Today was the first day of the D5 Conference for attendees. Industry luminaries such as Steve Ballmer, Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart, Jeff Hawkins, George Lucas, and many more were seen strolling around the Four Seasons Aviara today.

The conference was kicked off by U.S. Senator, John McCain, who engaged in a spirited discussion with Walt and Kara. Everyone got a kick out of McCain’s joke that he’ll be appointing Ballmer and Chambers to his cabinet if elected. Things turned serious when Walt asked about the War in Iraq and McCain’s stance on the United States continued role in the area. I’ve gone back and forth as to what we need to do. I can understand both viewpoints: the desire to stay and secure the area and the need to get out immediately.

Tomorrow’s going to be real busy as we dived into the meat of the conference. Ballmer, Jobs, Gates and Jobs together, and more. The team at AllThingsD accomplished quite a bit today, including launching a new section to the site, d5.allthingsd.com, which has continuing coverage of D5. John Paczkowski of Digital Daily will be live-blogging during each session. We’ve also created a special low-bandwidth page for those people who like to reload every minute.

Photos are being hosted by the fantastic team at smugmug, with D5 videos being hosted by Brightcove. We’ve posted a 5-minute clip from the McCain session. Check it out and more over the next few days!

Here are some photos taken throughout the day. The official photographer for D5 is once again the excellent Asa Mathat. I first met Asa at a Palm conference over 7 years ago! Everything is coming full circle!

As a surprise for Walt, the D5 staff all wore these great Mossberg Craplets t-shirts from Mule Design. Kara posted her thoughts on the surprise, along with a video of the proceedings.

I’m putting the finishing touches on some updates to the allthingsd.com site before the conference begins. I didn’t get to see much of the beautiful weather outside today, sadly enough. Perhaps tomorrow, I will have a little time to go out for a nice POSE run. One good thing about having Puma H-Street shoes is that I can fit them in my suitcase very easily. Typical running shoes are really bulky and take up so much luggage space. H-Streets are the complete opposite: light, flexible, and easy to pack.

The Four Seasons is a very impressive hotel; it reminds me of the time Rae, her family, and I spent on the Constellation during our Northern Europe cruise. The constant pampering from the hotel staff is a little bit awkward, but that’s par for the course at a five-star hotel. The service is definitely a step-up from a Best Western!

Some photos of the Craplets t-shirt surprise for Walt below!

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I’m sitting in my room at the Four Seasons Aviara in Carlsbad, California. This week, I’ll be at the D5 Conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to see and potentially meet industry heavyweights, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, John McCain, John Chambers, and more!

Marc and I went to the Star Wars Celebration IV at the Los Angeles Convention Center tonight, but we left early because of a stupid bomb scare during the Celebration Opening event at 7:00 pm. Some stupid, fat, pimply 40-year old dressed up in Star Wars regalia probably screamed out some quote from the movie like, “I have a thermal detonator!” and caused the security staff to freak out. I haven’t seen any news about the incident yet, but details will undoubtably be forthcoming.

We wasted another hour waiting for another presentation to begin; apparently, the DVD player crapped out, and the door to the player was locked. All in all, we only spent one and a half hours walking around the exhibition hall and attending one session.

I nicely asked to get a refund, but the people working the ticket sales were locked out of their systems and were not authorized to give out refunds. Marc said he saw another guy crying and complaining about the situation. This person, like us, had arrived late to the show and only had a few hours to spend before having to leave the next day. Having something like this happen was really unfortunate. Sadly, on the backs of our badges was inscribed, “No refunds for any reason.” I’m still going to try to get my money back tomorrow, since it was quite expensive at $45/person!

What little we saw during the exhibition was nice, however. A lot of merchandise was being moved at the convention. Tons of people dressed up as Star Wars characters, such as Ayala Secura, Boba Fett, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, various Jedis, Han Solo, Princess Leia, and more. I’ll have photos from the event up soon. I used to dress up for these kinds of events, but my outfits were nowhere near as complex as the ones I saw tonight. Halloween’s coming up… gotta get cracking on my outfit for this year.

Randy forwarded me the story of Azia Kim, a high school graduate who was recently caught on campus months after posing as a Stanford student. Initially, Kim pretended there was a housing mixup that caused her to be without a housing assignment in the Fall. She squatted in Kimball for the first two quarters before working her way into Okada House. Amy Zhou’s prior roommate was going overseas, opening up a room in the Asian-American Theme House; Kim used this opportunity to get a permanent room in the house until the Housing Office finally uncovered the ruse.

For this to happen almost all the way to the end of the year is pretty remarkable. I can see housing mixups happening, but I wouldn’t think that someone could pull this off for so long without a Stanford ID nor key. Remarkable!

I’m wondering a few things after reading the article:

1. What are Kim’s parents thinking and how are they reacting to the news?
2. What’s going to happen to this girl in the future? Will she be scarred for life from this experience or will she pull herself off the ground and move forward? Will society let her move on?
3. What are Zhou’s parents thinking after learning that their daughter had been spending many nights at her boyfriend’s dorm?

