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"technically, we're in New Jersey"
Mar. 28th, 2004 12:49 pmI'm writing this sitting on the Amtrak Acela Express from DC to New York. The conference is done and done, and fun as it was, I think that's a relief.
My brain is so damn full. The number of talks I was able to attend over the course of the conference dropped from day-to-day, as there was too much else going on. Partly this was just because of Python stuff - both discussions about the upcoming 2.4 and 2.3.4 releases, and distutils and the like. More on distutils in a later post. But a whole pile of discussions about shtoom (and particularly about doug, although the doug/shtoom distinction blurs and focusses as I work through this stuff). By the end of the conference, I was getting a bit sick of "could I ask you some questions?"
The standout talk of the conference for me was definitely the talk on Starkiller. The subject matter was interesting (although I wanted more detail) and the presenter was enthusiastic, knew his material, and did an entertaining talk.
So, a summary of the last week:
Friday: Left SFO. Airport hell, thanks to the TSA and the airline (ATA). Missed flight, but my luggage went on to DC without me. Yay. I'll come back to this one later. Arrived in DC around 11pm, after getting up just after 5am. Even taking timezones into account, a 15 hour day... Because of this, I didn't get to see Barry's band play. :-(
Saturday: Staying at the HI-DC - it's pretty nice. For a place to go back to so you can crash asleep, get a shower and then go out again, it's fine. And when the difference is $30/night vs $120-$150 night in a hotel, it's an easy choice. Saturday was the first day of the sprints. Thomas Wouters, Barry Warsaw and I paired (three-ed?) on reimplementing the standard library's email parser package, because it sucks. Barry dropped out to do Mailman3.0 stuff after a while, so it was Thomas and I coding and heckling Barry about the current parser. Can't honestly remember that far back as to what we ended up doing after that. I think Thomas and I went in search of a bar with a decent single malt.
Sunday was more sprinting, and more on the email parser. We also had a session on planning for 2.4. Depressingly, but not suprisingly, no-one wanted to take the job, so I guess I get to keep doing it. For those who care - on Sunday night, DC is DEAD. DEAD DEAD DEAD. We ended up having drinks in the bar of the Hyatt. Awful surrounds, but it seemed like literally nothing else was open.
Monday I worked with Fred, Kapil and Bob on a bunch of Distutils stuff. More dinner and the like in the evening, although I piked early to go write slides (the first, awful, set of slides).
Tuesday I had the aforementioned "aha" moment about slides and presentations (after Glyph said something to kick my brain into gear - I can't remember what). Most of Tuesday was spent staring at my old talk, furiously writing the new talk, and then practicing it several times.
Wednesday. The circus begins. Opening keynote was Mitch Kapor, founder and head of OSAF. I'd pretty much written OSAF off - they seemed to be just spinning wheels. But stuff is actually happening - Mitch and two other OSAF folks (Ted and Jeff) were over for the conference, and the latter two stayed the whole week. Mitch hung around until lunchtime on day 2, though.
Then my talk. I've covered that already, but this was the point where the week started to go a little crazy. Lots and lots and lots of people wanting to talk to me about this stuff. I think I've been correct to keep this very much under the radar for as long as I have.
Wednesday night was a Chandler (OSAF's baby) session. At the end of it I mentioned to Ted that he and I should talk about voice some. He was planning the same thing. Mitch also found me before I left to arrange to catch up the next day.
Thursday opened with Guido's keynote. He's always been pretty good with keeping slides short, but he'd really pared them away for his talk. He also had fun with colours and sending up my ... ahem... colourful dress sense. Fine by me - it was funny. Thursday was also when I realised that all the hallway conversations were actually more useful than many of the talks. The number of talks I got to per day dropped throughout the conference - too much else to do! Had a good talk to Mitch and Ted (Leung) about voice stuff before Mitch headed off, and then Ted and I went and had dinner and I filled his head with stuff about voice, the python community, and the like. Depending on various timing issues, I might try and make a bounce up to SF at the end of the LA part of the trip, before I fly home.
Also had the PSF annual meeting. So long as I don't get appointed to anything, I'm happy how the meeting comes out.
Friday was... gorgeous. The SF weather finally caught up with me. More talking, talks and frantic last minute catchups with people. After the conference finished, Jeff (from OSAF) and Mike McLay and I went to the Air and Space Museum and wandered around, then went out into the evening sun and walked around the sculpture gardens in the Mall. I wasn't sure whether I'd head up to NY on Friday or wait until Saturday - figured I'd wait and see how many folks were around. Enough were hanging around that it was worthwhile to stay - I'd brought my bag to the convention, so dumped it in Jeff's hotel room a couple of blocks away, and ended up crashing there rather than lugging it back to the hostel. A few of us also went out and saw Goodbye Lenin. It's a really good German movie. Go see. I'd give a review but, hey, that's what IMDB is for. And I'm off the net right now.
