We were only at the Hudson for a short time, back in July. The next day, we moved our bags to the New Yorker Hotel, which is significantly less spacious. We were joined by Ani and Alex, who split the room with us, and were also attending the same conference.
The Last Hope is a computer security conference held at the historic, but doomed, Hotel Pennsylvania. That hotel was even more cramped than ours!
There were a few talks that I wanted to attend, but I mostly wanted to see my friends. It’s nice to have friends all over the world, but it does make it inconvenient to have them over for dinner. We did attend a talk on how to get passwords out of your computer, even when it’s been turned off. And saw a demonstration on lockpicking. And ate some instant icecream.
I was most happy to see ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ioerror, janviere, secretsoflife, and Micah. All of which I hadn’t talked to in a very long time. I also got to have dinner with bokunenjin and meet princessleia2, at a stylish, but awful, restaurant.
You know, I’m getting worse and worse at actually attending conferences. Instead, the worrying trend is that I go to foreign cities to shop for hats, buy books, drink tea, and eat. Strangely enough, this doesn’t make me unhappy at all.
Small baths do, though. I got the worst crink in my neck while I was there. And bathing was so necessary in the sweltering moist heat of a metropolis in July. It should be no surprise to many of my readers that this was something highly encouraged, and frequently ignored, at this conference.
On the last day of HOPE, we scooped up some bottles of Club-Mate, grabbed some souvenirs, and went to stay with andukar. All the ex-NITIots in New York seem to be living under the same roof, which is nice because it’s a rather lovely one. We shopped for clothes in Williamsburg, took some photographs, and ate with regyt and novalis.
I can’t wait to go back. But mostly for the pizza.
I’ve finally had a chance sit sit down and go through some holiday snaps from the summer.
The Hudson Hotel gave us the best service I’ve had in a long time. Plus, it’s a lovely hotel too. I love spending vacations in bed, even if it seems like a prodigious waste, because sleeping is my favourite hobby.
This is in sharp contrast with my guest room, which has just had its wall torn up to replace a burst pipe.
Two people, one heart
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Bagel with cream cheese and lox
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Pizza filetti
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
ส้มตำ (som tum)
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Boston Five Cents Savings
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Shark boat
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Orange line
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Pigeons above skyscrapers
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
City Hall Station
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Life Underground
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Sweeping up
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Night in New York
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Model train
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Washington Monument
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
United States Capitol
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Spacesuit
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Tornado Kitty and Katie
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Attention people from Washington, New York, and Boston!
I will be in your fair country for the holidays and would love to see you. Let us go out, dance in the streets, and shovel delicious food in our faces while laughing heartily.
Road trip itinerary:
- 22 – 23 December: Washington, DC
- 24 – 28 December: New York, NY
- 29 – 30 December: Boston, MA
- 31 December: Montréal, QC
Send me an e-mail or an SMS or even call me up! For your stalking convenience, my cellphone number is +1-514-839-4887.
I am sitting on the couch eating apples, clementines and curd cheese. Delicious, squeaky curd cheese. This is my final push to eat the rest of the food in the fridge.
There are numerous shirts on the drying rack, waving in the artificial breeze of a fan. They're whites that I'm furiously trying to dry out. This is, of course, because they have to be packed for my week-long trip to the States.
I have to catch the 6:55 train to Kingston tomorrow, so I'd better not get distracted too much. There is an absurd amount of packing to get done and quite a few things I must do. For instance, I've discovered that the blacks have not come cleanly out of the wash. They're going through again right now.
The rest of the family is driving up from Toronto, to meet me halfway. They'll be picking me up in an action-packed sequence where they drive alongside the tracks and I leap from the train on to the roof of the car. Then we'll careen down a hill, jump over a cliff, and end up on the highway to the nearest border crossing. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to get the house in some semblance of order. I've stacked the books in piles in the living room, put away most of my tools, and am staring at a pile of dishes. I'll probably get to those after I've eaten. Then it's cleaning out the fridge as best I can and scrubbing the accumulated stains off the stove.
