n8 foo

ApacheCon 2004 in Vegas was definatly a good convention. Technically it was great, the speakers were good, the people were brainy, the partying was hard core and the demolitions were huge! Tracy came out to stay with me for the first 2 days of the confrence so there was a little bonus there too.

So, a few cool things. Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher of StarTrek and child star in "Stand By Me") was the keynote. He has been keeping a blog for years, and is one of the few (only?) celebrities to do so. This makes him mega cool in my book. I always identified with his character on the series (imagine that) and so naturally I thought he *must* be cool. Reading his blog, you realize he's a normal guy like you and me, and he's also a geek! I got to meet him, shake his hand, had a small chat, bought his book and got him to sign it. What a neat guy. The thing that I found intriguing was his keynote. He started off by telling us all he was scared to death to be up in front of all us geeks. A humble celebrity, rad. As he got into telling how the internet and software from Apache.org changed his life for the better, etc, etc (go read his book), he was dropping well placed, obscure and relevant jokes that I found to be quite funny. But most of the geeks in the audience weren't laughing...meanwhile I was giggling away. When I talked to him again later I mentioned this and he told me "I subscribe to the MST3K school of thought...if 5% of the audience laughs I've done my job". I just really like this guy. I felt like kind of a dweeb getting all nervous and telling him I thought he was so cool, etc. I mentioned the implosion, to which he got real excited. I hope he got to see it.

Implosion!? Yes, they blew up the Desert Inn while we were there. Damn, it was cool. We waited around till 2:30 am on Tuesday night just to see it, but it was worth it. While we waited on a sidewalk corner less than a block a way, a friggin jerk semi-truck driver cut the corner and drove over about 3 feet of the curb. He nearly crushed a reporter's camera and tripod and nearly took off this poor girls head with a ladder hanging off the side. The cops didn't even care! But who cares bout that...BOOM! The blast scared us...they gave little warning, just a policeman saying "you have one minute". He was off by 10 seconds. I got some pretty poor shots and a very lousy video. But I got some neat shots of the dust cloud! It shook the ground and thumped our chests. Way cool!

The rest of the trip was mostly doing some gambling in casino's and getting drinks. We stopped by the Las Vegas Hilton on the last night to do more gambling and get a nice dinner...Dan, Mark and I went to the Star Trek Experience. The Klingon Encounter was neat, a 3D ride in a shuttlecraft that feels very real...like the rides at Universal Studio. The Borg Invasion 4D was neat too...wore 3D glasses and got assimilated the chair jabs you in the ribs, it was creepy. They had some cool live action stuff...at one point a borg pulled one of the crew/actors thru the ceiling! It was neat! We went out later that night for some Japanese Steakhouse experiences at Beni Hana. The rest of the pics are here.

The only problem with the trip in my mind is that we had to get up at 6am to catch a flight back to SD on Thursday, and GO TO WORK. Blech. Maybe skip that next year.

This next week, Tracy and I travel to TN for some t-day fun. Should be a good time.

So, QC sent me to Las Vegas for ApacheCon 2004. 4 days of nerdy days and Vegas nights. But I nearly missed my 8:30am flight this morning...overslept by an hour, skipped shower and breakfast, had a security escort to the front of the line (keyword "I'll miss my flight" works wonders), ran thru the 1/2 the airport in my socks with my shoes in my hand, etc. But I made it. Whew.

This pic is me in the Hackathon. More to come later, gotta go get Tracy from the airport.

The pic to the right is at The Office in Cardiff Saturday night. We were celebrating Will's birthday.

Tracy and I have been fighting a cold for a week now. It's kind of disheartening to look at a calendar and know it's been a week. Jeeez.

Got a new radio. Trying to get back into the amateur radio hobby. I loved it when I was younger but computers and cell phones kind of squashed it. It isn't amazing anymore to be able to make a duplex phone call for free. But it is amazing to hold a tiny radio in your hand, dial a few codes and talk to someone out in the stix in Australia as if they were 15 feet away with a radio. For free. And to bounce signals off the moon to get around line of sight radio propagation limitations. There are a lot of cool things that the amateur radio license has enabled me to do in the last 10 years, figure it's time to get back into it. Maybe even learn morse code. Who knows.

Halloween came and went with not much fuss. I was all set to go to the Brotherhood party, but it was a week *before* halloween and neither Tracy or I had much motivation to get costumes ready by then. So our tickets became donations to the party cause. When Halloween came, I had all these aspirations of making my house scary and dressing up to give out candy...but Tracy had to work so I was home alone to hand it out. I opened the door and waited but got very few doorbell rings. Turns out that unlike when I was a kid, parents hover over the kids and don't let them go to a house that doesn't have big bright lights. And my flood lights are automatic...the kids never came close, they never came on. When I finally figured this out and flipped them manually on, it was too late. Oh well. Maybe next year. Met some of the neighbors and gave them those HUGE snickers bars that I bought from Costco. That was a hit. Watched the Charlie Brown special, that's always a treat, and makes me feel like a little kid again. I need to get all those short holiday films on DVD.

It's been cold lately and I finally figured out how to light the pilot on my heater. Man, that was cool. My first gas furnace. It's neat watching it flip on. I even took pics! And boy did that heat feel good after a week of freezing my a55 off.

Not much else has happened in the last week or so. It's been continuing to rain. I've cleaned my pool a lot, but haven't added any water in almost a month. And it's still nearly overflowing. Also haven't washed my car in a while either. D-oh. I wish it would clear up and get warm!