Punderings

(Yes, I still have ApacheCon blog postings to finish; I’m waiting on a friend to supply some graphics-fu before I wrap those up with a bang.)

The Thanksgiving week started out in a Murphy-esque way after we all arrived back home from our respective trips. The day after I stopped taking Airborne, I got a cold, which was quite a doozy on Wednesday. Luckily, we weren’t planning to travel far.

Thanksgiving day my lovely wife Amy volunteered to do the cooking and watch Roxanne, allowing me to sleep in and feel a bit better. We spent the traditional Thanksgiving locally with my mother, stepfather, stepbrother and his beau. Although my stepfather has been seriously ill, we made it through Thanksgiving with all traditions intact, if a little more tired than usual.

My mother’s traditional Thanksgiving is pretty familiar, with a couple of twists. The good white wine goes with cheeses, crackers, and crudite. The only requirements – besides good wine – is that one of the cheeses is blue, the stuff with mold in it. I lucked out and picked a wine that went perfectly with my light french blue (on the gorgonzola side). With the TV on the in background, there’s the traditional half-hourly dashes to the oven to baste the turkey and set the next side dish into motion. I usually help with the gravy, and then do the mashed potatoes as everyone else takes care of a vegetable.

Our biggest twist is the addition of sauerkraut, steeped with the turkey neck, as a side dish. It’s a surprisingly good counterpoint to the white meat, and comes from the tiny bit of Germanic blood in our background. Dinner is simple, and is accompanied by the good red wine. Everyone got through dinner fine, Roxanne even with unscathed clothes after deciding that the best use for cranberry sauce is to spread like jelly on the cranberry bread.

After the cleanup and finishing of one of the football games, we have coffee with the traditional pecan and chocolate mousse pies. Yes, I actually like pumpkin better, but my stepfather’s dark chocolate mousse pie has been a staple since I don’t remember when.

Friday we drove a couple of hours to spend a night with Amy’s family in CT. This is always great, because her parents use this as an excuse to have everyone else over, including their kids – all close in age, and (usually) all who play together for a while, leaving us a little bit of time to catch up. The dinner was, of course, traditional – turkey sandwiches. Hot or cold as you decided on microwaving with gravy (or not, with homemade cranberry sauce) yourself.

The highlight of this trip was bringing Lucas, our beloved Siamese cat, home again. He had been staying with family for a few weeks since we had both been traveling previously, and he’s a very social guy. He took the trip just fine, but I sense that he’s still a little miffed for having been sent away for a couple of weeks, since he’s still not purring nearly as much as he usually does. Siamese can hold a grudge for quite a long time…

Sunday was fairly productive in getting the house ready for winter, and trying to face up to going back to work in the face of only XX more shopping days until the midwinter holidays. Hope everyone had a good trip, wherever they went! (Or didn’t go, for those of you working a normal week and not succumbing to the odd colonial America holiday!)

Yes, I’m blogging this. Just sent home two very dear friends who arranged a surprise night out to celebrate my 37th birthday. Note: they were a tad late with the celebration, but that still made the surprise just as sweet. I must admit to failing my save against stun when they walked in, especially since I’d just returned from a crazy week at ApacheCon previously.

After a nicely mysterious drive into town – spoiled only by the fact they weren’t quite sure how to get there, and I was wondering if I should drive, M & M took me to see Tomb!, the interactive adventure. This amusing interlude – presuming your disbelief is suspendable, or you just enjoy watching everyone else – was the start of many a good joke for the evening. You will laugh or incur my wrath.

A quick jaunt and a moderate parking circle got us to The Elephant Walk, an excellent French/Cambodian restaurant. Veeeeery tasty. After waiting at the bar with some spring rolls and a drink – a surprisingly good French martini, which mixes gin and fruity stuff successfully – we moved to the dining room for dinner. Just about heavenly. Plus the waiter (a $dayjob co-worker of M’s) surprised us all with delivery of dessert with a candle in it for my supposed birthday celebration. Delightful overall.

Damn! It happened again. Most of the funny stories have already escaped the grasp of my conscious mind. However one theme was growing up – something we’ve each done to different degress – in the Boston area. That means there’s a whole raft of shared media experiences we have, including Candlepin Bowling and Willie Whistle, to mention but a few.

(Look! I found this posting lost in the mists of the ether!)

This, alas, was a wonderful post about the delightful show-and-dinner experience that two very dear and longtime friends took me out for to celebrate my 37th birthday, but it was never saved and was apparently wiped by some mysterious key combination on my Thinkpad.

I assure you, the original was almost worth reading. A pity I need to now leave the table full of liquor bottles as they are, and stumble off to bed.

Thank you, M & M, for a night to remember. I’ll follow the path or else feel his wrath.

Long conference, long ago…

Seriously: it’s a strange twist of fate that the same year the conference producer tries something different: very nice hats with the ApacheCon logo beautifully embroidered on them, there is also a near complete dearth of t-shirts across the whole conference.

This is the lowest number of t-shirts I think I’ve ever gotten at a conference. And I’m including the one Punderings shirt that I bought myself!