Timin is snoozing on the couch, blissfully unaware of my activity. I think he's gotten pretty used to my crazy late-night packing. The plan for this week is to have cloquewerk and angorian come by every other day and fill the food dish. I have left them little gifts on the table, to make them feel better about trudging through what looks to be bizarre weather. I suppose that cuddling with a cute cat might also be a good reward, but I can never tell how charming Timin is when I'm away.
I never seem to be able to pack light, but by George, I'm going to try this time. I've limited myself to a camera bag, a messenger bag, and a small luggage on wheels. How I'm ever going to get around in style, I have no idea, but we shall see if we can be inventive with the outfits.
As you can plainly see, my mind has started wandering quite a bit. I've had a nap this afternoon, but I can tell that my plan to stay up all night is going to be interesting. scjody is staying over, in the hopes that Aslan can benefit from the same attention as Timin. I have just realized that I've forgotten to tell my wonderful, beautiful, generous volunteers about the extra kitty they'll be feeding. So I hope they don't get too upset upon reading this.
I have been surfing the Internet to find places to eat while we're across the border. Thankfully, the lovely people at …an endless banquet have reviews of New York pizza joints, which I will have to try. But first I have to finish this absurd amount of fruit.
Oh look, that alarm has rung. I'd better go down and fetch the laundry.
November was just a whirlwind of activity. I was so busy that I barely had enough time to sleep, much less sort through photographs and write in my journal.
So here's an executive summary, brought to you by my photographic memory. That is to say, my photo albums.
Manhole cover
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
I started the month by flying to Sunnydale, California. I spent a week at the Googleplex working on Ubuntu during the day.
My nights were filled with activity as well. I saw old friends, like Peter, and made new ones too.
The next week was spent in San Francisco. maradydd took me to a Dorkbot. Fun!
Mark Shuttleworth
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Again, the days were filled with work for Canonical. (I took many wonderfully embarassing photographs of my co-workers.)
Mini camera
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
And again, my evenings were also very adventurous.
I managed to meet lovely people like Rachel, and Sorrel, and Erica, and Sophy. It's strange, but not that strange, how they all are connected to ioerror somehow.
Laughing squid
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
I finally got introduced to Scott Beale at the Laughing Squid party. I managed to convince Marc and Etienne to come along, and I think they liked it. But really, how could they not? There was a steam car, the Photoboof, kettle corn, robots, dancing girls, columns of fire, strange bicycles, art cars, and LEGO.
Decorations
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
I returned to Canada where I attempted to collapse, but failed. gorbash_dragon reminded me just how festive this time of year really is.
This began a whole lot of socializing with my long lost friends. So I went to a diluvienne's tea party.
And callmepavlov's Munchkin party.
5th anniversary party
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Expozine, which isn't a party at all. But they threw one afterwards.
Eric Dorland
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
And ze_dinosaur's farewell party.
Two-dalla party
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
My final event of the month was a blast. denkizero invited me to a launch party, where everything was two dollars, although bad puns cost extra. There was a fashion show, a marching band, an iPod battle (with real iPods), some television interviews, some drinking, some socializing, and a few time-outs.
Whew.
One of the interesting things about Google is how it supports the free software world. Like many companies built on web services, it keeps much of its software proprietary. Yet they do have a lot of their systems running free software and the way they redress that balance is fairly different.
Chris DiBona has a small group that heads their Open Source Program. They do normal things like help with pieces of Google's own open source projects. They also do strange things, like sponsor students to hack on software through their Summer of Code program. But their most bizarre project is that they sponsor free and open source conferences.
Leslie Hawthorn's in charge of that. Amongst the other work she does as an Open Source Project Co-ordinator, she organizes conferences on Google's many campuses. She told me that they used to give people money for travel expenses, but that did not work out very well. Instead, they offer to host them and provide food and space and Internet access. Which is pretty neat!
Now Leslie showed up on a Sunday morning to take care of us. But then I realized that she was more than just dedicated, she was utterly insane. In a good way, of course. She spent all her day with us and then showed us around town in the evenings. Not only that, she invited us back to her house and threw parties.
Insane.
Insanely great.
