Results tagged “fun”

This morning I had an epiphany about a difference in project management style between the two major development jobs I’ve held. One style was like driving an empty bus and the other was like riding in a clown car. I am going to examine both as anecdotes from my perspective and try to avoid grandiose analysis.

The Empty Bus

So, I start the job and the first thing the company does is hand me the keys to the bus. Actually, they dither on what kind of bus to give me for several months before getting me a suitable one and give me a loaner to drive in the meantime. However, once on the bus driving, I am pretty much on my own. I have a destination to reach that has been vaguely described on a scribbled piece of paper. The directions are unclear and no one in the company has been there before. They keep changing the directions. But I get to drive. That is fun.

Every now and then, I pick somebody from the company up, they make changes to the directions and then they get off again before I go very far. Every six months, everybody climbs on to the bus and sits in the very back. They do a lot of yelling while I park and then they take away my scribbled directions and give me new scribbles to follow and a new destination to reach. But I get to drive. That’s usually fun.

All in all, I am asked to develop software with very little cooperation or direction. I am left on my own to make almost all the decisions. Even though I have weekly meetings with my manager, I am not really given much feedback on whether I’m going the right way. He’s not a developer, so he doesn’t really know enough about what I do to give me useful feedback. My quarterly reviews aren’t very cooperative or helpful, they are more about the manager wishing I would drive faster and make fewer mistakes (mutually exclusive goals when you think about it).

I nearly get into a wreck a couple times, but there’s no one on the bus to help me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an excellent driver. I’m still learning, but some help should help things go faster in process, you’d think. Usually, though, my directions are so unclear and difficult to follow that I am directed to get into wrecks. This is not actually all that fun as time goes on.

The Clown Car

Clown cars are funny. They drive around in circles and then the doors pop open and an absurd number of hilarious characters hop out of the little car. This job is not quite like this. It’s actually more like a really crowded minivan, like the trip I took the other day with my wife, son, dad, mom, brother, sister, and her boyfriend, all crammed into our little Pontiac Montana. But now, imagine, that all of these people have a stake in where the van goes and have a slightly role and different idea about how to go about getting there. Now, we’ve got a good analogy. Clown cars are fun, though.

The CEO’s seat is next to mine and he gets in and out of the van whenever he feels the need. He’s a busy man: lots of vans to help. Usually, he gets in right before we wreck or near the major turns to make sure we drive carefully at those point and turn the right direction. Directly behind me sits an analyst whose job it is to navigate. He tells me where to go and annotates those instructions pretty regularly. Beside him sits another analyst whose job it is to talk to the customer and figure out what they want. He then tells the first analyst and me where we need to think about going next. I get to drive, though, they keep reaching from the back for the wheel and the pedals. That’s annoying, but still fun.

Behind the analysts sit a whole team of project managers, executives, sales people and between them and between the front seats sit a bunch of other engineers. Sometimes the other engineers help drive, make suggestions, and they often critique or commend my driving. There are a lot of people in this minivan, sometimes there’s a lot of yelling about what to do next. All the activity does make for quite a bit of fun, even if it gets a bit distracting at times.

I get to drive. As I mentioned, sometimes the analysts and engineers have their hand on the wheel and help push the pedals for me. This is pretty fun too, unlike the car though, this actually gives us a lot more control. We seem to be getting places in a much more controlled way, though we do have to control our speed much more carefully. It might take us longer, but the drive is fun along the way.

Software development in this style takes away some of my freedom as a coder. That’s a bummer in some ways, not as much fun. I like control. Yet, it also lets me focus on my strengths while others worry about talking to customers, making sure we have a plan that does what the customer wants, and while the constant feedback makes it hard to see the big picture, I usually have a lot of warning before I drive off the road or get into a wreck. Overall, this is more fun.

So far, I prefer the “clown car”/stuffed minivan to the empty bus. It’s less bipolar and more slow, steady, and directed.

Cheers.

Okay, so now that I have my fancy new blog, it's time to start blogging again. For the past month or so I've been a little short on spare time, but what time I've had to spare has been spent playing with two new toys: Twitter and OpenResty.

