Cafe Bucky

I’m saying goodbye to this blog for the time being. Am I quitting? No. I am taking a vacation from it though.

I’ve had fun writing over the past few months. If you read anything that made you think or smile (or on a really good day, both at once - though that is perhaps too much to hope for), then great, I am glad.

bye for now.

Daniel Smith
Sonoma County, CA
July 2003

I should probably have some cool photo here of Portland, Oregon. Perhaps the fountain by the Willamette, or a collage of the ever-present “Smart Park” signs. Maybe something looking out over Pioneer Square from the Nordstrom’s Cafe.

No such luck.

I really enjoyed my visit there last week, even though I spent a fair bit of time dashing between the Mark Spencer Hotel (ratty, dodgy) and the waterfront Marriot (corporate, bland, but served its conference purpose)

The Red and Blue light rail lines fight it out in Fareless Square for moving bodies. Not to be confused with Red Vs. Blue. Portland has its transportation act Together. Seattle and San Francisco could learn a thing or three. Streetcars come when they’re supposed to. Punks get moved around. Bikes are hung. Everyone’s happy. Airport? $1.50, bub. What?! Too much for ya?

Go have steak and mushroom alfredo at Pizza Schmizza. No tourist place, this. Wallow in 70’s cheesy music. Have a beer at Paddy’s. If you’re still hungry, get their “beef on a weck”. Once buzzed, try not to jaywalk too much. I had two of Portland’s Finest give me the Glare for stepping into the street a full two seconds before Green. Duck into Powell’s book store, which is so huge they’ll never find ya. Hungry again? Go stock up at Whole Foods, a clean, well lit nirvana of a supermarket. Yeah, they do beer too.

I went to Jax’s on 2nd a couple of times. Try the Bridgeport IPA. Say hi to “Shiloh”. They have a spin on the word “Quesadilla” - good but different, in a BBQ sort of way,

The word on the street is “Bento”. I’ve never seen an American city with so many places to get it. Maybe Seattle is like this too, but I just never noticed. Bento Bento Bento.

Picasso lives on at the corner of 4th and Yamill, if you look at the right patch of sidewalk:

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness”

– Pablo Picasso

I walked over the Hawthorne Bridge a couple of times, to pay a visit to the excellent folks at MacForce (emergency PowerBook keyboard swap). If it’s lunchtime, the Hawthorne Bridge turns into a Nike ad. Joggers a plenty. I waited about 5 minutes one time for the bridge to be put back together. It’s a drawbridge of sorts, except that the entire center section lifts up horizontally. Wild!

Portland is a series of one-way streets, in search of a downtown. It’s a much more exciting place than, say, Salt Lake Patheticy. It’s no New York, but then, it’s not supposed to be. On the one hand, it’s clean, somewhat homogenous (as in “really white”, compared to SF), is very environmentally conscious, and is a laid-back metro, with a large contingent of 60’s - 90’s hippies. Driving seems to be sane, although I couldn’t help but notice that seatbelts seem to be optional (Darwin, anyone?) There aren’t many boom cars, heard and felt from blocks away, which is a very good thing. Perhaps there’s some sort of “don’t be a friggen idiot in public” law they have there?

On another hand, some Portland disaffected youth do their best to show
us their angst. It could be a case of nice warm suburban bed at night, and practiced attitude downtown by day. Doesn’t ring true somehow.
Much more interesting to watch the chess matches at Pioneer Square.

Any hipsters? Nah. The only person wearing black in Portland
is Randal Schwartz :-) This ain’t the Village. This ain’t SOMA
in 1999.

Not to be confused with wannabe punks are the truly economically
down and out. There’s a lot of folks downtown that make up the 8%+
unemployment rate, and they’re not one bit happy about it. There’s
an edge to the Portland air that says “watch out, this City is teetering,
and things could get pretty bad in a year”. Although I rave about
how clean it is, and how cool the light rail is, and so on, there’s still a “should
have been here a couple of years ago” vibe. The “Port of Portland”
warehouses by the airport are both redundant in name, and up for lease.
There’s a number of prime business spots up for grabs. One
wonders which side of the seesaw will go up.