An entire conference ran off of Google's public WiFi access and we still had enough bandwidth for me to upload photographs to the Internet.
I've done loads and loads of laundry all evening and now it's hanging up to dry. The blues and greens aren't all done yet, but that will have to wait for tomorrow. The ironing will probably get done then, as well.
The apartment is now rather warm so I decided to sit outside for a while. It's gently raining and surprisingly mild. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I'm on the west coast again.
Which reminds me… I should tell you about the food at Google.
It's good.
No, not just good. Amazing!
The first lunch, on Sunday, was catered by an Indian place off campus. The vegetable korma was so savoury it disappeared instantly. And the food kept coming throughout the day, with sandwiches and fruit platters and all.
But the best was yet to come. On the weekdays, the on-campus kitchens are fired up.
They turn out astoundingly good food. Not just excellent cafeteria food, which is what I expected. No, they beat fine restaurants in many respects. Since I've eaten there, I've been completely spoiled.
Here, let me show you some photographs:
Monday's lunch was a roast that was done perfectly rare and served with sweet creamed peas.
Tuesday involved beautifully roasted chicken, a wild-boar coleslaw, and a hearty beefy chilli.
Wednesday, I had lunch with Jim, and enjoyed lovingly soft tacos.
And Thursday greeted me with meltingly good pulled pork sandwiches and a rich creamy chowder.
I was in heaven! How do I get invited to Google lunches more often?
I had a chance to speak with some of the cooks who were serving food. At the Building 44 restaurant, American Table, they've all worked in professional restaurants before coming on board. She had never cooked in a cafeteria before and actually thought the challenge was even harder. Later in the week, I saw the sous-chef who was taking her family on tour. I thanked her profusely and she seemed quite proud of the things her kitchen accomplished.
It's nice to see that kind of respect and passion for food. If only school cafeterias took themselves so seriously.
On Friday, I decided that I needed to visit a fast-food mecca. People have been telling me about In-N-Out Burger for quite a while now. All the Bay Area ex-pats I know long to go there. They rave about it whenever I mention hamburgers. I decided to find out for myself.
First, I convinced sailorfrag to join me for lunch. Then I talked to the Building 44 receptionist at the front desk who recommended I order a cheeseburger, animal-style. We walked there from campus, which she thought was a bit nutty, but it worked up a decent appetite. And was merely a ten-minute walk. I have to admit, that was the best fast-food burger I have ever eaten. And the chips weren't bad either.
These meals, combined with all the sushi I ate, have caused me to put on a bit of weight. But I wouldn't have skipped a single one.
I really wanted to tell you about the Ubuntu Development Summit in Mountain View, but I didn't know how to begin. In fact, I've been procrastinating for a long while about this, by doing work. Every time I've gone to California, I been caught up by this horrifically fast-paced lifestyle, such that I'm always busy. Which means I barely had enough time to catch my breath, let alone write.
Thankfully, Montréal has lulled me with her laid-back charm. So I'm able to sit down and tell you about some of the wonderful things that happened down there.
The first morning I woke up to was crisp and clean. I stretched, showered, and walked into the warm Californian winter. The Wild Palms Hotel had an interesting layout as there was no front door. It was almost like a motel, with covered walks and a large courtyard. But no wild palms. I went to the restaurant where I grabbed a few glasses of orange juice, sneered at the fake croissant, and then it was off on the shuttle bus to the Googleplex.
We were greeted on the campus by a friendly redhead who apologized for the lack of coffee. Surprisingly friendly, for someone working on a Sunday morning. We went upstairs and were greeted by a room full of people. People from all sorts of open source projects like Beryl, GNOME, KDE, LinuxPrinting, LTSP, and more. People were already starting to mill about, but my first priority was to figure out what was going on.
I quickly identified the name badges and then found a table full of Google bags. Inside were a shirt, some blinky LED things, and a pen. Loot bags are always popular amongst geeks and the extra T-shirt seemed to serve some conference-goers well when the clean laundry started running thin.
