Just back from CHI 2004, the biggest annual usability conference, this year staged in Vienna. Jiri Mzourek, Matthias Mueller-Prove and I presented an HCI Overview paper about usability in open source software– specifically, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org and GNOME.
Bumped into Ron Bird, who I haven’t seen or heard from in 10 years when we worked at the now-defunct Reuters Usability Group in London. Also bumped into Seth, from whom we skilfully managed to avoid taking any questions at the end of our presentation 
Coolest talk by far was from the guys at Carnegie Mellon who invented the ESP Game which, if a not unreasonable number of people play it, could end up generating accurate textual descriptions of every image on the web within a month[1]… neat idea or what?
[1] Sort of.