Lance got me hooked on Twitter and it's pretty cool. For those that don't know, it's kind of like a Facebook status if you know what that is, but it's more than that. It's also like have a public instant messenger that you send to everyone and everyone you're following sends to you. It's also like having really short blog posts. Anyway, it's kind of cool for those quick things you find and think, "Dang, that's neat, I'd like to share that with my friends." Things I used to post to the K-Slug channel on IRC no go to Twitter. Now, I just need to get more of my friends on there to see them. :)

The other thingy I've been messing around with is OpenResty, which is somewhat of an intriguing solution for serving a RESTful web service. Basically, it's just a web service API that allows you to create database tables, rows in those tables, users, control access to the tables, etc. It provides no UI at all, just the ability to GET lists of or individual resources, POST new resources, PUT updates resources, and DELETE resources. You can then build a front-end to the data using whatever application server you like, client-side JavaScript, Adobe AIR, etc. (If you want the buzzword, this is very "Web 3G"---I'm now looking for a waste basket to puke in.)

Anyway, I'm kind of in search of a problem to solve using OpenResty to find out what it would be really helpful for and I'm just really intrigued by what it offers. But that's what I've been dinking around with lately.

Cheers.

If you ask my wife when I work, her answer would almost certainly be, "All the time." She means a couple different things by that. One, she doesn't really like it when I work away from the house, which I do when I work in my cube three days a week. Bee, she means that I work in the shower, while eating breakfast, when I'm playing with my son, when I'm relaxing in the evening, always. I eat, sleep, and breathe work. This is what I am calling, "Stream of Consciousness Work Style."

Round Peg, Cubicle Hole

The first aspect of what Terri, my wife, has described is a bad thing. When I work in the office, I'm conformed to work from my cubicle. There's no creative workspace in our finely decorated offices at Boomer Consulting. That's not a knock against the company, but a sign of the company's origin, as a department of a CPA firm. CPAs are more creative than they'll admit, but they don't always need creative workspaces. They need orderly workspaces. They need workspaces that impress clients. Boomer has posh looking, orderly workspaces.

Not only am I constrained to my cubicle, I'm constrained in my work hours. I am expected to work from 8 to 5 or 9 to 5 or 9 to 6 or 7 to 4 or something. There's something in the Human Capital arena called "flex time" which is neither flexible nor timely, in my estimation, but for a well-ordered firm with top-down management, it's the rule. You can work flexible hours (i.e., not the typical 8 to 5), but those hours should be set in a regular schedule and your coworkers/supervisors should be aware of deviations in advance, etc. For a guy who found college hours to his liking (i.e., whenever as long as you and your project team got the job done), this is hard for me. I try, but I'm very bad at it. I try not to resent it too much. I try to conform, but I seem to fail regularly.

Finally, I'm nearly always in the middle of something when five o'clock rolls around. This is because I usually finish a task around 4:15, 4:30, or 4:45 and then it's not yet 5:00. I could leave before 5pm, but appearances are what they are and where would I draw the line if not 5pm? Thus, I pick up something else I hope won't take long, if I can. That generally pushes me to 5:10, 5:30, or 6:00 before I'm done. Terri no likey. Me no likey. Fortunately, my drive home takes 12 minutes, but I still don't like working late at the office. When five rolls around, I must make one of two choices: (1) drop what I'm doing in the middle and risk the mess that leaves things in or (2) complete the task and get home after dark. I despise both of those options, but I choose one or the other regularly depending on how long I estimate the task will take or how troublesome dropping it in the middle will be.

That's the negative aspect of "working all the time." It's a bummer, but that's life and while I work to slowly move my life away from work schedules that interfere with my work process, I deal with it in the meantime. This traditional office life is traditional for useful reasons as well. It is not without value. I'm not really knocking it. I am basically saying that I, as a round peg, find the cubical hole an uncomfortable fit.

Stream of Consciousness

The other aspect of "working all the time" revolves around my creative thought process. An article I recently read from A List Apart discusses the difference between the hat heads and the bed heads
. I definitely fall into the latter category. The bad news is that I'm difficult to manage, tend to work on my own, and don't necessarily communicate clearly all the time. The good news is that I'm a creator and I get stuff done.

