Kevin Lawver's blog about life, programming, culture and learning.
Max, Brian, my dad and brother Steve all drove to Ohio last weekend for Tim’s birthday. We had a great time, and the boys were angels. I’m busy, but here are the photo sets:
It’s been a wonderful (italics = sarcasm!) week so far. My second presentation at Web 2.0 Expo got moved to Wednesday at the last minute, and I won’t be here, so I’m not giving it. It’s a long and sad soap opera, and I’d rather not talk about it. But, instead of giving up entirely, I’ve decided to make some lemonade. Instead of doing the presentation (Microformats for Web Services and Portable Content) in a hallway at Web 2.Open, I think I’ll go to the Mashroom and see if I can get some help turning it into a Rails plugin. While I’ve launched a product on Rails, I’m no expert. I’ve been meaning to play with plugins, but haven’t had time (oddly enough, working on this presentation). I’ve zipped up the Rails app if you want to play with it. You’ll need to install the mofo and ruby-openid gems for it to work correctly (and you need a database for the profiles).\
What does it do? The main demo takes OpenID and after you log in, it grabs the OpenID URL looking for an hcard and pre-populates your profile with some selected bits of info. It was pretty painless to throw together, and I’d love to turn it into a plugin to make it even more painless. I think this could be a great alternative to CardSpace and the OpenID 2.0 attribute exchange stuff that’s still in the works. With delegate links, you could have multiple hcard “personas” that all point to the same identity provider but contain different profile information. Wouldn’t that be cool?\
In related news, I’m tired of conferences. I’d rather stay home, work and spend time with my family, who I feel is getting away from me. I’m missing too many of Brian’s little developments, the little things that kids learn on their ride from babies to little boys. He’s already a toddler and well on his way to kid-dom, and I don’t want to miss anything I don’t have to. Max gets smarter every day, and I want to be there to help answer questions.\
Other than Mashup Camps, and XTech (only because I already agreed to do it), I’m done until SxSW next year. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass to travel, and conference organizers don’t make it any easier. You’d think they’d treat speakers better, but they don’t. Yes, it’s a privilege to speak, but it’s also a huge commitment – both in time and money. They move your presentations around (without warning, or checking to see if you’re available), the network never works, and no one will answer e-mails (oops, here I go, I’m dwelling on this conference again). I’m tired and I need a break.\
So, if you’re going to Mashroom on Tuesday, come help.\
Update: I ended up not doing the Mashroom because I wanted to meet John Allsopp and see his microformats presentation (which was fantastic, and mine would have been a great sequel to it). By the end of that, I was tired and didn’t feel like writing code so I went back to the AOL booth to help out.
Verizon’s high speed EVDO stuff hasn’t made it down here, so I’m stuck at dial-up speeds for the next week. So… there won’t be a whole lot of blogging, but the Sidekick works, so I’ll be updating my Twitter page fairly often, so check that for updates.\
It’s morning in Mississippi, and it was a rough night for the Lawvers. Max had a little too much excitement (and ice cream, and one too many road meals) and spent a good portion of last night throwing up. Jen handled most of it, and is now snoozing on the couch, but it still made for an interesting evening.\
The boys woke up early because we’re still on EST instead of CST, and now Max is playing with the camera and we’re watching The Goonies. Breakfast is around the corner and then hopefully, we have a day of not doing much ahead of us (and maybe a nap).
