or quickly chatted with us while we attempted to be productive.

As the attention started getting to be a hindrance to the team, we made adjustments to our seating arrangements, and soon thereafter the reporters faded off into the sunset. Most likely, several of these individuals will be back tomorrow to check out the results of the event. With no more media and hours of work ahead of us, we did start to make SOME progress. That gave us enough time to find things to debate, and as the team grew more tired, patience was limited. Showing the true leadership that we expect from him, Silent Rob calmly took control of the situation and made sure that, as a team, we continued towards the common goal. He’s also the one thatÂ? decided the team didn’t really need to see the Beck concert (there were less than 500 people watching Beck and we missed it?!).

Since lunch, I’ve not been able to tackle another quick video to add to our memories of the event, and I’m not really sure I have the capacity nor the coherence to add to that collection. I guess one could argue that it might make the clip better, but I’m not sure we’ll ever find out.

It’s 5:39am, we just watched a quick clip on CBS that included us. If anyone wants to check it out, the URL is: http://cbs5.com/video/?id=16823@kpix.dayport.com.

Well, 15 hours,Â? three states, a state trooper, several Red Bulls, and a couple video clips later, we have all arrived at Yahoo! Open Hack Day, gotten our schwag - not prizes, as I have been corrected - and are sitting down for our first workshop of the morning. We all decided to take in the presentation by Andy Baio, co-founder of Upcoming.org, who will be talking about Step Away from the Computer: Why Virtual Communities Take It Offline. We are just getting the welcome speech from someone who is yet to be named, so I have to end this post now. Needless to say I am very excited, and can’t wait to take everything in.

Today we will depart for Sunnyvale, California. We’re going to try and video blog some of the trip and the event, but I’m not sure how it will all go. When we get back, we will be having an event on Tuesday, October 4th, 2006 at Wings on Granville. For more information go to nPost.com and see the events section. If you can, check out the article that was written up in the Abbotsford TimesÂ? and/or the one that will be coming out in the Langley Advance. I’d like to thank Andre Charland and everyone at Nitobi. I’m not sure if it will end up going through or not, but Andre and I have been emailing back-and-forth about the possibility of some sponsorship from the company. Even if we don’t get the help, which would be great, just the support from the local tech community is appreciated, so Thank You Andre and Nitobi, and hopefully it all works out.

Again, I apologize for the scattered posts this month, it has been interesting to say the least. Hopefully we can find some semblance of normality in the near feature, with respect to work andÂ? our blog. I hope we make BC and Canada proud with our efforts in the centre of the Net-Universe, Silicon Valley - and if not, we’ve always gotÂ? Nelly FurtadoÂ? to fall back on, right?