First, I am always thinking about something. My brain almost never shuts off. The only time it really shuts down is when I read a book right before bed. This is a habit I've cultivated to avoid insomnia. The goal of the book, even if it is intellectual or stimulating is to put my brain into the right mode to sleep. It takes about an hour for my motor to get up to speed in the morning, but after that, I'm again full on working. I begin thinking about work before I step into the shower, while I eat breakfast, when I drive to work (or walk upstairs to my home office), while I'm officially working, while I eat lunch, etc. If I'm not in front of a computer, white board, or tablet of graph paper doing what looks like work, I'm still working somewhere in the back of my mind.

Next, I'm not always working on work. I have several hobbies, most of which look like work, but aren't what I get paid to do. For example, I keep a blog, which feels the same as work since I write articles and blogs for work. I build web sites, contribute to Open Source projects, and do other computer science stuff, which feels like work, but might be projects I like on my own time rather than stuff Boomer pays me for. I study theology and my Bible, which is really not much different than studying whatever latest technology I need to know to get my job done.

As a really excellent article, The Nerd Handbook
, points out I see everything and everyone as a project. That's not far from the truth. Even wrestling with my son is something I see as a task to be completed. That doesn't at all diminish the preciousness of the experience, but after I put Gabe to bed, a little check box gets ticked off in my head next to, "Had a significant amount of quality time with the Goober Pants." (At least, it usually gets marked, sometimes I'm not satisfied and that box takes on a larger font in the tag cloud floating in my brain for tomorrow night.) The same goes for time with my wife or playing video games or any other form of fun and recreation. It all falls into the same category as work.

The interesting thing about this way of living is that work is no longer work, but it's life. I don't take a vacation from work to get away from work, but so that I don't have to structure my time to fit the needs of my coworkers. We have this mystical thing we talk about at Boomer called the "Work-Life Balance." I say "mystical," but I should say "mystifying to me" because work and life are synonyms as far as I am concerned. I will work until I die. I will live until I retire. I could say I'm a workaholic because I'm never "off", but that wouldn't really be accurate. That would be missing the point. I'm never off because I never need to be because sometimes my on-time is the same as my off-time. That really means that my vacation days are merely on-time where my time is structured according to my choice even more so than usual.

Another Boomer doctrine is that of Free Days versus Buffer Days versus Focus Days. Everyone should take Free Days (like weekends) to recharge, Buffer Days to get the crap work done, and Focus Days to get the really cool stuff done. My life doesn't work that way. That's just another set of boxes to constrain my work style. I see every day as a Freefercus Day. Part of my day is spent working on my job doing fun stuff, not fun stuff, and whatever other stuff needs to happen to keep everything moving towards my goals. I spend another part of my day working on eating while I think about my job or fun projects. I spend another part of my day focused on my family. I spend another part of my day working on paying the bills or taking out the trash. I spend another part of my day dinking around on a fun work and/or personal project, etc. All of this blends together in my brain without strict delineation.

If I really had my way, I would give myself over to this work style. I wouldn't constrain myself to a certain set of hours. I wouldn't put myself into a cubicle box. I wouldn't announce my work hours ahead of time (mostly). In order to satisfy my team members, I could seek a compromise position of having regular meetings or daily office hours or something, but even that would be part of this unstructured system of work/life I lead. The structure of my life/work would center around getting stuff done rather than following some pre-programmed formula of time management.

For the most part, I would work day or night on my job whenever it best fit to do so. I would spend time with my wife or work on fun projects or play with my son whenever it fit, even if it happened in the middle of the day. I would work in an environment that supported my creativity rather than constrained it. I would balance the work that recharges me (fun projects, hard tasks, family time, etc.) with the work that drains me (paying taxes, data entry, meetings, etc.) The nature of the structure of the time would morph over time as well.

What works to keep me organized this month rarely works six months from now. My life would be systematically unstructured, evolving from period to period depending on my current projects, team and family needs, and other factors in my life at the moment. This is what I call Stream of Consciousness Work Style. You can like my idea of work and life or not, but that's how I roll.

