All posts by rbowen

Signing

I’m at the O’Reilly authors book signing. I have the ego-damaging misfortune to be standing next to Damian Conway, who has a steady stream of folks coming for signatures. I hate book signings, however, I’ve already had more takers this time than any signing I’ve been at before, so it’s not all bad. 🙂

Ran over time :-(

Turns out that the clock on my Palm is 15 minutes off. I guess it sync’ed with my laptop last night, on which the battery was dying. Maybe it got messed up then. Dunno. Anyways, I ran way over on my Apache Performance talk. I’ve *NEVER* run over on that talk. Very very frustrating.

But at least now I’m all done for the conference, and now I can just attend and enjoy.

What do you want to eat today?

Today’s lunch is brought to us by Microsoft. Thank you, Microsoft.

And a pox upon all the silly people who feel *obliged* to take this opportunity to snipe at them. Being anti-microsoft is getting boring.

ok, let’s see, where are we?

Finishing up last minute run-through of my talk for after lunch. Just went to Randal Schwartz’s talk on mod_perl. It was very good, but needed at least twice the time.

Last night’s events were all excellent. Larry Wall’s State Of The Onion was, as usual, unexpected. (If that makes any sense.) And it made me think, unavoidably, that we have this great treasure in jars of clay. And we are all blessed to live in the same era as some of these great thinkers with whom we share this venue.

Paul Graham was funny and brilliant. I hope that a transcript is available somewhere, as I fear that I was aready fading by then, and missed much of it.

And Damian was Damian. I had heard that talk at least once before, perhaps twice. But it was fascinating with a largely non-Perl audience to hear the reactions.

And the keynotes this morning, also, were very good. Tim O’Reilly and Robert Lefkowitz were both excellent, and even insightful. I recommend reading these talks if they are available. Of course, neither will be quite as worthwhile in print, but it gives an idea.

Caching in Portland

I found some willing folks in the Press room, following my interview with OpenFoundry, and went geocaching. It was very warm outside, and we had to walk about a mile there. And then back of course.

This evening is The State of the Onion, and also Damian Conway’s Life, The Universe, and Everything. I believe I’ve seen this (latter) talk at least once before, but Damian is always worth going to hear.

At OSCon

I’m at OSCon, waiting for my tutorial to begin. I spilled $beverage on my keyboard a week or so ago, and it’s starting to seriously gum up. I’m very not happy about this. And, to make it worse, there’s a very shiny 17″ powerbook sitting here on the speakers’ table, and it’s looking very attractive.

I’m still not sure I could get used to that one mouse button thing. And it has a trackpad the size of Detroit.

I wrote some stuff on the plane, but it was on my Palm, and I have not had a chance to sync yet. I’ll probably post it out of chron order.

Every hotel in the downtown area is full. Between the conference and BrewFest, you pretty much have to go outside the city to get a room. My hotel was full, and I had to move to a different room this morning. Why is it that the worse one has to pee, the slower the check-in person is? I suppose this is a special application of relativity.

Oh, yeah, and I also wrote some other stuff this morning at breakfast. I need to sync pretty soon.

The conference is very full. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Breakfast, 26th

Of all the places I’ve had to travel “on business” I think that Portland is probably the top of my list of places I’d want to come on vacation. Or even move to.

Of course, I expect that I’d want to do a little more research before I call Two Men And A Truck. I don’t actually know anythina about the area much past that you get scolded if you try to pump your own gas here, and that it’s impossible to get out of sight of a coffee shop anywhere downtown.

I’m at the Days Inn City Center, perhaps 8 or 10 blocks from the conference. I’ve actually stayed here before. Twice. In the DataBeam days, when on a customer visit. Maybe I’ll drop in on the customer.

Lightning has just struck my brain

I’ve just had an apostrophe. Seems that the reason that I enjoyed Wil’s book so much is that it has much the same theme as Dandelion Wine. (Heh. It always comes back to that, hmm?) That is, noticing life as it goes past. But he even goes a little farther — noticing the good bits, really remembering the good bits, and letting the bad bits just fade away. And, of course, enjoying being a kid, even if you’re not a kid any more. 😉

And, as an aside, apparently online snacks and food are terrorist tools. Now they’ve only got diet coke, water, and orange juice. And the flight to Portland has food available to buy. Oy. I’ll bet they have paper knives too. Or perhaps pre-chewed food. I think I’ll eat in Atlanta instead.

… and out the door

Well, if it’s not packed now, it’s not going. (I can’t find the book I’m reading, so I’ll just have to take something else.) I’m off for some lunch with my family, and then it’s off to Portland. See y’all at OSCon.