My flight ended up being delayed more than 5 hours. I think that the universe is trying to compensate for my trip to Amsterdam, and the balance of my karma is now restored. So hopefully there will be no karmic backlash in July. 🙂
I’m currently sitting in the keynote room waiting for Rasmus to arrive to give the Keynote. He’s always a good speaker, and I imagine this will be no exception, since he’s very much in his element here.
And … there he is.
Important men
having important conversations
determined that we all know
how important.
Calling to encourage you
to focus on what works,
rather than doing what doesn’t work.
And that this eleventh hour deal
was big enough for me to
interrupt my busy schedule
of waiting for my delayed flight.
My flights to and from Amsterdam were on time. In fact, almost every leg of the trip arrived early. This caused quite a bit of confusion, since I haven’t had an on-time flight in roughly two years.
I’m pleased to report that reality has come back into alignment, and my flight to Chicago is delayed by at least an hour, probably an hour and a half. All is well with the world again. And once again, I sit in Bluegrass Airport waiting for a flight.
It is worth observing that this is the last trip that I will take before I get married. Pretty cool, hmm?
Tomorrow I will be leaving for PHP|Tek, which will be the first PHP conference I’ve ever attended.
Over the last 3 years I have gone from being a Perl programmer, and maintaining multiple packages on CPAN, to being a PHP programmer in my day job, and involved in a PHP Open Source project in my spare time, and now I’m speaking at a PHP conference. This is quite a shift, although the biggest thing that I’ve found during that shift is that the two languages have a lot more in common than they have different – an observation which is received with cries of HERESY from both camps.
If you’re going to be in Chicago this week, give me a call.
09-May-2007
A postcard of the sunflowers,
rather like a Chick tract,
a blasphemy, in the hands of too many people.
Like CliffsNotes of the Brothers Karamazov,
condensing into ninety-six pages
two years of Fyodor’s tears.
One can almost, but not quite, imagine,
concealed far beneath the half of a half of a half-truth,
the great Truth, waiting patiently to be discovered
but waiting in vain, for we don’t even know
that there’s something to be discovered.
And then, picture Vincent, at the same time
amused and flattered, depressed and enraged,
that everyone in the world
has an imperfect copy
of this gift to a friend.
Ever since I started writing poetry, I find that I long to share some of what I’ve written with you, my loyal reader. However, so much of what I am writing is like a personal journal, and, as such, would have to be heavily filtered before I would be willing to put it out in public “for daws to peck at.” Either it is too personal, or it is about events that would take too long to explain, or alludes to images that simply wouldn’t make sense if you weren’t either me, or my Best Beloved. So, while much of my poetry isn’t technically written *for*, or *to* her, much of it is inscrutable to anyone but her. And that’s ok. I write primarily to express ideas that clamor in my head, demanding to be expressed, not because it’s particularly necessary that anyone ever read them.
So, I have a half-dozen pieces that I’d like to share, but one after another, I’ve eliminated them, because they would require too much explanation, and so could never stand on their own. Perhaps when I’m dead and famous, some critic can go back and try to figure out what the heck I was yammering about. 😉
Here’s the one that remains, and there’s one other that I might post, if I can persuade myself that it would not be misinterpreted by the few people whose opinions I care about.
May 11, 2007
Time is both enemy and friend
we urge it on, beg it to stay
scream at its sluggishness
and rail at its flight.
Please, please stay, linger with me
preserve the sweetness of each moment,
and be gone from me,
thief of my life, thief of my joy,
destroyer of my patience, of my youth
and of my innocence.
Each moment, like a rare drop of dew
on the petal of an already-wilting poppy,
each moment rolls slowly by – far too slowly,
and is gone, forever, before there is
time to notice that it was ever there.
* Flight attendants were called stewardesses, and wore short skirts.
* There was a smoking and no smoking section.
* Nobody had a cell phone.
* There were no approved electronic devices, because nobody had them.
* Computers wouldn’t fit on planes, so there were no rules about them.
* Meals came with metal cutlery.
* You were allowed to carry a small knife – blade four inches or less.
* Metal detectors were fairly uncommon.
* Visitors could be in the gate area.
* Nobody had to take their shoes off.
* You could park in front of the terminal.
* I had enough leg room – but then, my feet couldn’t reach the floor.
It was a great conference, and a perfect location for the conference. But, it’s over, and I’m SO ready to go home. Or, as Dorothy put it …
… most of it was beautiful. But just
the same, all I kept saying to everybody
was, I want to go home. And they sent me
home.
All packed up, and in the morning I’ll be heading home. Going to bed, in the hopes that it will come faster.
FeatherCast 30 talks about ApacheCon in Hong Kong, which looks like it will be the first ApacheCon (well, not counting San Francisco) that I’ll miss. It’s a hard decision, but I’ve used up my travel quota for this year, as measured by my weariness as the end of this trip nears. Hopefully some day I’ll get another chance to go there.
And Danny posted a great picture of me Feathercasting. Thanks, Danny!
I attended a talk yesterday about Apache HTTPd on cell phones. We selected the talk because the abstract seemed fascinating, and the idea of a mobile website was intriguing.
The talk started a little slow, with lots of heavy technical details, but then it got into uses and ideas for future use, and I was really glad we had selected the talk. Utterly fascinating.
The idea that caught my attention was websites that are 1) mobile and 2) on-demand.
Imagine carrying your website with you. Your website knows where you are. Folks can look at your website, and it tells them where you are, and, via bluetooth, your phone locates other websites (phones) that are in the same general vicinity. A website is “linked” to other websites by virtue of geographic proximity. And using a camera phone, you can take photos so that your website is very context-sensitive.
The on-demand idea was even more interesting. Click on this link to request a photo of where I am. The phone-holder gets a message on their phone, and takes a photo, which is then sent as the response to the HTTP request. Viola. Content that didn’t exist before the request was made, and doesn’t exist after the request is terminated. On-demand web content.
It does mean that things like search will have to be rethought a little bit.
This was all presented as a technical project, of great geeky interest. However, I am now *certain*, that in the next couple of years, someone will find a way to make this easy to use, and will find a way to charge for it, and you’ll see thousands of mobile websites (“mobsites”) springing up and becoming a huge percentage of web content.
Strangely, this makes twitter seem slightly interesting too, if it can be brought into this kind of a model. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I am sure that someone will figure out what that means and do it.