We’re leaving for Jen’s parents’ new house in Mississippi later this week, and we’ve decided to drive instead of fly. I have all this time off, and we haven’t really done a true family road trip since Brian was born, so I figured it’s time. We’ve got the van, all the adapters for our toys and the road “menu” all planned out (pop tarts for breakfast, granola bars, grapes, apples and carrots for snacks and then out for lunch and dinner). We even have our route (just so everyone knows in case we get lost in the backwoods somewhere). The part through western Virginia and eastern Tennessee is the same route Jen and I took when we moved out here from Tucson, and it’s a pretty drive through rolling farm land (if I remember correctly). I love directions. I love knowing where I’m going and about how long it’s going to take to get there. I like that thick red line telling me where to go.\
I know I’m probably stupid for thinking this is a good idea, but I’m actually looking forward to it. We took lots of road trips when I was a kid. We drove around Europe in our VW camper van with the Porsche engine in it. It went over the Alps to the Eagle’s Nest, to Spain, to Belgium – where it protected us from golf ball sized hail, and I remember sleeping head to foot in the hammock over the front seats with Tim. My other favorite memory is sitting in the very tall back seat and picking up stuff from the floor with my feet (I can still pick up all kinds of stuff with my toes… good talent to have when you’re lazy).\
This trip will be different. We’ll be staying in a hotel at the halfway point instead of a campground, and I’ll have my macbook and EVDO card so Jen could blog from the road if she wanted (but she gets carsick reading, so I’m not sure how she’ll handle the laptop), and Max could surf Noggin or watch a movie (or play with Line Rider.\
I’m sure we’ll let you know how it goes.
Instead of paying for the hotel’s network connection, I decided to give my brand new EVDO card a shot. I was talking to one of AOL’s VP’s about my presentation and trying to find the time to write demos and she asked what I would do if I had a budget. Of course, I told her I’d get an EVDO card so I wasn’t held hostage to crappy hotel networks. Well, here we are, and I’ve got one, and it works!\
I checked my mail at the airport, worked on my presentation and fixed a couple bugs in the demos last night in the hotel, am uploading pictures to Flickr and it’s going OK. It’s not as fast as a wired connection, or even a solid wi-fi connection, but it’s fast enough to get things done. E-mail’s no problem, and even uploading photos is going smoothly. Connecting using Verizon’s expresscard modem is pretty seamless as long as you remember that it’s more modem than wi-fi card (and remember to disconnect before you put your machine to sleep.\
If you can get work to pay for it, I’d do it. If you work for yourself and are on the road all the time, I’d do it. It made the flight delay bearable because I could get work done while sitting in the terminal, and it gave me an option when the hotel network was unacceptable. I would bet that I’ll probably use it to give a presentation here at some point (hopefully not today, my demos are kind of bandwidth intensive).\
I woke up at 4AM, probably because I didn’t eat dinner last night and I’m hungry. Unfortunately, the restaurant doesn’t open till 6. So, I took some pictures in the bathroom. Enjoy.
Why is it, the more expensive the hotel, the more they rape you on everything? I’m staying at a \$300 a night place, and they want \$5.00 for a bottle of water, \$3.00 for a soda and \$10 for internet for twenty-four hours. Hotel Avante in Mountain View is \$155 a night and they give me free internet and free water. Westin? Not stayin’ with you again.
Because Tim did it, I’ve done it too… and I’ve been more places than Tim. I guess it’s not fair that we went to most of the same places in Europe when we were kids. I’m protesting Portugal though… we didn’t go there as kids. When did you go to Portugal, Tim, when?
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.
It looks like I’ll be presenting a short overview of AIM Pages and our use of microformats at Supernova. That means I’ll be in San Francisco from probably June 20th-24th. Who wants to do dinner?
The panel today went really well today. Bert showed of Cesar’s really cool Advanced Layout demo, Andy Clarke did a great presentation about the responsibility we have as web developers, and I did my CSS for Syndicated Content, which went pretty well. I got some good questions, and I don’t remember anyone walking out in disgust.\
Andy and I got a sandwich afterwards, and had a good talk about a bunch of web-nerd topics.\
Now, I’m back in the hotel, really tired (happens after every presentation), and just waiting for Big Brother to come on (can’t help myself), and IM’ing with folks. While doing that, I had a thought. Next time I travel, I’m taking a headphone-jack-to-RCA audio cable, and an s-video-to-RCA cable, so I can hook the Powerbook up to the hotel TV and watch all the crap I bring with me. My room has a perfectly nice DVD player in it, but it’s region 2, and all my DVD’s are region 1 (right now, it’s Homicide season one and the first two seasons of Buffy). I don’t want to sit at the desk and watch stuff, so it goes unwatched. But, if I could hook the Powerbook up to the TV, ta-da, whatever I want to watch on the big screen.\
Just sayin’… next time, I’m bringing even more cables with me.