Cheers.

I'm currently in hurry-up-and-wait phase and rather than go back and edit yet-another-script I'm working on, I thought I'd make a short post about the projects I'm hoping to work on, but I haven't got time for just now.

Blog Reload

The first major project I'm working on is my blog reload. I've posted an early version of that here
previously. The development version is quite a bit further than the published version is, but I've reached that point where I can't really release anything until I tie up some loose ends (e.g., I have a blog component on it, but no comment component).

This one also happens to be the base tool I'm using to work on another project...

Gentle Birth Doula Services

A friend of ours, Rachel, recently started a web site
to go with her new hobby/business. She's taken the training and now either very close to or already officially licensed as a doula.

For those unfamiliar with modern labor and delivery practices, many people now hire an additional helper for labor and delivery called a doula. A doula is not a nurse, but just someone with knowledge of the birth process that can give aid to the mother during the process beyond what care is provided by the birthing center or hospital nurses. (For example, being available prior to going to the hospital.) Actually, that's just my understanding and I'm probably off a bit.

Anyway, Terri and I are helping her fix up her new web site. I'm going to give her the software I'm using to build my web site reload and then work with her and Terri to make it look better.

Sermon Illustrations

A few months ago a pastor, Monte, in North Carolina contacted me out of the blue about the possibility of starting a web site for collecting sermon illustrations ala social networking. It's a good idea and I'm still interested in it, but it's stalled out. I hope to make some time for it over the next few months. We'll see.

Jifty Book

I caught Chromatic and Jesse Vincent at OSCON and I suggested that Jifty really needs a book. I'm slowly working through a table of contents for it. I'm also hoping to get some time for it in the near future to get back to work on that idea. I really like writing and would love to do that more.

Software Ideas for IRC Bot Nets and POE

Something I've been building at work as sparked my interest and I'd like to combine somethings I've learned from using Jifty and from using POE to build an IRC Bot Net to build a better tool for building Bot Nets for various things. I've had a fascination with multi-agent systems since I took a course on the subject during grad school and I'd like to apply some of my knowledge from there as well (i.e., designing robust multi-agent communication protocols).

If I could, I would like to publish an article on the subject, but my previous outlet for such, OnLamp.com, may not be accepting articles of that kind anymore since their trying to produce higher quality content.

Expansion of Contentment

I'm thinking about ideas of taking this blog to the next level. I'd kind of like to expand it beyond just me and get other authors posting here. What that looks like, I don't know, but I'm thinking of possibly making it into a place where Christians working in web, design, and IT can get together to talk about what they're doing and what Christian Service in the modern workplace looks like.

Okay, looks like my tests have finished baking, so I need to go back to previously scheduled overtime.

Cheers.

Okay, here's my take on OSCON 2007. I had a great time. It was good to be surrounded by professionals who do and care about many of the same things I do. Most notably: software development and Open Source. I met several folks and, being my first real Open Source event, I saw quite a few famous people whom I'd only seen in pictures or Revolution OS.

Tuesday: Travel

I skipped the tutorials (though, not completely willingly). That was mostly because I didn't want to be away from my wife and 7 month old son for longer than 4 days. I traveled to Portland direct from Manhattan, Kansas. Unfortunately, my flight arrangements were such that I was on three flights rather than just two. (My flights were not made by me.) I do thoroughly enjoy the first 40 minute jump from Manhattan to Kansas City on a Beechcraft B1900 turboprop. I also like to laugh at the n00bs on the plane that are a little nervous about riding a plane only holding 16 passengers. "Oh my, it still has propellers." N00bs.

My trip from Manhattan to Kansas City to Phoenix to Portland was pretty much uneventful. I caught the Trimax into downtown and walked over and checked into the hotel. I then met Lance for some Chipotle and headed over to the Doubletree where we met up with Seth and hung out in the bar for a bit. Then back to sleep a bit.

