OSCon Day 1

07/07/03 15:45:29

Not much to say so far today. I gave my “intro to apache” talk this morning, which, by some great miracle, I managed to finish on time, even though the first hour of the talk took an hour and a half. This afternoon I went to the first half of the DocBook talk, but was getting nothing out of it. Admittedly, it was a pretty good introduction, but by the end of the first half, I feel that he’s unlikely to get to anything that will teach me something I don’t know.

So, for the second half, I intend to attend Schwern’s talk on testing. I think I’ve been to this talk before, but I’m sure it will be entertaining, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, the network is down, which is irritating me a great deal.

Tomorow I’m supposed to attend the Extreme Programming talk all day. That could be interesting, or it could be a lot of stuff I already know. I really am not quite sure yet.

Some time in the morning, it seems that something on the network was producing a ton of UDP traffic, and killing the network. Now there are signs all over the place telling OSX users to turn off Rendezvous to help save the network.

So, I want to complain and moan on IRC, but, of course, I can’t get to IRC. It’s deeply annoying, and merely serves to increase my irritation. Sort of a feedback loop of sorts.

Second cache, aborted

07/06/03 13:53:45

Some folks were going to go geocaching with me, but apparently something else came up. I’ve found one cache so far today, but they are all just so far away that I really need wheels, and I can’t justify spending $25 each way for cab fare. And none of the rental places seem to be open. Annoying. I need to get out to at least one other cache in order to drop off these travel bugs I have. And it would be a great shame to only find one cache the whole time I’m out here. So perhaps I can get a car tomorrow afternoon, if I can’t find a rental place open today.

Post-caching

Just got back from my hike. I am worn out. The trip back was a little more direct, and all downhill. I am having the breakfast buffett, and am determined to get my money’s worth! Just saw gnat + family, and Uri + family.

Caching in Portland, chapter 1

Sitting at 45°29.858N, 122°42.511W, a few hundred feet from the first find of the day – Council Crest. The idea was to have a short stroll before breakfast. It was just 1.75 miles. 2 hours later, and probably 5 miles of switchback, I found it.

I left a hot wheels, a Chrisman Mill wine cork, and a travel bug called Rock Climbing General.

It is also worth mentioning that when I stepped out of the hotel, I was at 9 feet elevation, and I’m now at 1038 feet elevation. About 300 feet of that was up one set of stairs!

Photos at http://buglet.rcbowen.com/photos/2003/Jul/OSCon/Geocaching/

OSCon, day 0

07/06, 7:25am
OSCon Day 0

It being 3 hours from my time zone, I woke up rather early. I took the opportunity to write a letter to the Transportation Security Administration. I have no illusions that I’ll receive an intelligent response from a real person, however, I have included the entire note below for your edification. Please note that I put a great deal of time and thought into this, and that it is something that I feel very passionately about. Not that I think it’s a great or eloquent note, by any means, but if you have any desire to share all or part of it with anyone else, please feel free to do so. ie, I explicitly place this in the public domain, and heartily encourage you to send it on to your congress critter, if my efforts can in any way help in the fight against the police state that we appear to be slipping into.

New laptop

Work bought me a new laptop. It’s a Compaq evo n600c. Not my first choice, but can’t beat the price.

Two weird things about it.

It is very strange to have a laptop that actually runs for *hours* on the battery. For years no, my ThinkPad has gotten, maybe, 10 minutes off of the battery.

Second, it won’t suspend. This is a shame because I use that feature extensively. In fact, with my ThinkPad, I would go months without rebooting – just suspend. To be more accurate, it suspends, but won’t come back, or comes back with very corrupted video. Hopefully there’s a fix for this somewhere, but I have not found anything helpful yet.

Found it

When we got home after the pool yesterday, there was a police officer’s business card on the door with a message written on it – I think I have something that belongs to you. Although I had already cancelled my credit cards, and have not received my new ones, getting my wallet back was such a burden off of my mind that I’ve had a really good weekend. I suppose it’s silly that such a tiny thing made me miserable for two days, but it really did have some rather important – and hard to replace – stuff in it.

Thanks, mr policeman! (Sarah made him a thankyou card!)

Dude, where’s my wallet?

The excitement of today is that I have misplaced my wallet. And to make it more exciting, I have no idea when this may have happened, as I have not had a use for it since Tuesday evening. Or perhaps even Monday evening. So, while I assume I had it since then, I have no clear memory of seeing it since then. So I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking for it again and again in the same places, and wondering where it could have gone. Needless to say, today had been less than productive. I don’t think that it was stolen, as it was in a bag with other items of much greater value (my GPSr and my PalmOS device, my checkbook, my paycheck, and various other things) which were not taken. I expect it fell out of the Jeep while I had the roof off.

So, I’ve just cancelled my credit cards, which, if I’m lucky, will ensure that I find it in the next 10 minutes.

The wallet itself was purchased in Paraguay, and is thus very hard to replace, as the chances of me going to Paraguay again in the next 5 years or so seems very slim. 🙁 And it contained some wonderful pictures of Sarah which I don’t think I’ll be able to replace. All in all, I’m very very bummed about this.

So, all day, I have been very gloomy and grumpy.

Note: This was SIX YEARS ago, and I have long since found the wallet. I think I’ve gone through two wallets since then. I’m going to close comments on this post now. Thanks for the encouraging sentiments.

CGI::Lite

Just shows how much I’ve been paying attention.

I’ve been using CGI::Lite for a number of years. It does some of the things that CGI.pm does, but not everything. CGI.pm does *waaaay* more than I ever need. I just want some forms parsed, thanks very much, not a OO thingy to generate HTML. Anyways, I just discovered that CGI::Lite has been unmaintained for more than 3 years, with an “emergency” release in February of 2002 to fix a severe security bug.

So, perhaps I need to look for something else, since I really don’t want CGI.pm, unless there’s a lightweight subset that one can use.

Evidentally I have not done any CGI stuff in aeons, having been doing mostly mod_perl stuff. I consider this a *good* thing.

clue-by-four, clue-by-four, clue-by-four

There Is No Cat – Adventures in The Trademark Zone

I received a note from the clue-by-four folks also, asking that I refrain from using the term on my domain BoxOfClue.com which is a joke, in case anybody missed it.

At first, I was inclined to just quietly comply, but, fortunately, the page above was mentioned to me.

For those of you who missed the story, the basic idea is that somebody trademarked the phrase “clue-by-four”, and wants to stop everyone else from using that phrase.

I first heard the term used when I was in grad school, which was in the 1992-1994 time period. While I’m not anxious to get sued about it, I’m not about to stop using a phrase that has been in common usage for a least 10 years, just because somebody says that they own the phrase.

And, if you wonder why I’m not referring to them by name … well, I seem to have deleted the email message. I can’t find it anywhere. So, if you’re reading this, mr clue-by-four, you might want to send it again, so that I can respond and say no.

I’m sorry that the trademark office was negligent enough to take your money and think that you can trademark a phrase in common usage. That was wrong of them, and you should request a refund. While you’re at it, you might also want to trademark the phrase “get a clue” and “without a clue” and “utterly clueless”, just in case.

I’m not trying to be disrespectful or unkind, but you can’t dictate the way I use the english language by sending threatening email. If you want to send it registered mail, you have my address. However, I can’t imagine I’ll take that any more seriously.

The Margin Is Too Narrow