Punderings

How I love Christmas trees.  It’s mostly my father’s fault, although my mother and the rest of the family had a hand in it with wonderful family holidays of course.  And a significant part is due to the grandparent’s house that I recently discovered no longer exists, although it’s memories live on writ in wonder for me.  (Amy recently reminded me that we knew the current owners who bought the place about 10 years ago tore it down to build a ‘newer’ house.  Sad.)

The Christmas progression is interesting as the years go by.  Among other changes (like a complete change of, well, everything with a child!) is my tendency to slip almost everything later and later as I grow older.  It’s not that I don’t relish the anticipation about as much as I ever did, it’s just there’s too much life to get in the way, so we end up not decorating (what little decorating we did this year) later and later – sometimes after the holiday itself (which happens with extended families and multiple celebrations).

But the whole point of this post was to share Shane’s should-be-patented indoor tree lighting technique.  See, I love colored lights, and have to have some, or else the holiday isn’t quite right.  But I also like the modern interpretation of pretty white star-shaped lights all around.  So I devised this technique:

• One (maybe two) strands of medium-bright, traditional mixed colors lights.  Apply these gently fairly to very far inside of the branches: on a small tree, almost pushed in all the way to the trunk.  These give just enough color in a soft way, and have the wonderful effect of twinkling when you walk by as the branches cover up some of the lights.
• Take the nice medium (not super) bright white lights with the pretty star surrounds.  Not the cheap ones that instantly loose ‘petals’ from the 80’s.  But ones with nice sturdy star surrounds for each light, with sharp edges that reflect the light and also make picking them up a little dangerous. 
• Take several of the white star light sets and apply around the tree near the ends of the branches, anchoring occasionally.  I usually do sections back and forth moving slowly upwards, instead of a strict spiral application technique.
• Put the star (home-made by Amy for us) atop the tree and light.
• Be sure to turn off any other lights in the room!’

And yes, the little white light star Amy made for us all those years ago is still my favorite Christmas ornament of all…

Oh: and what the heck is up with chanuka being so late this year?  Wierd.

Safe travels for everyone’s holidays!

OK, there are plenty of blogging packages out there.  Enough so that finding one you like – with all your individual foibles, including the foibles of your ISP, your server, and your blogging package – is a difficult task.  But once you do find one, it’s wonderful.

I’m not going to wax poetic about performancing.com’s new Firefox 1.5 blogging extension yet, since this is my first post using it.  But we’ll see, I might need to put some good comments in about it later (once it works).

Edit: Of course, I’ve re-installed my browser, and have now forgotten exactly which “Just Blog This Now” Firefox extension that was I used. Hmmm… The brain is more connected but less reliable on demand than the hard disk.

Awake early once again, this time I get in early enough – and lars actually woke up – that we found folks to fill in all the morning session chairs. I actually did a little relaxing and work this morning, amazing. Dealt with some PRC issues and other mail.

We actually had a great lunch meeting of the concom to do some serious planning business. We were pretty happy with this year’s show so far, so we made the decision to be able to announce future ApacheCons during the closing plenary meeting. You heard it here first*: ApacheCon-EU will be in May/June 2006, and then ApacheCon-US will once again be in Oct/Nov 2006.

*: OK, you probably didn’t, since no-one is reading my blog yet, but hey, I can dream.

Today started on time, although without nearly enough sleep due to the hospitality of room 925 (or was that 924), and dreaming of how many flickr postings I’ll have by the end of today. But sessions need chairing, and I succeeded in roping in enough volunteers that I only had to chair one session by myself, and learned something about Forrest to boot.

Talking to people stuff looks pretty good – most people seem quite happy with what they’re getting from the con, and the few complaints are all about things that aren’t serious. It was also nice to see Tim mention in his keynote (he’s a first-time AC attendee, if you can believe that) that ApacheCon was one of the politest conferences he’s been too (blogged about too).

That’s great, because we believe that a large part of the purpose of ApacheCon is to allow our communities to gather f2f and meet each other. After the first few hours – once people loosen up – you can’t walk through two sessions without overhearing some folks who’ve known each other on mailing lists for months/years finally meeting in person and getting along great. Actually writing that down makes me realize how important that is, and how glad that we’ve been able to create the communities and the conference to allow that kind of connection to happen. [warm fuzzy thoughts]

Tim Bray’s keynote was unfortunately delayed due to the main laptop dying precisely at 11:30, but seems to be going well now. It’s also interesting to see the emphasis on Sun – IBM collaboration over Derby and how much they support Derby. Good stuff.

