How this works.

They warned me it would happen. TED exhaustion. It overcomes you. You become mentally tired. You can't think anymore. Your brain gets blown away by awesomeness so many times in a row that at some point you cannot catch the pieces and reassemble them quickly enough. That was yesterday. I wound up missing a session and of course the news of all that happened made me want to cry. I got it together and went to the next session and rocked it old school: I took notes by hand.

I have nearly adjusted to California time now, but on a normal day I don't usually sleep late anyhow (on a very sleepy weekend I max out around 9am) so getting up any time after 6am here is a blessing, which I've almost managed once... but no, not really. Staying up late is an art and a skill and a necessary non-evil. The TED experience requires engagement in all ways: the talking. There's a lot of talking AT you (the lectures) but there's a lot of talking WITH each other that is very, very necessary. The opportunity to exchange ideas with people who are a lot smarter than me isn't uncommon in my normal daily life, but the opportunity to do so with people who are also of amazingly varied in life experiences and their areas of expertise here IS common and you want to soak it up as much as possible. Sleep flies out the window. Sleep is for later. "Later" is TBD because once TED is over there are re-writes and revisions here.

"Later": the layout/format of this blog is based on the simple premise of one post per speaker. Because anyone can see/read about all the speakers on ted.com (except for the surprise interstitial ones), we're not re-inventing that wheel. And you've figured out by now that each post on the blog is titled by the speakers name so you can scan and find whomever you're looking for.

And of course as previously mention, the posts are a combination of transcriptions and a few thoughts of my own thrown in. Trying to get this up in "real time" so that at the very least what is unveiled at this, The Great Unveiling, is revealed here at TED is also unveiled to you outside of TED as soon as possible. There are many hyperlinks to be added and very importantly, there are many, many edits of text to come. The schedule here is back to back with speakers and when there's a break it's back to back with important conversations.

I'm taking my first "real vacation" in eight and a half years next week, which will give me the time to re-write pretty much everything you see here. TEDsters of old recommend the mental vacation, readers here recommend the revisions asap, so I hope to converge all of the above.

Last night: third night of less than four hours sleep and the ones before that, not a lot more. But it was filled with conversations about musician families, changing the educational systems of the US, how the TED prizes of the year can be executed and who can contribute, "green" art, creating a web site with Chris Hughes (who seems to have read all the same wikipedia entries as me), visiting Israel, (allaying) the fears of SCUBA diving, marathon training, violence and children... while talking with a programmer, a web-developer, a producer, a curator, a maker/designer of children's toys, a professor, a non-profit executive director... some of whom are well known, and others that are not yet. Name dropping will come later as mentioned before in the form of those ever-useful hyperlinks.

TEDDIY is starting in a few minutes and I am writing this from under the covers. Oh, coffee! COFFEE!

More in a very few minutes.

-chel