wiredfool

It’s been somewhat foggy for the last few days, I think it’s been a week since we’ve seen the sun. I went out on Saturday around noon to take some pictures — several of them look like it’s quite dark out. Guess I have to fix that in photoshop.

This guy was sitting on a line, fishing. He ended up with a salmon smolt after I took this.

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Ben has a new word. Google. Of course, he means Dougal the cat, but it’s cute anyway. He’s having fun climbing anything he can get onto. Nothing is safe, not even the light switches.

The Maple trees outside the house have been the most incredible shades of red, orange, and yellow this past week or so. I don’t remember them ever being this vivid. In the mornings, the light reflecting from the trees bathes my office in a pinkish glow.

The moon was nearly full last night with completely clear skies. This is not normal for November in Seattle, nor was the proximity of a very bright planet. This shot blows out the moon to pick up the light from the nearby planet. I think this was ISO 100, f11, 1/4 sec or so.

And one of the moon exposed to see the detail. This is an actual pixel crop from the 100mm lens. (exposure was ISO 100, 1/100 sec @ f11)

30 hours at seattle mind camp 2 of them asleep. Chalk up that ratio to a late night game of Werewolf that consumed 20 of us till 5am. Rule #1, Don’t wear a sweater if you want to live.

Update: 63 Photos on Flickr now. (follow the photostream)

Still trying to digest everything, but:

• Second life sounds like an attempt to do the Metaverse
• A box of random surface mount parts makes an interesting diversion.
• Checking that the T1’s are connected is a good thing. Especially while there’s still time to get DSL.
• Then again, not having internet access for the first couple of hours encourages people to mingle without hiding behind laptops.
• It’s fun riding a segway around a large empty office.
• Werewolf is an evil time sink. That’s not bad, just evil.
• A good strategy at this sort of thing is to go to sessions that you may not be interested in, rather that one where you know something about what’s being discussed. Leads to accidential discoveries. (no more Ruby on Rails sessions or 0 to x web application framework sessions. They might slice bread, but there’s other things to do out there)
• Todd Blanchard showed Objective CLIPS— looks very interesting. It adds Rule based inferencing to CoreData Applications with one line of code, plus easily digestible business rules. (yes, they’re lisp like syntax, but it’s things that are similar to: if item == taxible, set tax = taxrate * amount. I suspect that there’s a pretty good mapping to some RDF concepts there as well.
• Todd also showed me a Smalltalk based web application development system that was written by a Avi (who was also at the conference).
• A space elevator could probably be built faster and for not much more money than the Seattle Monorail. Major plus, there aren’t many back yards off the coast of Equador.
• I could have guessed that 95% of the drinks that people brought would be sugar+caffeine + carbonation. That probably contributed to the Werewolf game.
• Riya seems to have some interesting face recognition software to auto tag photos. It’s a mixed client/hosted service, currently windows, currently alpha.
• AdHoc wifi mesh + windows == Bad. When one gets bad signal, it sets up a competing network on an interfering frequency with the same name, except that one doesnt’ have a route to the world.
• Didn’t get to play with a retinal image display on a WinCE machine wirelessly Remote Desktop’d into an XP machine. Think Gargoyle mode.
• I don’t fit in the electric car.
• Wait, you’re not the Seer? Why did you say that you were? — Umm, because I’m chaotic neutral?

I’m always a little sad watching the gorillas at the zoo. Their features are so nearly human that it’s hard for me to get past thinking that this is not the life that they want. Then again, their wild life isn’t exactly easy or safe these days either.

Duck Blue Devil