A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

• classicaljunkie volunteered to help clean up my tags, found the LJ page that lets you mass-delete them after sorting by usage, and (with my blessing) nuked all tags I've used only once. This cleared up well over half of my alloted 1,000 tag-slots. So, my new posts have tags again. Aren't you pleased.

• I have a copy of the volity.net webclient alpha mostly running on Brie, my creamy white MacBook. This is very important, not just because Brie's become my primary all-sorts work machine, but because I left volity.net's codebase in a sad state when I last touched it, way out of synch with Subversion. No more of that.

The webclient daemon's regression tests all pass again, as of this evening, and I'm raring to write more tests. Recent work for clients saw me learning to really learn to rock Test::WWW::Mechanize and I am honestly looking forward to writing a mechanized agent that will try to play Tic-Tac-Toe games over the web and report back to me. (I may need to write and install a deterministic TTT bot to complement it.)

I have a goal to launch the damn alpha by April 1, and feel it's entirely realistic. I'll miss it only if I get too distracted by pay-money-work, which isn't impossible, but even in that case I'm gonna get a lot of good work done.

• My consulting business's brand-identity work is down to negotiating business card design, which is just a peewee version of the website's design. I am nearly there! I will be so happy when I can finally announce the business's name and identity loud n proud, though I haven't been exactly keeping it a secret in the meantime. (Have begun renegotiating my open contracts to point at the company, rather than at me personally.)

• Idled in the The Burren with taskboy3000 this evening to discuss the format of upcoming Gameshelf shoots, the likes of which you have never seen before, at least not on this particular show. Mailed our director about it. He seems really energized about our trying new things, and quite into playing his role through all of it. We are lucky to have him on-board.

Is there a word for when a baby decides that a certain person in a certain setting is a fascinating source of visual data, and so stares and stares? Mr. T. Boy had one of these attached to him tonight, from the next table over. Very amusing.

Back home. Thanks to xach and jaq (har har sounds like a chewy candy product) for suggestions of stuff to do in Portland. We did indeed eat at the Sebago brewpub, and tromped around the enormous cemetery. The weather was fine. Pictures later, maybe, as well as the Central Maine report.

The Shipyard brewery tour was fun. Being in the middle of the day on a weekday our tour group was us, an elderly couple, some random beerfan dood and two teenage boys with lacrosse sticks. First we all watched a movie about the brewery's origins and its various ales (and they are all ales, specifically), and then a guide led us around to gawp at fermentation vats and bottling machinery. Took maybe 15 minutes, and then there was some beer sampling. (The lacrosse kids were invited to instead sample some of the soda pop they brew there, and they did.)

I got to look all smart in front of this handful of strangers by answering the tour guide's pop quiz about why India Pale Ale is so called. Then the guide followed us into the gift shop and started reading aloud all the jokey T-shirts to us, in case we had missed them, which seemed a little odd. He cheered and went away when classicaljunkie announced our intention to buy a case of beer. We ended up with three, of all kinds of beverage. Good times!

This snuck up on me. It's near North Station this time, 6 to 10, and they're promising a better venue, and a free beer.

I'm of two minds about it right now... my main motivator is just to passively troll for follow-up conversations from my May talk, and just staying reasonably plugged in to the local scene. But I don't have any active agenda.

Here's the speaker list. Any of y'all interested in going?

Edit: I am now planning on attending.

For Volity, it was a win. The audience was quite large (given the venue of a pub's second-floor function room) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded in keeping its attention for the whole four-and-some minutes of my talk. There was much enthusiastic cheering, and I got some nice compliments about it, chatting with lots of folks afterward. These included total strangers, friends of friends, and two people from O'Reilly I hadn't seen in several years.

The major take-away was an invitation from the director of the O'Reilly Network to help create an article about Volity. I am not sure if he's thinking more an interview or a technical article, but I emailed him a little while ago saying I'm willing to do anything up to and including writing the whole article myself, noting that I wrote several articles for ORN before I started Volity in 2003 (and when it had a different director). Dunno what their editorial policy is on technology inventors writing about their own stuff. We'll see.

I credit the Ignite organizers for posting video from previous events on blip.tv. I watched several before I started putting together our bit on Tuesday. I applied my observation that, with only five minutes to work with, big grabby visuals worked much better on slides than lots of text bullets. The result was a fine success and I really gotta post a version online for y'all to see. Bug me about it if I don't!

Unfortunately, the venue for this event wasn't so hot. The room was a long and somewhat skinny rectangle with the stage at one end and the bar at the other. It quickly fell into a use-pattern where people who wanted to watch the presentations sat or stood in the stage half, while people who didn't really care hung out in the bar half, talking in the shouty voice one uses in a crowded pub.

Sadly, sound travels. One of the organizers repeatedly took the mic between presentations to ask for quiet from the back, which worked for about 2.5 minutes each time. And it got worse as the evening wore on; a colleague and I agreed that we were fortunate to have our talks scheduled among the earlier block.

Also the assembled geeks apparently failed to drink enough, since the same organizer asked people to enjoy another drink if they were thinking of it, since if they didnt O'Reilly would be stuck with a your-event's-attendees-didn't-cover-our-costs bill. I had three pints all told, which was about two and a half too many given my medication. But, you know: business. It's a write-off.

Oh, also the keynote was actually kind of interesting content-wise but the guy stumbled weirdly a couple of times. He was met with grumbling at a throw-away comment that the number of women in the audience was in the single digits - a strange thing to say since this was visibly untrue to anyone there. Then he responded to this grumbling by making a sarcastic jab at "feminists". WTF? It got things started on odd footing. Fortunately, most of my fellow lightning-talkers were smoother. (And if some weren't, they were yanked off after five minutes anyway...)

My proposal for a five-to-ten-minute beer-soaked talk on Volity at Ignite Boston just got greenlit. Once again, that's at Tommy Doyle's pub in Harvard Square (not the one in Kendall Square!) on the evening of the 31st.

The whole event goes from 6 until 10, and I hear tell that the full presentation schedule will appear on its blog by this Friday.

The labels on all six bottles of IPA are upside-down.

Nerdiest beer ever. Going home to bed soon.