I attended w00tstock last night with my daughter. We weren’t sure she’d be able to go because she’d gotten the flu a couple of days before, but by the time show day rolled around, she’d beaten the fever and was in perfect health all day, which is good because she’s a huge Mythbusters fan and would have been extremely bummed out if she missed being able to meet Adam Savage (a w00tstock headliner).
Leading up to the show, my main question was “what the heck was w00tstock?” and “what would I be seeing if I went to w00tstock?” It was being billed as a “celebration of geek culture”, which could be either really cool or really dorky, and still didn’t tell me much about what the show would actually consist of. I can now report that w00tstock is sort of a geeky, funny variety show, with musical acts and humorous readings and presentations, where you find that you mysteriously understand every Star Wars reference and Pac Man joke that’s made the entire night. It was a show pretty much aimed at me.
Paul & Storm provided the musical glue for the show, singing fun songs from their act which my daughter and I had seen from when they tour with Jonathan Coulton. Wil Wheaton, famous from Star Trek: the Next Generation, was a co-headliner, and it turns out he’s very funny. He had some funny video clips and read a passage from one of his books about a story from when he was eight years-old and got talked into trading his Death Star toy for a Landspeeder and five bucks (an abysmal trade, as every manchild in the audience immediately understood). Kid Beyond, billed as a “human beatbox”, did some human beatbox-ey songs and had a short A/V presentation. Molly Lewis played the ukelele (turns out she should have practiced a little more but the crowd loved her anyway 
), and Adam Savage from Mythbusters gave a presentation about his 100 Wishes. Turns out, quite a few of those wishes are things you’d think he’d have no problem with, like owning a pool table and having a secret passage in his house that you access through a bookshelf. Some of them were a little tougher though, like wanting to have dinner with the actual Hellboy.
I had offered to let them show any of my videos at the show, and they would have fit right in with that crowd, but it looks like they didn’t make the cut. It’s too bad too, because I think my video for Paul & Storm’s “Live” would have been perfect to have played on the screen behind P&S while they sang the song. As it was, Paul asked the crowd if anyone had seen my videos (the loud cheering indicated that many of them had) and he had me stand up and take a bow, which was great. There was even one person who wanted my autograph on their w00tstock poster, which was an unexpected honor.
In an odd sign of the compactness of my social life, I recognized one person in the audience whom I’d worked with at Adobe (not directly, don’t know what department she’s in) and two guys who worked with me on Hotmail at Microsoft. There was also one guy with long hair, a beard, and a puffy shirt that I swear I’ve seen before but can’t remember from where.
The entire evening boiled down to one thing at the end — my daughter was not going to leave there without obtaining Adam Savage’s autograph on a piece of duct tape we’d prepared for the occasion (we’d just watched the Mythbusters episode on duct tape the evening before). Adam was happy to sign it, and when he found out that I was the guy who made the video for Jonathan Coulton’s “The Future Soon”, which Adam was such a huge fan of, Adam gave me a hearty handshake and congratulations for doing a great job. So that was nice.