Last week, I was in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. I had a good time, as I generally do. Portland’s a nice place, and when I’m there, so are a lot of friends that I see only once or twice a year. I got some tasty pizza with Piers at Sizzle Pie, had a really nice long dinner at Farm with Robert, got a milkshake with Andy, went to Le Piegon with Piers and John, Shirley, and Sonia, got Indian and ice cream with David, Julie, Ovid, and Vicky, and went to Base Camp with a whole ton of people. I’ve probably missed something in there. Sorry!

I wanted to make an effort to learn some more languages, old and new, more or less continually as time went on. I started with Forth and Go, and did a tolerable job at getting the basics of each down. I didn’t do so well at writing anything of consequence, which isn’t too surprising for Forth, but I’m pretty sure I could be writing a lot more Go to get things done. I really do mean to get back to that.

A few weeks ago was YAPC in Orland, Florida, and I attended! I already wrote about the amazingly great video recording of the conference. It was great, and I was amazed. I watched some of the videos just today!

I went to YAPC::NA! It was in Orlando, Florida, and I had a lovely time. I’ll write more about it later. I wanted to say one thing as soon as possible, though, and I thought I’d say it in isolation from anything else, because I think it’s a much more important thing than some may realize.

For a few years, I’ve kept most of my “stuff” on a two terabyte hard drive in a little tiny desktop computer running Ubuntu. It’s got another 2T drive connected via USB, and once in a while I’d run an rsync job. This was basically my whole “storage solution” for my media files: ripped movies, ripped music, and books. Recently, I’ve been getting close to filling the drive, and I thought I should improve the whole setup with something less ad hoc.

It’s been over a month since I last tried to do anything on my still-crawling-along (re)playthrough of all of Infocom’s games. The next up, for me, was The Witness. I’m going to be straight with you: I didn’t play it.

Steve Jackson is a famous game designer and his company produced big hits like GURPS, Munchkin, and Car Wars. Lesser known, to me, was his first game, Ogre. It’s a fairly simple tabletop war game, and it had a long and successful life beginning with its launch as a super cheap pocket game in 1977.

Months ago, Mark Jason Dominus said to me, “Hey, I heard about a conference in New York that’s going to just be two days of lightning talks!” I thought it sounded cool and promptly forgot about it. As it grew closer, though, I realized that I’d be able to go, and it sounded pretty fun. Tickets were free, but only about 30 were open to the public. I was very lucky to get one in the first pass. Almost everyone I met at the conference had gotten theirs through the wait list.

I took this photo of my desk the other day:

This past weekend was the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I was in attendance! The venue was good, and the location was awesome, in downtown Silver Spring. Highlights, for me, included: