Boing Boinger and the Bamboo Garden

Last night I met up with a bunch of my former fellow IBMers at Inchin's Bamboo Garden, in Morrisville. We had a good crowd: CL, JL, PS, KC, GA, and TH. It was particularly fun, because we sat at four tables pushed together into a square, so we always had one group-wide conversation going. The restaurant is owned by a very close friend of PS, so we had lots of inside information about the dishes and PS went into the kitchen a couple of times. It is a small chain and wil soon have six restaurants across the country. They make everything fresh, so it's on the slow side, but that's perfect if you're catching up with friends. They have good selection of Indo-Chinese dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. I noticed that they do not serve pork. I had a bowl of sweet corn soup with shrimp, which was very good. For my entree, I had vegetable "coins" with manchurian sauce. They reminded me of disc shaped vegetable pakoras more than anything else. I enjoyed it.

This morning I went to the latest in the series of talks put on by the Duke Web Communicators Group. It was a question and answer session given by Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, who is also a science fiction writer and activist, among other things. I thought he was very impressive, funny and adeptly imparted a great deal of information in rapid fire fashion on DRM, collaboration, the logistics of running BoingBoing, etc. He also was actually wearing what I believe was an iPod inside his shirt, with earbuds dangling around his collar the whole time. His shirt snapped instead of buttoned, which made the player more accessible.

This evening, I went to a second talk, also given by Doctorow, to a much wider audience. This more formal talk focused on a variety of issues, including, but certainly not limited to, privacy, the ramifications of inneffective legislation, the risks of RFID and surveilance cameras.