Oblomovka

2003-07-07»

We didn't make it to Damian Conway's talk. Ada was fine, but had sufficiently tortured her dear mother by rising early that by 4AM it was all we could do to slide into a motel just halfway up the six hundred miles. We ended up pulling into Oregon around seven this evening.

At least being out of of the Net gave me a chance to catch up on some writing. It's also a good way of keeping me from my usual procrastination-through-overresearching gig. For instance, I have recently been ploughing through a huge pile of academic economics research on ebay which I'm belatedly realising won't quite fit into a 1500 word how-to-sell-online-for-novices piece. Worth it if you're looking for a few white papers for your pez dispenser futures consultancy business, though.

As is traditional with long road trips, we listened to too many show-tunes.

2003-07-06»

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.

2003-07-05»

I'm sorry I've been so grudging in dumping stuff here. Partly, it's mental constipation. I have four interlinked essays that I've been mulling over for an eternity, and they've become so intertwined with everything that I am considering right now that I've been apprehensive about pre-empting any of them by blogging a single smaller thought.

Which isn't the way to do things on blogs, of course. I should just dump material here willy-nilly, and tidy it up later. Tidy it up, and sell it, too.

I say all this, because I've just made a set of resolutions to myself for the next three months. One of them involves blogging daily, which I felt I should warn you about. But to understand them all, I'd have to explain that I've just gorged myself with a great deal of Ben Franklinabilia, and it has, as ever, made me very excited and determined. And I've never adequately explained to anyone why reading about Franklin would make me behave in such a way, except in a very long essay. Which you haven't read because I haven't written it. Yet.

Perhaps blogging daily will help. But I suspect Paul Ford's extract from Franklin's autobiography and this anecdote might help more. If all else fails, lean hard on your links.