The Cliffs of Inanity

Archive for the ‘personal’ Category

CWA

Last week was the Conference on World Affairs. I generally try to make it to a few sessions, but this year it overlapped with other plans. I even missed the movie (Chinatown), though Ebert was out sick, so it probably wasn’t as entertaining as usual.

Still, I did manage to make it to a few of the bigger sessions on Friday.

First I saw Tim Wirth (former senator from Colorado) talk about global warming. Usually this topic depresses me and makes me want to gaze carefully at the several colors of angst. Wirth did a reasonable job of reframing the topic from depression and powerlessness to opportunity. One practical thing he mentioned was getting state legislatures to let local utility companies get the same RoI for efficiency efforts that they do for building new power plants; he said Idaho has the model program here.

After leaving the senate, Wirth stayed involved in politics, pursuing various things, like global warming, that seemed important to him. I wonder what that sort of career must be like.

Next was Joe Biden. He gave what I would describe as a stump speech. I thought he did a pretty good job (he had the best speaking skills of the people I saw), and was even inspiring toward the end. He also answered a bunch of questions; that was pretty interesting. Also, he quotes Seamus Heaney.

Finally came Paul Krugman, giving the Molly Ivins memorial lecture (she was a regular at CWA). He was interesting and entertaining, though I think he didn’t really say much that you couldn’t read in his columns.

In all it was a great way to spend an afternoon; the content was ok, but also just getting out into a non-electronic community for a while was nice. Also I’ve been needing a change of scenery as a way to stretch a bit and reinvigorate my creativity. This helped.

Whither Movies?

Benjamin has been asking me about my mini movie reviews, and I’ve been basically ignoring him.

The sad truth is, the movie situation in Boulder sucks right now. They’re building a new movie theater at 29th Street (which is what replaced the old mall), but it won’t be done for months and months. However, anticipating this, one of the two remaining theaters shut its doors. The theater that is left only plays “art house” movies, which ordinarily aren’t what I’m interested in — I mean, I enjoy them, but in times of flux like this one, I am going to the theater to escape, not to plumb the depths of my ongoing existential crisis. Call me shallow.

IFS is still open but for some reason I never quite manage to read their schedule on time. I’m still hoping to get them to publish an ical feed (I seem to have gotten KGNU to do this… yay!).

When I was sick and couch-ridden a couple weeks ago I tried to watch old Stephen Chow movies. I forced myself through both volumes of Royal Tramp, but couldn’t watch Chinese Odyssey… both of these movies really sucked, I’m sorry to say.

Next week is the Conference on World Affairs, and even though Ebert called in sick, I will probably drop by to watch the movie straight through. They’re showing Chinatown this year — not exactly escapism, but I haven’t seen it on the big screen.

BarCampBoulder Saturday

Saturday I spent at BarCampBoulder.

Going to this event “isn’t really like me”… I generally don’t do that well with groups of people where I don’t know anybody. I did recognize a face or two from the local LUG, but no one I’d actually talked to before. I always feel a bit pulled out of myself in these situations and then, later, spend a lot of time picking apart various discussions and interactions and generally thinking that I’ve been an ass. Bleah.

But, nevertheless, I had fun at BarCamp and I learned a lot as well. It was in an awesome location on West Pearl, sponsored by endoze.com. Excellent coffee was provided by Veloce Coffee.

Most of the folks in attendance did web development, with a fairly large subset running their own companies. I think there was one Java programmer, the rest working mostly in Ruby, it seemed, plus Javascript for the client side. There were also some Python folks and various people who knew PHP, though nobody who claimed to like it.

A long time ago I wrote here about wanting to calendar-ify various places in Boulder, like the public library, KGNU, etc. One of the attendees, Neal McBurnett, is a volunteer at KGNU and so I pestered him about this. Also Dan Moore was interested enough in this, at one point, to have registered a web site for it; so maybe together we can solve this problem. (The KGNU bit looks easy since they seem to use a Python CGI script to register events, and there is a Python library for the Google Calendar API out there.)

I also met Ashish Jain from PingIdentity. He gave a nice rundown on OpenID and CardSpace, and the strengths and weaknesses of both. He also said that Novell recently announced an open source CardSpace client. This talk got me thinking, that it would be nice to have an identity registrar for the open source world, so that I could, for example, make a single account and not have to log in to any bugzilla anywhere. This, I think, could be done with today’s technology. Ashish was extremely knowledgeable. He also pointed us to The Laws of Identity.

