First, a refresher…

These replay write-ups get shorter and shorter as I go. I think it’s because I’m growing more and more confident in what I like and don’t like, and what I will and won’t spend my time on. Infidel has a nice setup. I liked the setting, the starting plot, and the way the game got started. Soon enough, though, I got a “you’re quite thirsty” message, and I groaned.

At work, a fair bit of our web stuff is Catalyst. That’s not just the user-facing website, but also internal HTTP services. For a long time, we were stuck on v5.7012, from late 2007. That’s pre-Moose (which was 5.8000) and pre-Plack (which was 5.9000). It wasn’t that we didn’t want to upgrade, but it was a bunch of work and all the benefits we’d see immediately were little ones. It was going to free us up for a lot of future gain, but who has the time to invest in that?

I think I’m officially giving up on beating Enchanter, but it has been a pretty interesting experience as far as my big replay goes. It’s not because the game is great, but because it has allowed me to get a better handle on what I don’t like about the early Infocom games.

Last year, I bought a Synology ds214play NAS. I posted about my horrible data migration, wherein I lost a whole ton of data, entirely because I was a bonehead. Despite that pain, I absolutely loved the Synology NAS. It frequently impressed me with how much it could do, how well it did it, and how easy it was to do. Even after I moved all of my media to it, all my old backups, and started using it as a Time Machine backup destination, I had a good terabyte of space left.

YAPC actually only runs two days, or three if you count “RejectConf” on day zero. So, this entry is not really about YAPC::Asia, but about what I did between the end of the conference and my trip home.

I woke up early again on the 22nd, some time before dawn, and did some preparation for the conference. It was my day for speaking, and I wanted to make another pass through my slides. Eventually, it was six thirty and I decided to figure out what I could do for breakfast other than Starbucks. I went to look up “breakfast near Sunroute Ariake Hotel” and found a bunch of reviews in which people praised the hotel’s breakfast. Marylou had said it was just soup and bread, and that’s when I realized my error: I had trusted someone from Pittsburgh.

I woke up really early on the 20th and did my best to kill time. I called home, I reviewed my slides and re-packed my bag. Part of my goal was to delay until breakfast was served, so I could eat something before heading to Ariake for the conference. I wanted to see whether the okayu had been relabeled, too! Around 6:20, though, I couldn’t stand any more waiting, and I headed out. This way, I figured, I’d avoid rush hour.

(Where’s day -1? Well, I left home on the 18th (day -2) and got to Tokyo on the 19th (day -1), but since I didn’t sleep between the two, they formed one virtual day for me. Day -1 was lost, like tears in the rain.)

YAPC::Asia starts on August 20th with “day zero,” with a talks that didn’t make the main two days. I probably won’t be there for much of that, since it’s mostly Japanese content. Despite two prior YAPCs in Tokyo, I still can’t understand Japanese. Go figure!