Since we’ve been inside all day, here are a few outside pictures from the Stateline/South Lake Tahoe main drag.

Welcome Gnomedex!

Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, host to our little gathering here.

The Pony Express is ready and waiting in front of Harrah’s

Harvey’s Casino, right across the street.

Heavenly Village, on the California side. This brand new hotel/shopping center is also the base of the Heavenly gondola.

Here’s the hill that the gondola goes up. You can also see the scar from the Gondola Fire a couple of years ago.

Maximizing Your Digital Lifestyle panel. Paul Kent, Tim Handley, Anil Dash, Eric Rice, Jim Louderback, Ken Layne, and Patrick Norton.

Gadgets. How many do we have, how many do we need? Should there be just one that does everything? Should we keep everything separate? The panel ranges from Anil Dash, who brought out eight different gadgets and laid them all out on the table, to Ken Layne, who owns one computer (his laptop) and no cell phone or digital camera. He’s waiting for one box to come out that does it all.

Steve Wozniak gave his keynote speech this afternoon, telling us his life story. It was all about the pranks he played in college, and how every time he built something, Steve Jobs went out looking for a way to sell it. By the end of the hour and a half, he was up to 1982. I wonder how long it would have taken him to finish?

The blogging panel is going on now. Dave Taylor, Ross Rader, Jason Shellin, Adam Kalsey, Nick Bradbury, and Robert Scoble.

You don’t need to be in the audience to be in the audience anymore. The panel is being broadcast live at IT Conversations, and they have a form on their site where you can submit a question to the panelists. Then there’s a guy here with a laptop who steps up to the mic and reads the question. And you can hear the answer on the webcast. So why did I drive all the way up here?

Well, I came here for the experience. Just getting to see what the audience is doing, as well as the panel. Scott Johnson from Feedster just came up to the mic and said that porn is starting to show up in RSS feeds. Now, anybody can hear that part on the webcast. What they can’t see is that, at that point, most of the laptops in the room suddenly surfed over to Feedster.

Also, when you’re here, you can realize that all these people out there are really real. Jeremy Zadowsky is sitting in front of me, doing something in command line on his Mac. Darren Barefoot is in the next aisle over, wearing a German Army shirt. Anil Dash just stepped up to the mic, and when he was finished Steve Gillmor was next in line. These folks have always just been words on a screen, but now they’re really flesh and blood. What other chance would I have to put faces and voices to the words, and do it all so close to home?

I found where the plugs are, finally. The conference room here has outlets in the floor, groups of two plugs spaced every thirty feet. So of course everybody is clustered around these spots where the outlets are. I was able to find a power strip I could plug into, so my my wife’s three-year-old Vaio now has a nice food source.

Right now the online security panel is going on. Talk has ranged to how easy computers should be to use out of the box, and whether they are appliances or not. As someone said, unless you take it in the bathtub with you, you know your toaster is going to work fine. People expect the same from computers. They’ve also gone on to talk about DRM, and now they’re talking about what power ISPs and OS vendors should (or should not) have to force people to upgrade and keep up with security. Is it the ISP’s responsibility to make sure there are no computers with viruses on their networks? If somebody wants to run Win 98, with no anti-virus software, should anybody be able to stop them? Or should they have the freedom to do what they want?

In general, since the internet is supposedly for everyone, how do we stop the incompetent people from destroying it?

James Roberts, in the audience, just proposed that ISPs should charge more for people who are using older, insecure software. As he said, if the ISP charges $200 more per year, or goes the other way and gives you a discount for being up-to-date and secure, there’s the money for your Windows XP upgrade.

I made it up here to the Lake, after a bit of road construction. About an hour drive, with stops for breakfast, photo taking, and flagmen. And since everyone will be posting pictures from inside the conference, here’s one from the drive up.

I’ve got to find a place to plug in here, since this laptop just sucks up the battery.