I Left My Bowels In San Francisco

I’ve been good, I swear. Maybe it was the carpaccio last night. Maybe it was the chocolate mousse. Maybe it was something else, like the amorphous blob we had for lunch yesterday. Anyway, I skipped the end of Supernova today to spent some quality time with the hotel bathroom.\
But, yesterday was good. Rohit Khare gave name to a game I’ve played before, and we had a great time playing at lunch: Acronomious. Given a word, you have to come up with the most implausible acronym for it, extra credit for recursion (using the acronym in the acronym, for exmaple: Bases Around Strategic Emplacements). I met the guys from Netvibes, and we had a lovely conversation about building modules, and we talked about how similar our approaches to development are. It was fun, and they’re the friendliest Frenchmen I’ve ever met. The day before, I met the guys from ATTAP and we had a lovely talk about their new open source javascript framework: Jitsu. It’s definitely something worth keeping up with.\
Last night, I went out to dinner with Kristin and Jessica and we had a lovely time at The Steps of Rome (where we had the carpaccio, the best bruschetta ever, and some lovely prosciutto and mozzarella). The food was amazing, and surprisingly cheap for the quality and quantity. After dinner, we walked around Little Italy for a little while, and got dessert at Stella’s Pastery. Yummy yummy chocolate mousse!\
This week has been pretty good. Mashpit was a great experience, and will help me in a couple weeks. We’re running an internal Mashpit at AOL to work on module, and it was nice to get a “real” Mashpit experience under my belt before I try to replicate it at work.\
The Supernova workshops on Wednesday were very interesting, and I think our Decentralized Data panel went really well, and so did my short talk on Modular Web Development that I hope to expand into a real proposal or set of best practices. I get to work on refining it a little bit more before Mashup Camp. The panels yesterday were a disappointment. It was mostly “my company believes in these buzzword and I’ll say them over and over again and ignore what anyone else is saying.” The best stuff was happening in IRC, where the snark overflowed.\
That’s what I’ve been up to this week. Tomorrow, it’s back home for a little while before Mashup Camp, and then I’m really taking the rest of the summer off from traveling.