Wednesday: Sessions Day 1

The first keynotes of the day weren't very interesting. I now know what Mark Shuttleworth and Tim O'Reilly look like, but the only talk I found very interesting was the one on Transactional Memory and that for technical reasons I won't elaborate here. As with most conferences, they always try to pack as much of the best stuff into the first day of sessions since that's the day most people stay for. There were at least 3 sessions during each period I wanted to attend.

After the keynotes I hit the expo hall and started picking up free T-shirts, pens, and other swag. Here I met with James Turner, who's been my editor for a couple of my OnLamp.com articles. He was showing off his work on his comic at the Watering Hole. I also saw Mark Tiemann, current OSI President and founder of Cygnus, here, whom I recognized from Revolution OS, handing out OSI T-Shirts in exchange for donations.

For my first sessions I went to How to Herd Cats and Influence People with Jono Bacon of Canonical. The basic recommendation of the session is that if you want a successful community make it very easy to participate. Period. There was a comparison with McDonald's and how they've made it so easy for morons to make burgers and that's the secret to their success. In Open Source, we should learn to do the same.

The second session I attended was Care and Feeding of Large Open Source Applications by Perrin Harkins, which was basically a talk on the project management tools available for Perl development. It was largely a review of what I already knew on the subject, but he did provide some good suggestions that I hadn't really worked with before, such as using Test::Class.

I ate lunch with Seth and a couple other attendees and then moved on to the afternoon sessions. I nearly went to Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes: Cooking with Catalyst with Matt Trout, whom I've chatted with on IRC but missed shaking hands with at OSCON, unfortunately. However, I saw that his session was introductory and I've already built Catalyst applications (including a blog I used on this site briefly), so it probably wouldn't have been the best session to attend. Instead, I went on to Who Am I? The Age of the Digital Identity by Robert Richards, which was about OpenID and InfoCard. His talk was interesting, particularly since I'm writing an SSO application, CAS+, but I had a hard time following the talk. I hope to implement OpenID in my application, but I can't just yet (or at least, not as the primary login mechanism) as our clients aren't quite ready for it.

After this I went to the Perl 6 Update with Larry Wall, which was interesting as ever. One reason I got into Perl 5 was because of what I'd read about Perl 6. I decided on Perl as my language of preference during my first year as a grad student. I had hacked around in Perl before while working on Anomy Mail tools when I was with Network Resource Group, but I didn't take any particular liking or disliking to the language at that time. As I started my Masters Degree I was trying to decide which language I liked for building web applications since I already new I didn't like Java and while I liked C++, it's not considered an ideal language for web development. I tried out Python and then taught myself some better Perl and felt an affinity to Perl immediately. I can think Perl. I read the first couple Apocalypses and was sold when I found out what Perl 6 would (eventually) be. Larry Wall and the Perl 6 language team continue to impress with more good ideas and the elimination of more bad ideas.

After the Perl 6 Update, I went to the Programming with SQLite talk by Michael Owens with Lance and Seth. The main thing I learned from this talk is that SQLite isn't like other SQL databases and requires a little more manual intervention to make things work just the way you want, which can be seen as an advantage or disadvantage. That is, if you want to use SQLite efficiently, take your locking seriously.

Lastly, I went to Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun and then promptly went down to the book store and bought his book. I don't agree with everything in the book (particularly the veiled hostility toward spirituality), but it is a good book overall.

At the end of the day, I took Lance and Seth out to the Rock Bottom Brewery where they had a couple pints and a microbrew sampler. I even drank a couple of the samples and enjoyed them as much as anyone who doesn't drink can. We then headed over to the OpenSolaris party at the Doubletree and I met Donnie, who's a PhD student at OSU, one of the top guys at Gentoo Linux, and a friend of Lance's. After chatting at the party for awhile, Lance and I headed back to the Red Lion to end another day.

Thursday: Session Day 2

The Thursday keynotes were very interesting. The keynote by Robin Hansen on Bias was simply depressing, but basically stated a fundamental Christian belief, people have a veil pulled over their eyes and refuse to believe truth when it whacks them in the face. Of course, he didn't make any spiritual remarks and my statements would be construed as my own biases in his view. He also made some good points that the key to discouraging bias in the work place is to use competition or even gambling as a mechanism for encouraging truthful predictions of project timelines and such.