“We should say thank you to IBM for keeping Cloudscape [and donating it to become Derby.” – Tim Bray, keynote

With thanks to brianm signing us up, I got to take an hour ride on a Segway with some other cool Members. Certainly not something I’m gonna go buy, but it was a definite blast riding around with them, even if they didn’t give us the ‘yellow key’ that unlocks the low-speed limiter. Our guide (who made sure we didn’t do something stupid with the 5 Segways we had) had the full-speed version and could literally do rings around us. Pictures are available courtesy of sylvain, thx!

After some more running after session chairs, I opted out of learning more Cocoon from gianugo’s beautiful slides in his Slicing and Dicing REST with Apache Cocoon talk. I saw him practicing with the slides on his Titanium beforehand, and they were stunning in their simplicity and beauty with stock photo images in the background – a nice contrast to the many other plain presentations, good content notwithstanding. Instead I went to take a short nap to recharge before the evening activities.

An hour later – after my cell phone, set on vibrate, indeed did not wake me up with it’s alarm, I ran down to the Lightning Talks and was the last person to put my name in the ice water pitcher. Much hilarity – and some good and heartfelt content – ensued. I still feel dumb that I didn’t jump up and say “Pick me!” after Julian’s Anti-pornography talk, since I think I would have been funny, but that’s how the ice water pitcher pours. The closing talk by fielding was a bit flat, but was a good story about Apache Jackrabbit, and the pictures were terribly amusing.

The world premiere of FUD, The Movie was fairly well attended, although since it ran late some folks left early to go to BOFs – their loss. Hopefully there will be plenty of other blogs talking about FUD, and I hope michi and company post it or work on some other distribution so more folks can see it.

After the movie I was naughty and skipped out on the PRC BOF to do dinner with Sally. Dinner with Sally is an annual tradition, one I’m thrilled to be part of. She does her ‘magic’ to get reservations at somewhere fabu, and we work on a small guest list of cool folks. Both food, drink, and company were wonderful this time, and I can’t wait for next time. I’m really glad to have finally really met wsanchez, too.

Still being up after we got back, I wandered over near the hotel bar (not into it!) and got roped into reading thru Julian’s photo book (the conference photographer, really fun guy), then sitting down, then having a drink, then… Was fun, and talked to jerenkrantz about interns, so he’ll keep an eye out for referrals for EB.

Placeholder for what happened and some ramblings about getting Session Chairs for AC-US. Admittedly we were late trying to get chairs signed up, but still it’s more effort than it should be.

More later, if I can remember it after the feather tattoo and the sushi…

Tidbit: shouldersurfing, no ApacheCon is complete without an attendee pulling up the google/yahoo/etc map of the nearest Fry’s to the conference hotel.

Today was quite fun – I finally got into the swing of things after not quite enough sleep (recovering from a cold last week and jet lag). There was plenty of catching up, as well as trying to get some conference stuff organized. It was nice sitting in on the tutorial lunch and seeing how some of the attendees liked the conference so far.

Much of the day was spent in and out of the online lounge. We finally got a good group photo of the folks there outside, camera difficulties notwithstanding.

Many thanks to the hosts of the Member’s party, which was quite tasty and in the cool but beautiful Waterworks area outside the hotel on the marina’s edge. A big bonus was the marvelous roast served up to Brian, one of the original founders of the ASF and a tremendously nice guy.

Members then moved on to our Special ASF Member’s meeting to conduct business. This was mostly some brief officer reports – things are going pretty well – some discussion, then an election of new members. In a historic move, we elected 34 new members to augment the existing 151 active members of the foundation. It will be interesting to see the perspective they’ll bring to the larger picture of the ASF.

Although I was tempted to try to join in the Narnia movie group, I skipped – which was good, since the Member’s meeting went far over time. I just went back to my room to collapse after congratulating one of the newly elected members.

I’ve long thought of opening up a CafePress or related merchant site to see if some of my interesting gaming or coding/ASF slogans would make popular t-shirts. I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a shop (really easy if you don’t bother to make fancy graphics and some up with cool marketing slogans like I didn’t), so now you can buy some of my designs!

For now the shop is linked from shanecurcuru.com, but is also available directly at my ASF-Swag shop.

Note that a portion of all profits from ASF-logo’d items is donated to the ASF itself, so you can feel good while wearing licensed ASF apparel!

Sorry, I can’t provide much details about the first day of ApacheCon, since my flight didn’t arrive until 21:00. I still ended up getting a free limo ride from the airport – after waiting forever for my checked bag – from Sally K who was on the same flight with me. It was actually funny how long the drive was – getting out of the airport exit ramps – when the hotel is literally across the street from the airport. Watching the planes landing is an odd echo of Las Vegas, where ApacheCon-US has been the past 3 years.

Although I should have just gone to bed (a fact becoming clearer every continuing day) I headed down to the online lounge to see what was up before even going to my room. Two hours later of chatting with various folks including Brian McCallister (congrats, dude!) and James (Duncan), I think I got to sleep by midnight.