And today it was up and out to Union station to get Amtrak. Ended up getting the snazzy high-speed all-business-class train, because the price difference was only $120 vs $90 for the ticket. It's verrrry nice. And no airport bullshit!
My brain is so damn full. The number of talks I was able to attend over the course of the conference dropped from day-to-day, as there was too much else going on. Partly this was just because of Python stuff - both discussions about the upcoming 2.4 and 2.3.4 releases, and distutils and the like. More on distutils in a later post. But a whole pile of discussions about shtoom (and particularly about doug, although the doug/shtoom distinction blurs and focusses as I work through this stuff). By the end of the conference, I was getting a bit sick of "could I ask you some questions?"
The standout talk of the conference for me was definitely the talk on Starkiller. The subject matter was interesting (although I wanted more detail) and the presenter was enthusiastic, knew his material, and did an entertaining talk.
So, a summary of the last week:
Friday: Left SFO. Airport hell, thanks to the TSA and the airline (ATA). Missed flight, but my luggage went on to DC without me. Yay. I'll come back to this one later. Arrived in DC around 11pm, after getting up just after 5am. Even taking timezones into account, a 15 hour day... Because of this, I didn't get to see Barry's band play. :-(
Saturday: Staying at the HI-DC - it's pretty nice. For a place to go back to so you can crash asleep, get a shower and then go out again, it's fine. And when the difference is $30/night vs $120-$150 night in a hotel, it's an easy choice. Saturday was the first day of the sprints. Thomas Wouters, Barry Warsaw and I paired (three-ed?) on reimplementing the standard library's email parser package, because it sucks. Barry dropped out to do Mailman3.0 stuff after a while, so it was Thomas and I coding and heckling Barry about the current parser. Can't honestly remember that far back as to what we ended up doing after that. I think Thomas and I went in search of a bar with a decent single malt.
Sunday was more sprinting, and more on the email parser. We also had a session on planning for 2.4. Depressingly, but not suprisingly, no-one wanted to take the job, so I guess I get to keep doing it. For those who care - on Sunday night, DC is DEAD. DEAD DEAD DEAD. We ended up having drinks in the bar of the Hyatt. Awful surrounds, but it seemed like literally nothing else was open.
Monday I worked with Fred, Kapil and Bob on a bunch of Distutils stuff. More dinner and the like in the evening, although I piked early to go write slides (the first, awful, set of slides).
Tuesday I had the aforementioned "aha" moment about slides and presentations (after Glyph said something to kick my brain into gear - I can't remember what). Most of Tuesday was spent staring at my old talk, furiously writing the new talk, and then practicing it several times.
Wednesday. The circus begins. Opening keynote was Mitch Kapor, founder and head of OSAF. I'd pretty much written OSAF off - they seemed to be just spinning wheels. But stuff is actually happening - Mitch and two other OSAF folks (Ted and Jeff) were over for the conference, and the latter two stayed the whole week. Mitch hung around until lunchtime on day 2, though.
Then my talk. I've covered that already, but this was the point where the week started to go a little crazy. Lots and lots and lots of people wanting to talk to me about this stuff. I think I've been correct to keep this very much under the radar for as long as I have.
Wednesday night was a Chandler (OSAF's baby) session. At the end of it I mentioned to Ted that he and I should talk about voice some. He was planning the same thing. Mitch also found me before I left to arrange to catch up the next day.
Thursday opened with Guido's keynote. He's always been pretty good with keeping slides short, but he'd really pared them away for his talk. He also had fun with colours and sending up my ... ahem... colourful dress sense. Fine by me - it was funny. Thursday was also when I realised that all the hallway conversations were actually more useful than many of the talks. The number of talks I got to per day dropped throughout the conference - too much else to do! Had a good talk to Mitch and Ted (Leung) about voice stuff before Mitch headed off, and then Ted and I went and had dinner and I filled his head with stuff about voice, the python community, and the like. Depending on various timing issues, I might try and make a bounce up to SF at the end of the LA part of the trip, before I fly home.
Also had the PSF annual meeting. So long as I don't get appointed to anything, I'm happy how the meeting comes out.
Friday was... gorgeous. The SF weather finally caught up with me. More talking, talks and frantic last minute catchups with people. After the conference finished, Jeff (from OSAF) and Mike McLay and I went to the Air and Space Museum and wandered around, then went out into the evening sun and walked around the sculpture gardens in the Mall. I wasn't sure whether I'd head up to NY on Friday or wait until Saturday - figured I'd wait and see how many folks were around. Enough were hanging around that it was worthwhile to stay - I'd brought my bag to the convention, so dumped it in Jeff's hotel room a couple of blocks away, and ended up crashing there rather than lugging it back to the hostel. A few of us also went out and saw Goodbye Lenin. It's a really good German movie. Go see. I'd give a review but, hey, that's what IMDB is for. And I'm off the net right now.
And today it was up and out to Union station to get Amtrak. Ended up getting the snazzy high-speed all-business-class train, because the price difference was only $120 vs $90 for the ticket. It's verrrry nice. And no airport bullshit!
