2010 BlogFest.Asia (Day 2)

[continued from Day 1]

I had an eventful Saturday night and arrived home past midnight. Although Sunday's events will also start at 9 I already planned to arrive late. Hey, don't judge. At least I showed up. By the time the event actually began at 9.45am, it was evident that more than half of the local attendees skipped the thing.

Typical Malaysian behaviour when it comes to free things.

As we started late, the schedule kept going out of whack. It didn't help that time management wasn't strict and some speakers tended to ramble endlessly. I spent the whole morning surfing the web on my Nokia C6-00 phone - I'm so thankful it has a real QWERTY keyboard that enabled me to surf easily, even if text was a bit hard to read. Even a panel session represented by a DAP MP and a MCA man didn't pique my interest much as they only skimmed the surface.

The most entertaining part of the morning was the Country Report, where representatives from different Asian countries came up to talk about the state of blogging in their homeland.

Representative from Taiwan

Lunch came, and once again it was at WOU's cafeteria. Dishes consisted of curry fish (very mild), fried chicken and stir-fried cabbage. Simple fare that I will not be criticizing as I do not have a food fetish. In a nice gesture, Duy and Ami (the Viets) gave me a small souvenir from their country. Within South-East Asia, I haven't visited Indonesia, Phillipines, Brunei, Laos, and Vietnam but I'm putting Hanoi at the top of my list since I have some new contacts there!

 

Souvenir from Vietnam



Queueing up for lunch at WOU cafeteria

We had breakout sessions again in the afternoon, but I only went for the first out of three sessions. I enjoyed Tactical Technology Collective's sessions the most because the speaker was very natural and the mood was very informal. I already know many of the things he taught (coming from a technology background and all) but I really respect their efforts to use technology to build up civil society.

Tactical Technology Collective workshop



I was still tired from last night's gathering, and I had another dinner appointment in the evening, so I left at about 3pm to go home. I'm quite sad to have missed the closing ceremony and I didn't even get the chance to say a proper goodbye to my new friends - sorry all!

In conclusion, I think this BlogFest.Asia was quite informative and empowering. Well, it got me to restart this blog, didn't it? There's talk that next year's conference will be in Myanmar (Burma). I'll probably not be going - don't think I'll even be in Asia this time next year!

That concludes my imperfect coverage of this conference - normal blogging topics resume next week.