Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

It appears that the AZN cable channel will be going off the air. This is a little sad for me, as it was one of the few places I could find some of the movies friends have been recommending I see, with their original subtitles. The Anime they have is mixed at best (currently only Last Exile and Moon Phase), and the movies have been spotty. Guess its back to Netflix.

I must admit that I have spent a number of late evenings dancing with Sarah to the opening and ending music of Moon Phase and Last Exile. She prefers the former, I prefer the latter. I am a little ashamed to admit that I have seen all of Moon Phase in it’s subtitled form (way back when Josh was born no less so the full circle is kind of nice.) The dubbing is some of the worst I have heard in a long time (and I have heard some bad stuff.) The first time I saw Josh or Sarah smile were to that anime, so it grudgingly holds a place in my heart if for no other reason; well that and the neko mimi. Last Exile is decent enough with a great soundtrack, great writing, and above average animation.

The real loss are some of the movies that now I will just have to rent and plan for. I personally would rather stumble upon a movie that was recommended, but that has always been hit or miss anyway; more miss than hit really. I did get to spend some late nights working on PyCon-Tech, (or in one case, not working on it,) watching the channel. I tend to enjoy the surreal. Actually I revel in it. There is no better escape than a surreal movie or an on-stage farce. Soon after Sarah was born, the AZN channel aired Wool 100%, which came highly recommended from friends who share a similar affliction to mine. I spent the entire movie standing rocking Sarah. I was mesmerized from beginning to end. I missed the chance to see Kamikaze Girls again when they aired it, but it is another of those borderline surreal movies which scratch that itch; and I hate the entire goth-loli things; really, really hate it, all evidence in this post to the contrary. (Why Nana why!??! Your 2002 demo had so much promise!)

One of these days I will get around to making a list of good anime/manga. One of these days. Until then, go see Paprika! (seriously, go see it.)

Well it has been a very long day, so lets begin.

I woke up at 4:30am (a time I am more know for going to bed at), and got ready to be picked up by the airport limo. Because I planned for every eventuality, there turned out to be no need for such planning. There was no traffic. I got my bags checked immediately, and proceeded to the book store where I picked up Terry Pratchets latest book ‘Making Money’.  I have a trdition of reading Prattchet every time I fly. I will continue this tradition even after he stops witting, which may have unfortunately already be the case. But I digress. The flight was a short hop and I managed to sleep for about an hour of it (thank you DJ Tiesto – In Search of Sunrise 7). Landed, got my bag, and hopped on the free shuttle. Got to the hotel, and at 10:20am I was standing in my hotel room!

Then I made the mistake of trying to get the wireless working. Two calls to customer support, a wireless bridge, and secondary wireless card later, I was successfully connected to the wireless app, and crashing their servers (I have a habit of doing that).  And I am paying $13 a day for this privilege (more on this later). I am up and running, so I start dealing with the PyCon registrations. Nothing spectacular. There are some more vendor and press passes to be made up that didn’t make the press run, but no big deal over all. I connect up with David Goodger, Steve Holden, and Peter Kropf in the atrium and have a decent enough late lunch. To me its 3pm and I am starved.

Things seem to be going way too smoothly. The base network is in place, the power drops are in, and the pallets of printed materials are on the dock. I figure I will have time to get a hair cut after all. I have about 4 hours before I need to be back, so I promptly go up to my room and fall asleep for those 4 hours. Then some more reg work (up to 1005 pre-paid in full registrants!), and a peek at the schedule app. 680 people using the application!!! DAMN! Brett Cannons talk is at the top of the attendance list. By the app numbers we expect over 350 people to attend that talk. That is more attendance than all of Python 2004. That wakes me up enough to head down for what I expect to be an all night bag stuffing event. An event I have been greatly looking forward to.

It’s done. The bags (all 1000+) were stuffed in less than an hour. this is insane. Well it turns out that NONE of the sponsor materials are arriving at the hotel until tomorrow after noon. Yikes. So what as stuffed? 5 items. A far cry from the 21 we had last year, and the 8 shirts. Well we are not stuffing shirts this year. The solution is that we will try to have a separate packet to go with the shirts and hand those out Thursday evening and Friday. We might end up re-stuffing or something. Not really sure what the end decision is, and it will greatly depend on the amount of materials we have from the sponsors.

Things are a blur after that. People decided to merge the tutorial and non-tutorial badges into one poorly alphabetized pile. They did not know that the badges were broken into two sets on purpose, not that they were pre-sorted in a special way (due to being printed in sheets). Steve took this in stride and with some help we re-re sorted everything in short order.  The network is not 100% functional yet, but that will be fixed at 5:30 when the network guys get in and complete the job. We have a great group of people running the networking and Jaffo seems to like their work; thus I am quite impressed and have 0 concerns. The hotel room wireless is a different issue, and they are playing some dirty pool, which I will talk about another time.

There were some other small issues of little note. Meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a year or only know online. It will be good to see James Tauber again tomorrow, and I am looking forward to the tutorials. One issue is the registration desk which I will be running the on-site portion of at lest during the crunch.  We still don’t have a printer/computer pair which work together properly (my laptop does not like the generated PDF’s for some unknown reason), and there are ~40 unpaid registrations which we will have to deal with. The job of getting ~440 people through registration before 9am! That is going to be fun. I still have not seen Jeff or Mary to talk logistics, so we will see what happens 4 hours from now.

With that I am off for another 4 hour nap before registration setup starts!!!

