2003-07-06»
portland ho»I'm off to Portland, Oregon in a few hours. We'll be driving through the night, because Ada (pictured below eating my tie) isn't a great traveller, but happens to be a member of the US Olympic Sleeping-At-Night Team. We'll see.
It's for the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, which I'll try and document as much as I can.
I think this may be my last O'Reilly conf for a while, because I'm beginning to feel like a Deadhead, following them around like this.
Also, it's really about time I settled down and did something, instead of zooming around talking to other people about the somethings that they're doing. Or at least I should write much longer things about other people doing something. Stuff with indexes. Because if you don't write things that have indexes, you're nowhere.
Part of that search for a something is leading me to arrive, unshaven and sleep-deprived, having spent ten hours in the echo-chamber of my daughter's screams, to head straight for Damian Conway's 8.45am Monday talk, "Inside ~damian/bin".
I have this crazy idea for a book, and Damian's bin directory is just the thing to convince me it's a stupid undertaking. Or get me far too excited about it, one of the two.
After that, I'm just praying I don't collapse and sleep through the rest of the week, and miss Ward Cunningham's talk on the unit-testing for users, fit.
The rest of the time, I think I'll be moving in an unstructured haze between talks, ADHDing my way through the conference as usual. At Emerging Tech, I jumped around like this, but had this terribly embarassing experience of leaving every talk just as Tim O'Reilly was dropping in, leading him to deduce I'm sure that I was spending my time melodramatically storming out of every event. It didn't help, I don't think, that on the one occasion I was stable and sitting down when he entered, I'd just stolen Jeff Bezos' chair. Like Jeff Bezos needs a chair.
Anyway, anyway, come up and say hello if you're there. I'm the taller, dorky-looking gentleman above.