Hero

I could have used him this weekend. O_O

Anyway, Ruby Conference photos here. They don't convey much beyond my inability to hold a camera still, but at least now you have proof that my ass was indeed warming a seat at the Tech Museum, not in Dubuque, Iowa doing God-knows-what.

Though it's safe to say I felt like Alice might if she wandered into the looking-glass and found herself in East LA.

At 2:00 AM.

Wrote furiously most of Saturday and Sunday. Computer kept freezing. It was bad enough I had a 7-lb. PC, but did it have to get all anxiety-disorder on me too? I never thought I'd experience such acute Mac envy but the world changes when you're surrounded by the haxor elite.

Check out conference coverage at CMSWire. That's not everything; the editor and I are still parsing out a lot of my inflamed hoo-ha. While I had a winning time I was deliriously happy about sliding into my own bed on Sunday and falling asleep to South Park, even if it was the Super Adventurer child molestation episode.

I see the code, I see the code, I see the code.

Post 4/20 Chronic Bust, Geek-Style

I'm in San Jose for the Ruby Conference taking place at the Tech Museum. I've never felt so profoundly out of my element. It's an orgy of haxordom, a veritable Anandtech forum blown-up and come to waking life.

One discussion of interest took place when the founder of Chronic showcased his Ruby-based date and time parser. It's fairly new, and dude admitted the product was mildly buggy, but a burn war of /b/ proportions erupted and I felt the urge to duck.

What Chronic does is interpret natural language and parse out the date. So if you put in "This Tuesday 5pm," it'll spit out "4/24/2007 at 17:00" or some such. Potentially useful for reservation-setting, event creation on calendars, that kind of jazz. Google Calendar does something similar for its Quick Add function.

"Can Chronic interpret 'Five o'clock last New Years Eve'?" someone asked.

"No," the founder admitted, and it was on.

Things got worse at live demo time. It would have been too tame to expect a bunch of devs to politely ask him to input "Noon Friday next week" or "Today's date and time." Requests like "Fourscore and seven years ago!" and "Next month of Sundays!" came flying forth, and one guy actually demanded that the parser reflect 12 noon as 00:00 because that's what it's supposed to be, and everyone misuses it.

Dude decided to nix the questions with the exception of one last from a row of young cavalier coding elites: "Can I have a pony?"

"If you're good," our fine speaker replied, not missing a beat. "One day..."

At the conclusion of the presentation he smilingly suggested his audience turn in a patch or two, then stepped down.

Wild. This place is like church camp, except God has been replaced with code, and praise songs have been replaced with hax heckling.

Heading off to dinner with a guy whose team allegedly built the first Ruby-based CMS. This should be promising.

JOOOOOOOST

I finally got JOOOOOST! (Okay, I didn't *just* get it, I *just* found the time to download it.)

I am juiced. (Ha.) And while I don't think it'll replace Youtube, I'm otherwise ready to pull a Tony Chung and drink the Kool-Aid. Will let you know how all fares when I resurface from free-wheeling geekosity.

A Nation Asks Why

...with regard to the worst school shooting in America's history. (As far as fatalities go.)

Why ask why? We won't find anything besides meaningless (somehow mistaken for illuminating) tidbits about the boy's ethnicity (South Korean) and bad plays.

And despite insistence to the contrary, heated debates about gun control, gun possession or eyebrow-raising descriptions of the boy as "loner" or "question mark kid" do not answer a "Why" that in itself lacks adequate context to provide a framework for answers.

Life continues in the same way it always has:

"...my husband's a Leo, I know how to work with you three!" cries a playful feminine voice wafting out of the conference room behind me, amidst the smell of coffee and requisite controlled laughter that precludes another day of vacuous "relationship" development.

Condolences go out to those whose friends and family were taken at Virginia Tech.

Symptoms of an Adolescent Country

Me, staring in horror at the business acquaintance who's just told off an overwhelmed waitress: "You're damn high-maintenance. How on earth did you manage to live in a Third World country for a whole summer?!"

He tilts his head, smiles pertly and replies, "Outside the lines is one thing. In the States, anything less than my way is unacceptable."