Bill Hilf of Microsoft announced that they were sending their Shared Source licenses to the OSI for approval, which got applause. I don't really remember anything else about his talk. He was followed by Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party, which is a political party in Sweden based on the single issue of IP rights. He made some very good arguments about why copyrights are being abused to harm consumers and individual liberties while working to aid corporate and governmental power. His platform is very interesting and I've added Sweden to the places I'd like to visit someday.

The best talk of the morning, though, was Steven Yegge's talk about marketing and branding. He works for Google and was basically saying that OSI needs to remember to be focused on branding. Our brand is very important and the brands of individual products and even developers help us market our products to the wide world. He was very entertaining as well, especially since I think he was probably best representation of the audience that we saw give a keynote. He was one of us and I think he was persuasive only because of that. If a marketing guy had stood up there and said the same thing, he probably would have been written off in that crowd.

After hitting the Expo Hall again for yet more free stuff, I went to the morning Lightning Talks. The talks I noted most were the talk by Donnie on the state of Gentoo and the talk on the current state of Linux, which is mostly funny because the speaker (whose name has escaped me) and his daughter give the talk together. He reads off every patch and improvement made in the last year and she holds up signs summarizing things and then mocking him and penguins toward the end. The most important statistic: Linux receives an average of 3.8 patches per hour all year long.

After lunch, I did want to go to Sam Vilain's Next Generation Version Control systems to learn more about GIT, but I decided to go shopping with Seth instead to pick something up to bring home. I ended up with a shadowbox frame with the cow jumping over the moon for Gabe's room.

When we got back, I went to straight over to Jesse Vincent's talk on Domain Specific Languages, which is interesting talk for me since it was about software I used regularly. It's also interesting because he was discussing work he and others have been doing on Jifty to create mini-languages in pure Perl. The declarative language used by Jifty to create models, action definitions, dispatchers, templates, and (coming soon) web application tests. All of these are written using pure Perl, but it doesn't look like traditional Perl because of how he's stretched the syntax a little bit. I like the ideas a lot and I've always been a fan of DSL's (I did write one for my multi-agent system for my MS a while back). This was first opportunity to do more than just shake Jesse's hand as we hadn't met but over IRC previously. I also stood by and watch Jesse, Larry Wall, and Matt Trout discuss some backport issues from Perl 6 to Perl 5, which was interesting and a little amusing.

Afterward, I went back to the Expo Hall to hang out with the OSL guys for a bit before the evening sessions. In the evening sessions, I went to the Perl Lightning talks. Andy Lester gave his talk on ack (and alternative to grep) and his assertion that we should call Perl work "programs" rather than "scripts" (which got cat-called by Larry Wall). There was also a rendition of a song by Bare Naked Ladies with new lyrics, Perl in a Nutshell. After the lightning talks, I went to the rest room and met Chromatic (another of my OnLamp editors) on the way out and chatting with him on the way back to where Larry was going to give the State of the Onion. At one point, I had both him and Jesse in front of me so I suggested that we needed a Jifty book. Perhaps we will someday soon. I also got to meet a few of Jesse's "minions" and others here, though I confess that my brain has blurred all the names other than Kevin Falcone.

Outside we waited for the Perl Foundation auction to end while everyone made fun of the proceedings inside. However, we were shortly inside and listening to Larry Wall deliver the State of the Onion address, which is something I'd been looking forward to. Larry gave a summary of his history with language and reasserted his view that programming is hard and scripting is easy, so he strongly disagreed with Andy Lester's statement about what we should call Perl application components. He went on to discuss all the different areas where a scripting language can vary: strong typing or weak typing, early binding or late binding, etc. He also showed why he thinks Perl 6 is going to win in the end because Perl 6 isn't so much a new programming language, but the root of a family of programming languages, which played nicely into Jesse's earlier talk about DSLs.

After this, I dropped my stuff off at the hotel and hopped on the train to get over to the Thirsty Lion to attend the Open Source Lab party, sponsored by Jive. We chatted some and then went to the Irish Pub across the street to get some dinner. Lance needed to get back to Corvallis so he checked out and headed home and I spend the evening in the hotel room half-working and half-relaxing.