We worked all week on specifications for Feisty. This means going into meeting rooms, sitting down with other people, and trying to figure out what's reasonable to do in five months. Then someone sits down and writes out the specification until it's approved. A lot of people spent a lot of time in meetings, while others hid in corners to get writing done.
Those of who didn't hide were often accosted by friendly people who wanted to talk with us. I actually liked these conversations a lot, as you got a broad view of what people were interested in the community. I spoke with a bunch of folks about what they wanted to see in Quality Assurance and promised to send them all e-mails. I really should get on that soon, now that Herd 1 has been released.
Which reminds me, I certainly have documentation to write up, if I want to get more people on board for that.
I was in discussions about automated installation testing, a bug reporting tool that can file bugs right into our bug tracking system, automatic upgrade testing, and improvements on the crash reporter. But not all of my time was spent on Quality, some of the other discussions were based around community involvement and user interface improvements.
Throughout the week, we also had various presentations every day about Ubuntu-relevant topics. Like demonstrations by the Looking Glass and Beryl projects on nice user-interface tricks. Or reports on the nVidia driver situation and the One Laptop per Child project.
By the time Friday rolled around, everyone was awfully tired, and some people could be heard losing their voice. But it was a great experience, especially for people who had never been to an Ubuntu Developer Summit before. I certainly hope to see them again.
Flying out to another city is sometimes a bit stressful, especially if you've been travelling a lot. Here's what happened on the 11th, when I was set to fly to San Francisco.
21:00: Laundry laundry laundry. Blacks, whites, blue-greens, red-browns. No clean clothes and not enough time. I pulled the last load from the washer, hung it up, and ran out.
01:00: I hailed a cab to the W, in the hopes of meeting dzuunmod. They had already left but I was treated to a strange scene of beating music, girls dancing on dividers in precarious heels, and expensive drinks. Everyone else was too clean and sharp to be geeky, though I managed to fit in. Until I pulled out my notebook and started writing.
02:30: Rode the bus up to St. Viateur to buy bagels for my expat friends. The bus is full of drunkards, as the bars had just let out. Some girls got off the same bus and they were weaving around trying to find the bakery. I led the way. Got a dozen sesame seed ones and consumed one greedily while it was still soft and hot. There are hundreds of newspaper clippings lining the walls, you know, and even signed photographs.
03:00: Rode the bus back home. Ironed a few shirts and packed the suitcase. Tried fitfully to stay awake.
04:30: Cleaned the kitchen.
05:30: Bagged up the bagels.
08:50: Got to Dorval airport bleary-eyed and confused. Tipped the cab driver well for driving like a madman. Then I stood in line forever at security, got through the TSA, and arrived at the gate. There I discovered that I had no seat.
11:00: Kurt von Finck and Jeff Bailey showed up to keep me company. They boarded the plane before me while two other passengers waited to see if they could free up seats. One was really upset, since he had to make it for his daughter's birthday. I was remarkably calm about the whole thing, finding it even amusing. The ladies at the gate shook their heads when they realized my suitcase was on the flight.
11:20: The handlers rearranged some cargo so that we could fly. Seats were made available and we boarded. I sat in one that had been vacated three times. We got briefed about emergency procedures, where I claimed to know how to open the emergency exit. There's a lot of legroom in those spots. Kurt sat in front of me chatting with a guy the whole flight. I passed out happily.
14:45: Awoke in San Francisco. It was bright, sunny, and warm. I was still tired, even though I gained three hours of sleep. We met Jim Morrison, got our bags, and headed out the door. With our local guide, we got on the BART, then the CalTrain and were off to Sunnyvale.
15:30: On the train, we shared the car with some kids from USC. They were all in football uniforms, swapping beers, and being rowdy. Their coach told me they were going to play Stanford at 16:00. The conductor, grumpy man he was, shouted at them to get out of the hallways. Kurt and I went to the second level where he chatted with some guy from Vancouver. I watched the guys below do the college football thing: talk about girls, make out with girls, and crack open cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
15:40: They got off at the Stanford Stadium stop, which was basically a hole in the fence. It's a stop solely used for football games. Isn't it odd how football is so important that the train would make a special stop? Calm returned to the train.