There’s so much pressure to succeed pushed onto children. It make situations like these more and more likely. In fact, the story makes me think back on the Blair Hornstine saga from a few year’s back. Sad.

I’ve been down in Long Beach for the Society for Information Display (SID) conference this week. I’ve been helping out DigiDelve, a Bay Area startup with some great OLED-based technologies. In and out of Internet coverage, I haven’t been keeping up with the news lately. I just read that Riis admitted to doping during his Tour Victory in 1996. It wasn’t quite an open secret that he doped, but everyone certainly suspected that he did, despite his frequent denials. In the same article, I read that Eric Zabel and Rolf Aldag, teammates of Riis (and Ullrich) on Team Telekom, also admitted to doping.

It’s best for the sport for everyone to come clean now. That said, I don’t think the UCI and the Tour will be able to rewrite the history books because of the prevalance of doping in the sport throughout this decade and the 90s. In 1996, Riis, Ullrich, and Virenque were the podium finishes. Virenque admitted doping several years later and Ullrich, though denying that he’s ever doped, is linked to the Puerto and the emerging Telekom scandals.

Prudhomme, the Tour Director, is suggesting lifetime bans for people who deny cheating but are later outed. I wouldn’t go as far as that, but obviously a hard line needs to be drawn to cleanse the sport.

When I was in high school, I received a series of annoying prank calls, the subject matter of which was crude and sexual in nature. Though I never found out the identity of the caller, I have a good guess who it was. If this were to ever happen today, however, it would be relatively easy to find out who the perpetrator is with Caller ID.

Uh, paging Mr. Geoghegan. WTF were you thinking?

Today’s events at the Landis hearings in Malibu may have turned the case on its head for me. It sure doesn’t look good for Landis to be associated with a guy who’s threatening a witness. Cycling has a drug problem, no doubt. The optimistic and naive side of me has wanted to believe that our cycling heroes can and will do no wrong. Basso, Millar, and Ullrich have proven us all wrong. Hamilton and Landis are on deck.

Despite all the doom and gloom surrounding cycling, it isn’t preventing me from riding my bike. It actually feels good to have to huff and puff up Highway 9 on my bike. I’m slow, but at least I’m clean!

I read in the Stanford Daily today that five freshman girls from Donner got the top pick in the housing draw: lucky number five. They’ll be living in Bob next year.

The Housing Draw was very different when I was a student. Back in the day, you wrote out your list of preferred houses before you got your number and assignment. Today, I believe you get your number first before you choose any of your houses. This of course allows you much more choice in the matter.

When I was a freshman, also in Donner, I drew 2455. Preferred numbers then went from 1-3000, so getting 2455 was pretty crappy. I had Hammarskjold ranked number one on my list. Hammarskjold, the international co-op, you say? My top two goals was to live in a house and have an in-room network connection, and Hammarskjold met both of those goals. It’s hard to believe that back in 1994, many on-campus residences at Stanford did not have in-room network connections! Oh, the horror!

Sadly, the cutoff for the Hammarskjold was 2432, meaning I just missed out. 2455 was “good enough” to get into Okada, my last choice, but I really didn’t want to live there. Though Okada did have in-room network connections, it was right next to the Teahouse where I worked and was predominantly Asian. I wanted my Stanford experience to be a little more culturally diverse, so I placed my name into the waiting list and crossed my fingers.

Throughout the summer, I checked Axess daily for updates of my new housing placement. I was pleasantly surprised when I learned I was going to live in Xanadu. Along with Bob, Xanadu is one of the most desired Row houses, regularly drawing numbers less than 300. To have a number like 2455 and to get into Xanadu was pretty remarkable, but it wasn’t the last time that I would circumvent the dreaded housing draw.

I was overseas in Paris at the beginning of my junior year. As a result, I submitted my name into the waiting list for Winter Quarter. When the bell tolled, I was placed into 353 Campus Drive, the former Delt House that’s now called Narnia. It turns out the Delts hadn’t been paying their bills and were booted from the house. Though my draw number was over 2000 again, I lucked out again in the draw.

My final year was spent at the French House, where I was the Theme Associate. I felt my luck was running out with the waiting list, so I aced the interview and got to live in another Row house. My time in Xanadu, 353 Campus, and the French House was overall great. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have lived in dormitories during those final three years.

It goes to show that you always have a choice in the matter when it comes to your housing options at Stanford!

Great coverage on the 10-day Landis hearings in Malibu on Trust But Verify. The title of the site sums up my thoughts on the case. I’d like to believe Landis, but I want to see some hard proof of wrongdoing on the part of drug testing authorities.

A COBA member forwarded me this article. No, it’s not my Mark II! You can read about Clark Brooks’ mishap with his camera in this SportsShooter.com post.