I really liked Portland, and want to get back up there to get to know
it better. It’s urban enough, a 3 hour drive from Seattle, has more
great beer than I could ever check out in a year, and is the most
wireless city in the country. I love the friendly people, the tech
leanings, and the civic follow-through that it must have taken to get
the infrastructure nailed so well (except for all of the ugly parking
garages… they’re supposed to be Underground, people!)

Can’t wait to go back.

Sometime in the next week or so, I am going to stop blogging for a while.

I have my O’Reilly OSCON stuff to finish up on that blog. There’s
also some impressions of Portland that I think I’ll jot down here.

After that though, I expect to hang out the “on vacation” sign.
I want to focus on FlexiPhoto. I enjoy writing, and I do a
certain amount of it in different styles, and am mostly coherent
at it. It’s good practice, in case someone is crazy enough to
ask me to write a book :-) I guess it would be different
if all I did was write one-liners - I’d still blog them because
they are so quick to rattle off, and they’re fun to archive.

But the truth is, there’s no feedback, and I am not going to
engage in some sort of Internet Popularity Contest just to get
readers. I’ve given it a good try, and I’m doing
something wrong. Best to just back off and focus on something
I am good at (programming). I may come back to the blog later.

[note: this is on my personal blog, instead of ORN, because
I have been posting there all week (and still have another to
do in the next day or so). It's also more of a personal wondering
out loud thing than the reporting/musing I've been doing over there.]

What happened to Hydra at OSCON?

I found it interesting that Hydra, the Mac collaborative editor, didn’t get a lot of use during OSCON. It was
in some sessions here and there, with perhaps 4 users. The
Emerging Tech Conference had half as many people, perhaps
the same percentage of Macs, and a lot more use (just
see the archived sessions at trevor.smith.name).

So what happened? I’m not sure. I suppose it just
wasn’t on the radar for most Mac attendees (which is
a little strange, since it is a few months after Etech. You would
think it would have had even more use). Perhaps the people
that attend the two events are more different than I thought?

Oh well. I’ll tell you a selfish interest in collaborative editing:
lazyness! It’s actually not so much lazyness, but a desire to get a
more complete set of notes than I could possibly type on my own.
Think of the solo note taker. You have 100 people in the room, all
typing the same thing within their own space, missing a good chunk of
a fast moving talk.

When it comes to capturing a session, there are at least two tangents
to take: one deals with the idea of something like Hydra on any
platform, and the other is capturing a talk via iChat AV
(with permission, of course)

Think of Jabber, and how it can do so much more than just
simple IM. We know it can do group chats. The next step
would be to feed it into an editor, keeping track of cursor
position and other per-user info. Something like collaborative
editing should not be limited to one platform. We should
pay proper respect to the folks at The Coding Monkeys, because they
did a super cool implementation, but we should also realize
that the functionality is too important to wait for a Windows
and Linux port. We want it now!

The other capturing idea also happens to involve Jabber …
well maybe. iChat does use Jabber (as mentioned in the
“JabberJazz” talk at OSCON.) I imagine iChat AV might
make some use of it as well.

Get an iSight, fire up iChat AV, and stream the audio/video
to something that can capture it. After the talk is over,
make a compressed version of the talk available via BitTorrent.
Should be pretty straightforward. What’s the video equivalent
of Audio Hijack? To be clear, I am putting this out
there in the context of archiving talks where the speaker
has given permission. Some wag will probably think
of a name for it (”laptop broadcasting” doesn’t sound
right to me!)

I haven’t forgotten about what I usually do here. I’ve been
very busy at OSCON, writing
my O’Reilly blog (Wednesday entry).

Sensory overload. Well, not all of the senses. Conferences have a
way of shutting you off to the outside world. One hour chunks
of insight (depending on the speaker, sometimes you only
get 10 minutes of info in an hour…), breaks here and there, and
then more hours. At the end of the day, I flash on the blog
I am to write, and think “hmm, couldn’t I just audioblog this?”
I’m not a reporter oriented writer, spitting back every fact
I hear within minutes and hours.

Here’s what I think I am trying to say: I want to meet more people
and try to network and all that. But doing that gets me all apprehensive
that I’ll be up really late writing my ORN blog. I probably just need to chill out,
not sweat it so much. I want to put fresh stuff out there, and therein
lies my dilemma: can’t split myself in half. I wonder how real reporters
do it.