16:10: We got off at Lawrence and tried to walk to the hotel. We commandeered a shopping cart, one of those huge Costco numbers. That didn't work out so well with all our baggage, so we found a petrol station and got the attendant to call a taxi for us. She had trouble understanding us at first. While we waited, I bought a map. Then I juggled.
17:00: The cab brought us to the hotel. We dropped off our stuff and I took a bath. Then it was dinner at a local Japanese restaurant, which looked pretty empty. They shouted irasshaimase at us as we entered, so it couldn't have been that bad. I asked for a tatami room, we sat down, and I pigged out on otoro. Mmm, it was good to be back in California.
19:00: I was supposed to go to SuperHappyDevHouse, but I thought it was on the other side of the city, instead of a half-hour away. Whoops. Instead, I attended a party with Jim. We walked from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto. It was a good walk, except for the fact that I was in constant pain from my bruised foot.
19:45: We arrived to a group of people playing some form of game. I no longer recall what it was. It eventually devolved into people just sitting around talking. I met Mike, who was the host of the party. And I forgot-her-name, who was the cute girl that all the guys wanted to talk to. And Will Chan, who would show up in my later adventures. Everyone else got introduced to me, and I forgot all of their names too. But I do remember that they all worked for Google.
22:30: There was a lot of partying, which involved excessive drinking on most people's part. I'm glad that Jim has brought alcoholism to his co-workers, although slightly disturbed at their tastes. They bayed at the moon on the balcony, which ended up in the cops arriving. Nicest cops I'd ever seen. They thought the party was cool, since we were quiet by then, but had to show up because of a neighbour's call.
00:15: The Token Hot Guy at the party had hooked up with the Cute Girl, so I made people promise not to let them drive off drunk. This failed because everyone else was having a "good time" and didn't notice them putting on their shoes. This meant that I had to trail them to a parking lot, in a dark neighbourhood, and I am bad with directions. She wanted to drive herself home in her car, but the guy seemed reasonably sober, so I let him drive. I hope they didn't get into trouble.
00:25: I walked back in the warm Californian night, slightly lost, until I found Jim getting into Will's car. Will drove us to the hotel, where I collapsed instantly of exhaustion.
I'm flying to California again, this time for the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View. I'll be there for a week, and then going to San Francisco for another.
So once again, I'm offering to send you postcards if you leave your name and address. I'll be screening comments, so only yours will be visible to you.
From my previous postcard experiments, sometimes they don't arrive. So if you don't receive one, it isn't because I've forgotten you. It's because international mail is sometimes unreliable.
I woke up on Tuesday morning, rubbed my eyes, and walked out on to a balcony in my bare feet. The balcony was littered with cigarette butts, which I carefully avoided, and I sat on the railing. I looked below to see people who walked along cobblestone paths between the fountains. Charmingly, just outside the gates of this condo complex, there spread an orange grove.
Oranges! Growing on trees! Just like apples. Apparently, the entire area was covered in orange trees before the housing developers got to it a while ago. It's sad to see arable land go like that.
I remember going out to the rental car with spider88, but having to go back inside. But the gate had just locked behind me. What to do, what to do? Well, I climbed up a stone wall, swung over the fence, and dropped down the other side. My theory is that it's far less noticable for a well-dressed man to jump a fence and open a gate, than someone who dressed in baggy pants and sneakers.
Once we were set, we drove off to see Spider's brother. He lives with their granny, in a house packed with cats and memories. It looked like the people who live there aren't well-to-do, but all the houses and the cars and the lawns are very well kept. This neighbourhood is proud and happy, which is all that counts.
We talked and played with the cats and a super-happy dog. This dog was so ecstatic to see me that he went into what looked like epileptic fits. Then, as I was sitting on the couch with Spider, the door started making sounds. I got up and was charming to granny, who had just stepped inside. Later, Spider admitted that she was surprised that our meeting was so amicable.
I invited Spider's brother to lunch with us, since we were meeting Len and maradydd for Thai. This, unfortunately, did not work as the restaurant was closed. So we went to another Thai restaurant where I walked in the door and noticed nobody was there. I went to the back and found some people in the kitchen, who apologised that they were still closed.
