This past weekend, I attended BarcampLA6 which took place at Mahalo HQ in Santa Monica, CA. Barcamp is an “unconference ” where people can share and learn in an open environment. Most of Los Angeles’ tech community showed up to talk about things they are knowledgeable about. I attended talks ranging from dating tips, zombie hacking, budget movie making and twitter novels. I took a lot of pictures with the Nokia N82.

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Barcamp is a great place for people to show off gadgets. Macbooks are overwhelmingly popular, almost 75% of everyone there had one. Netbooks are not as popular as I thought, I only saw a handful of them there.

Blackberries and iPhones were certainly popular. I was glad to see the Android G1 for the first time, I saw at least 5 people using them. There’s some pretty neat apps for Android, I loved the barcode reader. I saw quite a few Nokia N95s, mainly being used for QIK livestreaming. I saw one person use his N95 as a remote for his powerpoint presentation.

Perhaps the neatest gadget I saw was the Microsoft Surface. It was interesting to see so many people interact with it at the same time. I learned that it uses a camera to detect touches and the apps run on Silverlight.

A great aspect of barcamp is being with gamers. I got to play an original Street Fighter 2 arcade cabinet. People spent most of Saturday night playing Rockband. My favorite was playing Mario Kart DS, playing with people is more fun for me compared to online play.

I took a lot of pictures with my Nokia N82. There were multiple wifi access points available at the Mahalo complex, one access point was stronger on one half of the facility compared to others. To take advantage of this, I went into the settings and made sure the default access point was set to none. After every picture, I would select Post to Web. I added a title, picked my tags and picked the best access point. Uploads were quite simple. The hardest part was thinking up a title for each picture on the fly.

There was a monitor on display with pictures tagged with barcampla6, so I often saw my pictures load. This is what I love about instant uploads, not having to wait until I’m near a computer to upload and manage this stuff. Its all done on my phone.

Share Online came in handy to help me make sure I didn’t double post some images. I constantly updated my photostream to see what I’ve uploaded and see any comments available. I did occasionally do some double uploads. I used my Nokia N800 to log onto flickr and delete the pictures from my photostream.