There was a session on CMS which was pretty interesting. Folks in attendance have tried most existing major CMS systems. Current favorites are WordPress (for simple sites), Typo3, TextPattern, and Radiant. I also found out about CMS Matrix, another site for letting you compare CMS systems.

Also I found out about Colour Lovers, for all you palette freaks out there. I had some fun browsing here.

We also played a fun game of “half baked”, and I met tons of other people… overall it was great, and I’ll definitely be going to the next one. And, after that, hopefully not feeling like an ass for a change.

BarCampBoulder

Tonight I went to the starting session of BarCampBoulder. It is pretty cool so far — I met a bunch of interesting people, the schedule for tomorrow looks fun, etc. Most of the folks attending seem to be doing web development of one kind or another; lots of RoR hackers around. So, considering that my one attempt at using a CMS was a disaster, and I wrote my first javascript program a week ago, I think I’ll be learning a lot…

BarCamp, for those who don’t know (like me, a couple weeks ago), is an “unconference”. People get together in a room and decide what the conference topics will be. Everybody participates.

So, it is sort of like FOSDEM, only even more free-form, and, at least here in Boulder, quite a bit smaller.

For me it seems ideal. One problem I’ve had working at home is that I rarely talk to people who generally share my interests. The local LUG is mostly sysadmins — not really my thing. the Denver JUG is pretty good, but somehow I never quite remember to look at the dates and drive to Denver. So, just meeting developers who even vaguely share my interests is pretty great.

MC Prekarius

I went to see MC Prekarius the other night; he’s “the world’s first fully XHTML 1.1 compliant rapper”. It turns out I didn’t actually “see” him; he hid behind a screen emblazoned with the W3C logo, on the pretext of separating content from presentation.

DJ Furbolect spun tunes onstage, in full view. He said he was “specifying layout”, but this mostly seemed to consist of him randomly screaming obscenity-laced CSS into a microphone.

The No Asshole Rule

I heard of this book a few weeks ago and I bought it at the airport and read it on the plane. It is an extended defense of the idea that assholes are detrimental to working conditions in many ways and should be either retrained or gotten rid of.

This is the sort of book that, in my fantasy world, all execs read and implement.

The book carefully distinguishes between assholes and temporary assholes — we all have our weak moments and, I feel certain, have all acted like jerks on occasion. The author offers two diagnostic tests to identify chronic assholes. First, does interacting with the person consistently drain your energy and leave you feeling oppressed or humiliated? Second, how does the person treat other people less powerful than him- (or her-) self?

The author also differentiates between “not being an asshole” and being a wimp. In particular he understands the virtues of disagreement and conflict, provided they are done properly — assholes have trouble disagreeing without being disagreeable. Conflict avoidance is also a bad approach, though, so people have to learn to fight fair.

I found the writing in this book a bit odd, as if it is targeted at high school students. But, I didn’t mind; it has nice anecdotes, many research references, and is generally a good read. It has a bit of information on how to cope with assholes even if you are (institutionally) powerless, though not as much as I would have liked.

Please read this book.

Cambridge

I’m in Cambridge visiting Andrew until tomorrow. Gary came up for a night as well.

I got so much spam on my blog these past few days that I think I’m going to install the hashcash plugin and require posters to use javascript.

I took notes at FOSDEM but I’m waiting until I get home to post them. It would be nicer to do this from the conference itself, but I’m always pretty tired and there’s no good time to do it.

Santa Fe

I’m in Santa Fe this week. Due to some fluke we got a good deal at the St Francis hotel so we’re staying downtown.

Mark Galassi, whose desktop always blossoms with odd gadgets and interesting things, showed me the electric sheep screensaver. It is awesome.

Mark and the local linux user’s group also linux-ified the Aztec cafe. So, when I went in this morning, I was not at all surprised to see a public machine displaying tux and a big “GNU Linux” banner, along with an explanation of what this was about.

Links

Since I heard about it on the local tv news last week, I’ve been reading a bit of Pond Patrol. The writing isn’t too hot, but the photos are fun and it is made in Denver.

Benjamin directed me to vertical gardens. The wallpaper garden is super cool.

Since Christmas is approaching, turducken is once again on my mind. Of course, I’m vegetarian, so I don’t eat the stuff — but the idea does inform my cookie-making. Also I’ve been thinking of turducken as a more general meal paradigm; say a few birds wrapped in lettuce (the salad) with ice cream or custard (dessert) on the inside. Or turducken soup, where the soup is in the middle. Yum.

Dates is most of what I’m looking for in a calendaring application. It is actually a little bit too minimal: no synchronization for one thing. The “zooming” GUI is nice.