Some shred of responsibilty kicked in last night, and I skipped a party - of course then I met up
with my pal Mike Schilli (A Perl Guru of the first order) and his wife,
and headed out for some awesome Indian food (lamb masala). I’m
looking forward to the DynDNS party tonight, even if I have to resort
to a large amount of coffee to keep me awake long enough to
have a small amount of beer (file under: not so great idea #273)

So go read my other stuff, and let me know if I’m off-base, right on,
boring, or otherwise. I’m sort of writing in a vacuum. I know people
read the O’Reilly entries … I sat down in a session yesterday, opened
my laptop, and looked over at the screen next to me - hey, my ORN stuff!
Threw me a little. There’s a gazillion other places on the internet to go.

I really like Portland, and wish that I could spend more time
here. I have a 5 minute freeform burst I’ll jot down, when
I’m more energetic. I think I could easily live here!

My O’Reilly blog from the OSCON sessions yesterday is up and awaiting any comments you might have. I had a heck of a time posting it this morning: the server would give me an error, so I would try again. The server would give me another error, and so we went on the overloaded posting carousel for a few turns. next thing I know, my blog is on the site no less than THREE TIMES!

Now, this wouldn’t bother me on my own blog (cyberspace equivalent of a ghost town), but on such a high profile site as the O’Reilly Network, it was a little rattling… They’ll fire me! (oh, wait, I don’t work for them per se, I attend a conference, and write everything in sight, but it’s something of a barter) Another thought was “Ohmigawd! There are millions of people laughing at my misfortune right now! How could anyone possibly post the same thing THREE TIMES!?”

Hmm, I thought … maybe I need to call someone at O’Reilly? No no no, don’t do that - because they’ll FIRE ME! Oh wait, they can’t, etc.

So I collected myself, and calmly went to my super-secret private weblog control page. “Aha!” I said, with a twinkle in my eye (well, it could have been a bug, I’m not sure) - “I can delete these!”

And so I did. Two of them. Leaving the One True Version of Monday’s events up, the way I had intended a full 15 minutes earlier.

I am hopeful that my next 5 or so posts there are uneventful. If not, I’ll have to deal with the “delete, or run away” state of pure adrenaline, pupils dilated as I see link after link of the exact same blog entry.

I’m in Portland, OR, and I want my brekkie! My first O’Reiily
blog for the OSCON is up to take a gander at.

Happy Fourth of July to fellow Yanks. I was going to write
something about how I am glad about our freedoms. I was
also thinking of writing something along the lines of
“you can’t outsource me” (because, as a 3rd generation
American, I have insight into our culture & society, and
blah blah blah).

But I decided to be quite non-lofty today. I’m surrounded by
Zip-Loc bags and all manner of gear. No, I don’t label the
bags. It’s just enough to know that my gear isn’t going
to get into some colossal spaghetti fight in the Cargo Hold,
where I am frightened by the ensuing mess when I get to
my hotel. Looking into the gear bag, in my best Indiana Jones voice:
“Snakes. Why did it have to be Snakes?”

Go ahead, throw all of your stuff together in your suitcase,
all intertwingly. I guffaw in your general direction!

Many Power adapters. Cables. Mice. A few Zip disks. Laptop #1 (borrowed
PowerBook). Laptop #2 (Toshiba, my “Plan B”). Nikon D1. Nikon 950.
Holga. Batteries. Palm Pilot. USB hub. CF Cards. A power strip. Braun coffee maker. Lava lamp. etc.

Ok, not the coffee maker and the lava lamp. I’m between lava lamps
at the moment.

No, clothes don’t get the same attention. Then again, they
don’t turn into self-organizing systems in my suitcase. They
behave (as I cast a glaring eye at a basket full of gear).

So anyway, my task next week is to write, write some more, and then go
back and write about how the writing went. I’ll be making daily
entries in my O’Reilly
weblog. I’ll be focusing on:

• PHP
• Day to Day Productivity (Eclipse, WebDAV, Jabber)
• Trends to Think About

I’m bearing in mind that others will be covering things like
Perl and Java pretty well. It’s a big conference, so
I’ll be constantly reminding myself to not go off in
too many directions (I love Perl and Java too, and I want
to learn Python, and, and … there’s only so many hours
in the day)

I’ll leave off with yet another mention of the OSCON Semi-Unofficial Wiki, and with a nod towards the more Perl-centric page. See some of youse there!