Friday: Session Day 3

Unfortunately, the last day had come. I wasn't really ready for it to be done. But it was. The keynotes today were certainly the funniest and most memorable of all. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs gave a talk about Second Life. The most interesting thing about his talk was that Linden Labs does all their meetings in Second Life, which I think would be cool if they had better tools for collaboration that were easier to get to, but with everything going Open Source, perhaps they will.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame gave the second talk about Wikia which is the "Wiki to End All Wikis" (or he would like it to be) and also about his hope to provide a true Open Source search engine where everything from the algorithms to the data is all open. Which is a good idea, if it can get enough support to work.

Then came the "Keynote Resignation" of Simon Wardley where it was announced that Fotango (though he didn't use the company name) has refused to let it's subsidiary Zimki Open Source it's web development platform, which Wardley was to announce during his keynote. Too bad. It looked interesting and I'm guessing that if they'd Open Sourced it Zimki could have had a chance at becoming a bigger player, now they will be relegated to the same obscurity as the other hosted frameworks. However, his replacement talk on IT Commidization was very funny, though I have no recollection of what points he made other than he likes ducks.

Open Source therapy by the conference MC, Nat Torkington, was basically just an attempt to tell us all to get along with one another. Which I certainly agree with. I may mock Python, Ruby, Java, and PHP every now and then, but I don't mock those that use them (unless they really are worth mocking for other reasons). Anyway, there are certainly lessons that Perl can learn from each. PHP, for example, teaches that ease of deployment can make all the difference in the world to popularity. It also reminds of how bad things get if a language doesn't provide namespaces.

Pimp My Garage by James Larrson is easily the most humorous of all the talks. I hope he posts his videos online, but he basically like to take household junk and revamp it so that it's either funnier or more dangerous. He had some excellent visuals and I think he has a thing for tall leather boots.

For the last two sessions, I thought about going to Hack Your Manager, but ended up in Adventures in Copyright Reform with Karl Fogel, which was somewhat enlightening as to how the RIAA and MPAA are trying to restrict civil liberties in order to help their clients (record companies and movie producers) continue making money the old fashioned way rather than adapting to the new media. The new media tends to favor the artist over the producer, which producers don't like very much since there's a lot of money to be earned in production.

Finally, I went to Running Your Language on Parrot with Chromatic and Patrick Michaud. One of the things I regret leaving K-State for is the fact that I no longer get to play with Parrot as much. I was hoping to use Parrot more to teach my class on Computer Architecture, but, alas, I don't have much need to play with it as a web developer. However, the talk showed me all the new cool toys they've added in the last two years since I've played with it and it's getting to be very nice indeed. If you have a chance to play with Parrot, I highly recommend it.

The End of the conference. I didn't go to the last talk since I wasn't very interested in Open Source Hardware (I'm really not much of a hardware guy) and worked on some stuff for Jifty instead.

Friday: Corvallis

After the conference ended. Seth and I grabbed some lunch at the Doubletree, picked up a rental and headed south to Corvallis. Corvallis is the home of Oregon State University, where Lance now works for Open Source Lab. He gave us a tour starting with meeting his boss who was still around waiting to start an after hours meeting. He then showed us the lab itself including many of the Open Source projects they host. He took us in to his office where one of his students was still working to fix some DB problems with Drupal.

I'm a little jealous of Lance and all his toys. However, I enjoy software development far more than I enjoy systems administration, so I'm not that jealous (but a little). OSL has a very nice facility, much nicer than anything I had at K-State. Lance also has some phenomenal students working for him. I am jealous for that being the lone wolf at my current job.

After the tour, we went out to Newport and had some seafood on the bay and then headed back to Portland. Seth and I said farewell and so ended my time in Portland.

Saturday: More Travel

My trip back to Manhattan was pretty uneventful, so I won't bore you with anymore details.

I had a lot of fun on my trip to OSCON and I look forward to making the trek again next year.

Cheers.

Update: (2007-09-30) Corrected references to Andy Lester. Thanks for the correction, Andy.