Like most other children, our son has a favorite item, a little stuffed monkey, aptly named, monkey. Monkey went with us to Montana, and here is a Tabblo immortalizing the trip from his unique perspective.

See my Tabblo>

NOTE: There is a picture of us standing around a broken frostfree hidden in there.

Well I am sitting here in my hotel on the last evening I have internet access, eating Pocky, typing away as fast as I can, wondering where the week went. Tomorrow I move to a coffee shop before heading back to the ranch. In the week before the trip I was too overwhelmed with last minute stuff at work (like migrating to Python2.5), and preparing to spending 10 days without all my electronics. As a result I only posted information on the potter predictions site. There were a million little things which I figured I would get done while having 10 days with little to do but some minor farm work. This also meant that all the things I like to post about had major announcements. It all backed up, but I still figured 10 days away from the daily regiment would allow me to clear out some of the backlog. No such luck.

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James Tauber just made an announcement concerning Potter Predictions; If you haven’t voted in the last 5 hours, please do so now, as over 250 new predictions have been added:

As the book is about to be released, I wanted to let you know what is going to happen on the site the next few days.

As of just under an hour ago, I closed the submission of new predictions. Voting on existing predictions is still open, though. I encourage you to go back to http://potterpredictions.com/ soon and vote on the predictions that have been approved since you last visited the site.

Voting will be closed some time between Thursday 11pm EDT (GMT-4) and Friday 9am EDT so the next 24 hours or so will be your last chance to record your votes.

At some point after the weekend, results will start being published. You’ll want to avoid the site from Friday night until you’ve finished reading the book Given that it might be controversial whether some predictions came to pass or not, we’ll probably poll members for their opinion in ambiguous cases.

I hope you’ve had as much fun using the site as we had building it.
And, of course, I hope you enjoy the book!

James

James has been adding features to the site almost daily. There are stats including sure things, fat chances, most obscure predictions, and my favorite, most controversial. Not to mention group and friend management, tags, and you can compare your choices with anyone else. You can compare your predictions to mine. At last count, there were 519 members, almost 400 predictions, and well over 40,000 votes! The site is beginning to slow a little as votes are being made at about 10 a second (rough wall clock estimate for 5min to account for django caching). About 250 predictions were added just today. Even though James claims to have closed the adding of predictions there seem to be another 20 new ones sense I started typing all this.

UPDATE:

No, I’m just approving ones submitted prior to closing. -James

WOW! I mean WOW! James Tauber has done it again, and no doubt I will be wasting enjoying my time on his latest site Potter Predictions. I love his cats or dogs site and reveling in the predictive Potterness. Of course it’s built on his Quisition framework written in Django. I added one prediction, and have a few others to add. I need to create a group and invite friends…. and to pick a name for the group before all the good ones are chosen. Gah, so much for working on my project tonight!

Once the book is released the stats will be closed and the results posted. I can’t wait… I soo want to know what people think. I need to e-mail the penny-arcade folks, tyco will go nuts for this!!!

[UPDATE: I got group Gryffindor!]

I consider myself to be extremely lucky. I have a wonderful family, friends and a fantastic job. It is the type of job I can’t wait to get to in the morning, and usually end up taking home as well. I work with some fantastic people on hard problems. I have worked on five speech recognition engines professionally, and played with two open source projects. The current engine is the cleanest, and most well engineered piece of code I have ever had the pleasure of working on (including CPython, and that says a lot!) No matter how good the code is, it is nothing without the people behind it. The researchers and developers are the hands down the best I have ever had the privilege to work with. Some of the people I am working with, I have been doing so for the past ten years. The nature of the work, technology, and the people it attracts, means that the core groups do not change much over time. It usually takes major events like the breakup of a company or large mergers for people to leave or move groups.

Why am I mentioning all this? Well for the third time in six years, I am not looking forward to work.

Last week we said goodbye to Fred Webber, as he is moving to New York where his wife will advance her career and he can spend more time with their children. I am sure his name will come up again in the future given some of the projects he is looking to work on; now that he doesn’t have all those pesky experiments to get done. Fred has been someone whom I see every day, eat lunch and solve the Guardian Crossword with. He is a fantastic researcher, a calm rational voice, and a practical engineer. Most importantly, he is a good friend. He will be sorely missed.

We have a ‘hit by a buss’ policy at work, which means that while some people have spheres of expertise, no one is irreplaceable. His knowledge and legacy remains intact. As such I have no ‘technical’ fears about the coming days. I also know that we will still be in contact, via the magic of the internet and shared interests. So why do I fear heading back in to the playtime I like to call work? It is a dread based on the hole left, where Fred once was. It is interesting how the physical presence of a person can leave an imprint on a place and influence our experience of those places. It’s not the pain of saying ‘goodbye’; it is the fear of not being able to say ‘hello’.

All the cool people are doing it, so here are all those silly quiz results I have taken in the past but have never had a blog to post the results on
(At least the ones I kept).

Which Programming Language are You?

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Well it finally happened. 30 Days of Spam (the limit in GMail), and I have surpassed 10,000 spam e-mails! And its a palindrome to boot (fellow Dragonites may realize why that is special). Currently this is just for one account on one site, so I would not be surprised if others have much larger spam counts, but it’s a milestone for me. I am celebrating by playing the Monty Python ‘Spam’ song on repeat while solving the palindrome problem as many ways I can in just 1 line of python (generators rock!)

[Then I will get back to that django sponsorship app thingie...]