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To Dorkbot-SF at Chicken John's place, just around the corner from my house.

Highlight of the evening was meeting one of my heroes, Rudy Rucker. (A colleague of mine later asked me, "What do you say in a situation like that?" "Something stupid, in my case", I replied.)

Rudy was talking about some of the ideas he has explored in previous books and some which will appear in 'Postsingular', the first novel of a new trilogy. Chief among these is the notion that computers as distinct entities will go away because everything will become a computer. Inspiration for this comes from Wolfram's observation that many natural processes are effectively performing class 4 computation and are therefore equivalent to Universal Turing Machines. A branch of a tree waving in the wind is doing a bunch of hard sums just to work out what it's going to do next. Rudy envisages a world where all this computation is put to better use - computing minds.

Andy premiered his new beer this afternoon, to great popular acclaim. It's a smooth ESB style with a subtle payload. I had the honor of naming the beer, Andy wrote the strapline and Darren designed and produced the labels. It should be noted that Andy and Darren put in some sterling work over the last few weeks, emptying the bottles that now contain 'Extra Sensory Beerception'.

Called in at the Box Shop to meet some of the people building OrbSwarm. I found myself volunteering for this because they need help, I know some people involved and it was just too cool. They have an mechanical prototype constructed and running around in order to see where their plans conflict with reality.

They definitely know what they're doing, having made the "Serpent Mother" for BurningMan last year. Dozens of stainless-steel conjoined segments of the "Serpent Mother" were glinting in the sun outside.

I was killing some time, walking between haircut and bookshop and BestBuy when I passed a car dealership. They had one I liked, so, after a suitable period of negotiation, I bought it.

Fortunately, I passed up they opportunity to drive the car first. The salesman took us for a drive instead. This was a clever move in retrospect. If I'd actually driven the car I wouldn't have bothered to haggle over the price.

After dinner, I went for a little rip down the 280 to Colma and bought a cheap laptop. Same color as the car.

Happy consumer, I.