Also known as the start of the conference itself. A lot of attendees show up on Wednesday morning, since Wed-Fri are the regular session days, including Fast Feather, BOFs, and the like.

Wednesday started poorly for me when my alarm failed to wake me up. Sorry, Jim, I missed your State of the Feather, but did get downstairs in time for our opening visionary keynote speaker Doc Searls talking about Web 2.0 – no, not really, but about The Live Web. Nifty analysis that nicely turns CRM into VRM, which he’s working on a project for at the Berkman center. (Pause while Shane looks up the Wednesday schedule so I can remember what actually happened.)

Lunch took me into the sessions since I guested on the Board meeting happening then, which was quite interesting. I actually made it to chair a couple of sessions, but unfortunately missed both Greg’s and Fitz’s talks. Not that they’re saying that much that’d be new to me, but I’m sorry I missed out on the humor I’m sure they included.

The evening started with our now long-traditional Welcome Reception, and the PGP Keysigning. There were a lot of new faces at the keysigning, so it will be interesting to see how that goes (and who the new folks are – regular release managers, or others who just created a key yesterday).

Dinner was… I forget already. That happens when you have such a spectacular dinner each night – and plenty of drinks to go along with them. No, now I remember: Fogo de Chão, which I already reported in a previous blog post. Burp. But it’s definitely going to be hard to pick the best meal of the week, given the excellent recommendations we’ve gotten all along.

Will be my new CafePress store opening very soon. Namely as soon as I get back to my hotel room after dinner, presuming I make it back conscious. Details will be posted, including some new pithy sayings on tshirts, what everyone needs! (Sorry, no thneeds.)

To riff a meme and bump some links, here I go with rhymes that stink!

ApacheCon ApacheCon ApacheCon: ApacheCon ApacheCon

Lightning Talks Lightning Talks, Lightning Talks!

Man oh man was today fun, but too jam packed to have written quite as clean a Lightning Talk as I would have liked. It was well received though, and I got to sing again, although not with as good rhythm as last year. Comes from not practicing. We should have Lighning Talks once a week at work: just walk right on up to your boss and say “Lightning Talks!” and walk away…

Sorry, I’m still riding high for having been some of the top search hits that Doc Searls showed in his keynote yesterday – I had no idea I was that famous!

Also known as the super secret hacking time, and Tutorials and trainings. More to the point, I now know why Concom people are so busy. Not only are there the classic community and social networks to keep up with and reconnect with, not only is there the hacking to be done (I really do have 2-3 serious hacks I want to accomplish, both to keep my geek cred and to scratch some itches), there’s also a ton of conference work to do. So this entry will mostly be a personal retrospective so I can remember what the hell I was doing.

Monday trainings were a little quiet. Although that might be because I decided to sleep late, work in my room, and not run downstairs until lunchtime. That’s Atlanta ApacheCon lunchtime, which doesn’t start until 1pm anyway. I was really glad to see the training attendees at my table really getting value from their talks.

After spending the afternoon bouncing about, we had a Concom meeting to develop strategy that was productive yet long and long winded with many tangents. I unfortunately left a little abruptly when I realized I had little more to contribute, and was late for a reservation at the Sun Dial and I wanted to ensure that my party knew I was coming. Dinner atop the tower in the revolving restaurant was great. Contrary to popular saying, the food in the revolving restaurant was actually very good. And of course I went to my room and worked for a while again.

(Side note: the Westin hotels broadband connection interstitial really s%@#$@s. Besides being an annoying clickthrough with several required options, it resizes your browser to the screen size – not maximizing, but resizing – not once, but twice. As $anonymous said: the hotel basically charges the guests the price of maintaining their internet blocking routers and billing system.)

Tuesday, or ApacheCon day 2, was a little busier since more training attendees had arrived. I again slept late and did work in my room for a while, before joining Cliff (ASF Member and wifi magician) and Luke (super tech dude and my personal dealer) for a Fry’s run. I willfully admit my lack of geek cohones at not actually buying anything in our whirlwind shopping trip for random conference supplies. Sigh. The 360 wouldn’t have fit in my luggage, so adding shipping costs and delays just made it not worth it.

The afternoon was filled with a special feedback meeting about the conference, which was both much less contentious than I expected, as well as coming up with different and valuable ideas for improvement. It’s a lot of organization, but I think we’re poised to get a lot better at what we do.

Tuesday night involved following Greg to Hsu’s, a Chinese restaurant somewhat nearby. Actually, it was odd, since Greg started walking the opposite direction, but magically appeared there later. The food was far better than I gave the facilities’ and bartenders appearance to be on first look. The waiter actually gave our table of 10+ separate checks, which worked great until we realized that everyone got their own dinner to pay for, but half of us got the drink bill for the person to the right of us. After walking back, I aggregated onto a group at the hotel bar for another drink and some excellent conversation and strategizing, in some surprising directions.

Hey! That brings me up to yesterday, which is far better than I expected after a ton of Brazillian grill at Fogo de Chão with a pair of Caipirinha’s and a brief stint at the rotating bar of the Sun Dial at , well, well past midnight again. Luckily the keynote tomorrow isn’t until mid-morning, so if I miss a little bit of sessions I’m still OK.