It's all over bar the Board meeting.
And that's exactly where I am – the bar – having what I hope will be a long, long-deserved lunch. Unfortunately I'm sat and eating alone since it's 3pm and most of the delegates have high-tailed it out of the hotel to try to enjoy at least half an afternoon in Vancouver itself.
Vancouver is quite, quite beautiful. What is so depressing is that I only realised that this morning – having been here for four days. Stumbling and bumbling around my hotel room this morning, packing my bags in time for the nightmare journey back home, I suddenly noticed, properly for the first time, that stretching out ahead of my balcony was the end of downtown. Then a vast expanse of water, and on the over side rising majestic mountains catching and reflecting the sun.
I went out on the balcony and stood there in mindless contemplation enjoying a very brief period of calm. Until I released I was dripping wet with just a towel around me and had started involuntarily shaking with the cold.
I would like to apologise now to the woman on the 20th floor of the hotel opposite. Now only did the poor cow have to contend with the opposite view to me – less natural beauty than high-rise buildings – but she had to witness a goose-bumped, half-naked, jet-lagged 30-year-old Brit enjoying the view that he had only just noticed and she was livid not to have got. Christ only knows what she made of my shrugging gesture.
Toilets and fame
I was recognised numerous times at Thursday's two-hour party by people complementing me on my stories, which was nice. Or it would have been if it was my journalistic talents that people were celebrating. Not a chance.
“Ah man, I loved that stuff you wrote about going to the toilet in Tunis,” was the first comment. “Hey, I tried to figure out how to use that tap too,” came another, completely separate, comment. And then: “What was it you wrote about the toilets in Luxembourg?”
Yes, I am the travelling poo blogger. Put me in a city and I will provide the defecatory detail you desire. I'm wasting my time with this tech journalism stuff. Lavs are the way forward. Great bogs I have known and soiled.
I had no idea I was so obsessed with toilet tribulations – but at least it would seem I am not alone.
Not wishing to disappoint therefore, I feel I should point out that every time I go to the toilet in the Westin Hotel – the one at the back on the third floor – an easy listening band with such clarity that you just know they are actually sitting cross-legged on the ceiling above you, started playing really bad Xmas tunes.
What is it about musak in bogs? If you're going to go to the trouble of installing speakers in bathrooms, why not help everyone along and play the sounds of a running stream? But Jon Bon Jovi's relentlessly cherpy younger brother playing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer? Jesus.
And all the toilets here possess the most evil (mis)use of infra-red technology known to man – the automatic flush. In the cubicules, you stand up, reach for the loo roll and then jump when it flushes itself completely unannounced. So you clean up, but then – and this is the evil bit – as soon as the paper is in there, it doesn't matter what you do, how much you move back and forth, in and out of the sensor's sight, that toilet just will not flush.
Everyone's already heard the first flush. You don't want hang around in there, banging into the walls in the hope it will do it again. So you gather your stuff together, go outside the cubicle and find some ridiculous reason to linger just for a second, ears pricked, and relax when it automatically flushes itself again.
All this automation is just plain wrong. Not only does it make people immensely lazy but it separates them from the reality of their own existence. Already you see people staring in despair at escalators that aren't moving. They are seemingly incapable of recognising the fact that a stopped escalator still represents a set of stairs. Actually, there's an idea, install stairs that looked like escalators and just watch on CCTV as mindless goons try to figure out how to get to the top.
In three years' time, accident and emergency will be inundated with people that have walked into glass doors, expecting them to open magically for them. And by 2012, an electricity cut will see every toilet bowl in the world fill up with human waste as people stare in disbelief at the automatic flushing toilet stubbornly refusing to whisk away its contents.
What the hell has this got to do with ICANN, you freak?
Resisting the temptation to draw a parallel between toilets and our beloved Internet overseeing organisation, nothing at all.
It's been another grand week-long meeting with enough intrigue and argument to keep most happy for weeks. And, as ever, now it is over, the last remnants of this lively bunch are milling around the lobby, exhausted and looking forward to getting back home.
The conference isn't even over, but I'd be surprised if there were more than 10 people remaining when the Board has its meeting tomorrow (Sunday) morning, excluding the Board of course. Here is a pure indication of how the Internet has changed things. The Board meeting will be where the substantive elements of this whole process are agreed on and become part of the ongoing ICANN.
But there's no point in actually being there. You can listen in online, or if you really want, watch a webcast to get those vital pics of people with laptops talking into microphones with little red halos. If you miss it, you can find the link and catch it later. But why bother?
What is decided – the resolutions – will be instantly fired in full across the whole world in a matter of seconds. Vint Cerf even recognised it at the end of the public meeting today, breaking with protocol to thank and present gifts to the two outgoing Board members – Thomas Niles and Richard Thwates – because at least there would be an audience for this bit, as opposed to an anti-climax for all their work tomorrow.
What will be decided at the Board meeting? Good question. According to the Board agenda:
Consideration of proposed sTLD Agreements and Applications: Probable approval of. asia. Studied ignoring of the .xxx controversy.
Approval of Terms of Reference for GNSO Review: Formation of a group that won't do anything interesting for at least two meetings.
Acknowledgment of ccNSO Recommendations on Proposed Bylaws Changes: Vital changes that ICANN has to make if it is get the rest of the world to grant it full credibility will be looked at and ICANN will wonder how to cut out the bits it doesn't like.
Acknowledgment of GNSO Recommendations on Proposed Bylaws Changes: Ditto.
Proposed ICANN Bylaws Changes on Interim ALAC's Certification of At-Large Structures: The ALAC will be patted on the head again.
Board Committee Business: Dull detail on the running of ICANN.
2006 Nominating Committee Chair Appointment: Formality.
Thanks to 2005 Nominating Committee: Formality.
Other Business: Occasionally worth watching but probably not this time.
Thanks and Acknowledgments: Where's everyone gone?
