Cafe Bucky

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.

For the next week, before heading off to Portland OR, the low priority thread in my mind will be working on some sort of wordplay on “open”, “portland”, “source”, and “convention”. Another one is “packing list”.

I’m really looking forward to the OSCON. It’s going to be a week of drinking from a firehose of topics! (speaking of drinking, I hear Portland knows a thing or two about BEER. 20 brewpubs!) For me, Etech was a foray into covering an event. This time I’m focusing more on a few themes (one of which is PHP), and am building breaks into my week-long schedule to try to get some writing done while things are fresh.

One task for this “week before”: get my mitts on an iBook or Powerbook! I think that Hydra (Mac OS X collaborative editor) is so important in a conference setting, that I would rather have access to that, than cruise along solo in Windows or Linux. I am surprised that we still don’t have something like Hydra in the Linux neck of the woods.

I’ve never been to Portland for more than 15 minutes, so it’ll be fun to learn about the city. It looks like a beautiful place! I’m beginning to wonder if I should delay coming back by a day or so, and I’m not even there yet…

Equipment: For the conference, and for the joy of city photography, I’m lugging along a few cameras… I just got a Holga, and will bring a couple of Nikons (a D1, and the more incognito 950). Packing equipment for a trip is always fun: I usually end up with a 40+ pound duffel bag of computer peripherals, cameras and 3-5 lenses, and all manner of cables. I always seem to use a dozen Zip-Loc bags to keep the cables, power adapters, CF cards, etc. from getting into a massive Scrum, and I always bring a power strip. I simply deal with the weight in the airports, and enjoy having access to various doodads on the trip.

btw, If you are going to OSCON, you may want to visit the Wiki.

I just posted Etech a Sketch, Part 4 to my O’Reilly blog. That finishes up my look back at that conference.

Photos and Videos of the Alan Kay presentation are available. Lisa Rein got them together. It’s great stuff, especially the Open Croquet demo.

I’ve updated my O’Reilly blog over the last day, with a couple of new entries. There’s Etech a Sketch, Part 2, and Part 3

I would enjoy hearing any feedback.

(comments closed November 2003)