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:

I sat on the idea of writing this replay entry for a long time, because my replay of Suspended was almost necessarily perfunctory. I have played the game many, many times. Before writing this entry, I sat down to do a run after months of not playing it, and beat the game in ten minutes. (I got a lousy score, but I’m pretty sure that with a picture of the map in front of me, I could probably get a perfect score with a few more tries, from memory.)

I still use The Daily Practice to track the things I’m trying to do reliably. I like it. It helps.