Disappointed but not defeated, we sat down at a pub where we ordered hamburgers. Not ludicrously expensive ones, though. After lunch, we returned the rental car, wherein I lost my hat. That's because I was forgetful and left it in the driver's side door. Sadly, I didn't notice until I was back in Canada.
Anyway, things got pretty rushed here. We dropped off Spider's brother and rushed me back to the apartment where I threw everything into a suitcase. Then I lugged it into the car and I was dropped off at the aeroport. The security checkpoint decided that I should be sniffed for explosives, so I had to step into a funny machine that did that. The puffs of air tickled.
As I waited in Pittsburgh, I walked around the place. I was hours early for my flight and nobody was there but me. At one of the computer terminals, the ones that agents use to check your ticket, there was a cryptic message on the screen. I wonder what it could mean.
Anyway, I was happy and exhausted to land in Pearson. What a wonderful trip.
It's a little disorienting to wake up in a different place every night. When I opened my eyes on Saturday morning, I was sleeping on maradydd's daybed. I padded off to the kitchen to get a drink of water and then tried to figure out what to do.
It was very late in the morning and I was exhausted from the late nights and early mornings. But I did manage to rent a car and get spider88 up and about before the sunset. We drove to Google and tried to get inside.
We managed to park the car and find our way to Building 43, where I convinced someone to let us into the front door. In the lobby was a projector that showed a scrolling list of queries that were being submitted to Google right that second. I stole a couple of smoothies for Spider and myself, while we waited for Jim Morrison to come downstairs.
I had to sign an NDA on going inside, which I did by putting down a large X. What can I say? I'm illiterate!
We walked about the place and were introduced to some co-workers. I noticed that he had my inspirational poster up on his door. I'm glad that I'm making a positive impact at Google, even though I don't work there. I met some of his co-workers, strolled around the building, and noticed that many of their inflatable meeting rooms lacked straitjackets.
They have amusing whiteboards all over the place, which are used for generating collaborative ideas. It would be neat if we did the same thing at NITI.
Shopping needed to be done, so we went outside and drove to some supermarkets. There, we picked up the ingredients for dinner. Man, I still can't get over how small the produce sections are in U.S. stores. And their yuppie-food stores are a lot less charming than ours. But I was happy to be able to get melon and prosciutto in the dead of winter, so who am I to complain?
Once done, we went to Jim's place. It was there that we found wealhtheow waiting for us. As well as Joel and Rhoda, whom I only see at parties and I cook for. Rhoda had brought some ice cream which was now slowly melting, so Jim went to quick work making vodka creamsicles.
I started making meatballs when other people started arriving. I recall a Justin and a Jeffrey. Oh, and Katelyn because Jim had borrowed her mobile phone. Jim is really difficult to reach, he doesn't have a working telephone number at all. Not even at work! Lucky bastard.
We put the meatballs in the oven and started making pasta sauce. Then the linguine went into a pot of boiling water and dinner was basically ready. Unfortunately, the meatballs had overcooked a bit in the oven and the dish they were in had shattered. Whoops! I need to practise more cooking in different conditions, I think.
In the end, we had a very decent time and I was the only one who abused alcohol. Which led to Rhoda identifying that I had moved to Québec and segued into a discussion about swearing. :)
Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some.
We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle.
In the Q&A period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6.
I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word.
My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool.
At lunch, wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat.
I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences.
All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you.
I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers!
As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy!
Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult!
After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealhþeow and charming akashayi who went off to dinner without me.
Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss.
I had a very good night.
I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips!
The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere.
I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was.
Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs.
Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless.
At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store.
iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up.
Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face.
I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach.
maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want.
I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question.
It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped.
After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us.
Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy!
We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea.
It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar.
The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back.
I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out.
I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!
I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them.
We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else.
Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter.
I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink.
We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing.
We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day.
The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward.
I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time.
Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected.
The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments.
After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company
I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea.
Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning.
I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive!
I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect.
I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good.
Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.
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