The Mandelbear's Musings

A pretty good day, but a rough evening. See upstream. OSCON continues to be very useful.

The parties were a mixed bag: Sourceforge was loud and crowded; Facebook's was not quite as loud but thinly attended; I had two good conversations, one of which yielded a job lead for a friend. I should probably have stayed longer.

It's been a good day. Met the flower_cat in SEA; she'd arranged for someone to meet her and wheel her around, so all I had to do was collect the baggage and rent the car. Avis gave us a PT Cruiser -- cool-looking, and drives well, but the controls are confusingly different from my Honda, and cargo space is quite limited. Ended up with two bags and the walker in the back seat to accomodate the wheelchair and large suitacase in the back. Even then it was tight, and the rear visibility was nil with the wheelchair in the way.

But now, we've been well fed and made welcome in the Big Green Monster, and the Cat is sleeping beside me even as I type. Folks seem to go to bed early around here; I'd been kind of looking forward to some late-night conversation. Tomorrow, perhaps.

No idea what's happening tomorrow. Real-time scheduling, and likely to be pretty relaxed. I'm hoping that everyone will get the one-on-one time they need with me and/or Colleen respectively, and that there will be music and burlesque at one time or another. Other than that it's all pretty open.

I've been having breakfast in the hotel this trip rather than the Continental breakfast at the con: protein and potassium are my friends.

I'm really glad I've developed the habit of keeping my room key in my right-hand pants pocket. I hardly ever leave a room without my pants. I have been known to leave without my shoulder bag. Recently.

The Red Lion at the convention center is undergoing extensive renovation. Sure, the carpets have been torn up most of the weekend. OTOH, the WiFi works perfectly in the rooms; this is the first year that's been true.

I've been trying to figure out how many years I've been coming to OSCon. This must be the fourth; first year I believe I was in the Inn at the Convention Center, and I've been at the RL at least twice before. I see LJ tags for OSCon 2006 and 2007. OK, also posts in 2005, and apparently none in 2004.

I've taken to wearing a luggage strap as a belt. Infinitely adjustable instantly, and no metal at all. Needs a way of temporarily attaching something that looks like a buckle when I want to be dressy.

The San Jose airport is also being extensively renovated; Terminal C has been rejiggered to put all of the shops inside the security zone. Finally. They also have free WiFi. Finally.

I still hate the Mac. The apple key, which exists only because they're using a one-button mouse, is exactly where I expect the ALT key to be. Emacs uses Alt-Q to rewrap a paragraph, and Alt-W to copy a selection. Fortunately you can configure the terminal to ask before closing a window or a tab, so as long as I run emacs in a terminal window and not the native version, I'm comparatively safe. (It also took me a long time to figure out how to configure the terminal to treat option as alt.)

The Mac laptop's keyboard is still wretched.

The food has been very good, though I don't like the fact that breakfast has been being served downstairs in the exhibit hall instead of upstairs outside the room where the keynotes are given.

I've been taking realtime notes (in a text file, using emacs). It would have been possible to turn that into real-time blogging using a couple of well-designed scripts and makefiles, but that will have to wait for the next time.

The continental breakfast was down in the exhibit hall this morning; I bagged it and went back to the hotel for something with protein and potassium (i.e. hash browns).

I don't really like eating alone, though. Grabbed coffee and conversation back at the conference; the hotel may have bacon and eggs, but the con has melon and Charbuck's. Need both.

Well, here I am. The afternoon has been filled with wonderful conversations. My seatmate on the plane, a student at SJ State interning in the marketing department of an open source company, and here to work their booth. A woman on the train, going to OSCon for the first time now that her company has gone open source.

The woman handing out badges and bags, who turns out to be a long-time Tolkein fan -- she told me about the badge ribbons they've started using and I mentioned that I was familiar with them from SF conventions. (I added one of my CC&S ribbons left over from Baycon.) A guy in the hall with a home-made PVC-pipe didgeridoo.

MaryBeth Panagos, business relations person for OpenMediaNow.org, the people behind the GNASH flash clone, which it turns out is optimized for use in embedded systems, making it ideal for things like user interfaces on gadgets. Turns out she has a copy of my CD; we mostly talked about recording and my upcoming projects. We apparently met last year when I had preorder bonus disks in hand.

Yeah, I'm a little different these days. But only a little. I still have trouble with phones, and have yet to get in touch with didn't even leave a message when I called _amethyst_fire_ to give her contact info for this weekend. I'll try a couple more times tonight. But she called me back anyway! Today has been made of win, with awesome sauce.

And I'm still really bad with names.

(I really need a travel icon, don't I?)

11am: SJC

I'm travelling lighter than usual this week. Decided to go back to a backpack as my carry-on after finding out the hard way that a TravelPro rolling briefcase is remarkably easy to overstuff to the point where it won't fit under an airplane seat. Ended up with a pretty nice backpack with the Rick Steves brand, but actually made by somebody else. It's enough larger than my old Jansport that it comfortably holds a modern 15.4" laptop, and the front flap hangs in front of the zippered back section rather than over the zipper. So you can get out the laptop without unsnapping the flap.

The flap is also asymmetrical, covering a sizeable zippered pocket (which I'm not using at the moment) but not the mesh bag that holds a water bottle. Yay! There's a back compartment that the straps stash into, and enough room over the front pocket and under the flap for me to put my shoulder bag in order to convince the airline that I only have one bag. That's less important this trip because I decided not to take Plink, my little Vagabond travel guitar.

Instead of Plink I took my new Yamaha recorder and my (very) old recorder book; I'll either re-learn recorder or get dragged out of my hotel room by my neighbors and drowned in the pool. To give you some idea of how long I've been out of practice, let me just say that the book is only a few years younger than my wife.

This is being written at around 11am in the San Jose airport -- they have nice desks where you can sit and plug in a laptop, but they don't have free WiFi. So it'll get posted sometime after I get to Portland.

I note in passing that the master for CC&S has been dropped off at work for UPS to pick up this afternoon.

4:20pm: Portland Convention Center

I'm here. Nothing much going on, and it seems to be difficult to connect with LJ here. Hopefully that's temporary. Doesn't matter much, since I'm currently ssh'ed in to home. I just love the net!

The Mac is its usual hatefull self. Should've brought a real keyboard. Think I'll go out and look for something to eat before the Meet and Geek at 7:30.

6:34pm: Convention Center

Seems LJ is totally hosed due to a power outage in San Francisco. So it goes. Dinner at a Red Robin's. Fried shrinp and fish and chips. Tasty, and not terribly expensive. They have several local brews on tap; I had a porter from a brewery whose name I don't remember.

The new backpack is definitely more manoeverable than Rolly, and holds at least as much stuff. Turns out, from having stuffed it under an airplane seat, that it's almost exactly the same dimensions. But because it doesn't have the wheels and so on it's lighter and holds more (though arranged differently and not necessarily more accessibly. Not quite as handy if you just want to toss something into it and move on (for example in a dealer's room or trade show). I'll probably keep using Rolly for SF cons, for example; you also can't easily use a backpack as an impromptu music stand.

6:30 am: Red Lion Hotel at the Convention Center

LJ may be back, and my master is "out for delivery". Web access here at the hotel is unuseably slow, but I can ssh ok, for the moment. Here goes!