What struck me about the conference was the community feel.  This is easily up there with FISL and FOSDEM as one of the best conferences I’ve been to.  It was grass-roots organised, staffed by volunteers, and though it had some corporate sponsors, it didn’t feel corporate in any way.  There were (IIRC) 230 attendees, with two talks going on any given time over the 2 day weekend (with in-depth tutorials on Friday).  While this is a far cry from the thousands of people at OSCON and multitudes of talks going on at any given time… but IMHO, it was far far better.  Having only two talks at a time ensures that each talk has a good # of attendees (avoiding the OSCON scenario of talks with only 5 or 10 attendees which sucks).  OSDC.tw also really fostered more of a community feel; I saw people chatting and meeting new people, hanging out and discussing technology and having Q&A over tea-time.  Having the regularly scheduled tea-time breaks in one central area really fosters a nice sense of community as well.

In addition to my talk Sunday morning, I got to meet Tim and Bob of the Mozilla Taiwan Community, and went to lunch with clkao, gugod, obra, and a few other folks.  During the afternoon I had a discussion in IRC (#osdc.tw on Freenode) with some folks on ZFS, and ended up giving a lightning talk in conjunction with in2.  She gave some quick slides and introduced ZFS in Chinese, and I followed up with a rapid-fire 5 minute demo (managed to throw up a Virtualbox install of OpenSolaris (snv_101b) quickly) of snapshots, cloning, rollbacks, sends and receives.  My demo was particularly well-illustrated when I accidentally rm -rf’d an SVN directory before snapshotting. 

I also saw Rasmus’s talk on PHP performance and scaling… his example of profiling and optimising Laconica was particularly interesting given our use of Laconica for Songbird’s murmuration project.  But the best talk of the day, by far, was Yusuke Kawasaki’s talk on JSAR (Javascript Augmented Reality).  I can’t even begin to describe his demo of Air Xiaolongbao and Air Pudding, but it was very akin to his hilarious Air Yakiniku video on YouTube.

After the conference we had a great speaker dinner… I can’t think of any other conference where every speaker could get together afterwards and have a big dinner.  I got to chat some more with obra, xdite and met Paul Bakaus (the undisputed and renowned jQuery UI world expert ).

I’m really hoping I’ll be able to attend OSDC.tw 2010 next year, and I’d certainly encourage anyone organising conferences to pursue this sort of community grass-roots feel.  It was a far far cry from the huge corporate conference feel, and if anything felt more like a huge user-group get-together.

Update: Photos from Yusuke’s talk here, and photos from dinner here

We’d been reading a lot about the Balkans and the history of the region (skimming most of the stuff pre-WW1) trying to understand the tensions and conflicts that have plagued the area.  It was definitely a little chaotic to track all the different parties involved, and we ended up sitting down one night in the hotel bar with some drinks, pads of paper, Wendy’s Kindle & my iPhone with various Wikipedia pages loaded (such geeks, I know).   We mapped out the parties involved, the wars fought, and generally tried to simplify things into “good guys” vs. “bad guys”.

Of course, this dramatically over-simplifies things, but we were really trying to just distill things down as much as possible.  One of the things that jumps out at you when you do this exercise is that things aren’t so clear cut as the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys”.  There is perspective obviously (e.g. how the Albanian Kosovars saw NATO vs. how the Serbs saw NATO), and the vicious cycle of revenge and what everybody calls justice.  I’ve spent my whole life in the West (England and the US), so justice to me is pretty clear and absolute.  But justice in the Balkans takes on shades of grey tinged with the red of revenge for war crimes committed by pretty much every side involved.

Given that my only previous background to the area was more or less the news media coverage we got here in the US in the 90s, my initial naive impression was that NATO (and thus, by extension, everyone NATO was “defending”) were the good guys, and that the Serbs (e.g. anyone led by Milosevic) were the bad guys.  Reading the accounts, going through the quite thorough Wikipedia articles, and actually talking to folks present that lived through the wars has dramatically changed that for me.

Wendy and I had dinner one night at Restaurant Europe in the Budva Old Town.  Since it was still low season we had the entire restaurant to ourselves for the whole night, and we conversed quite a bit with the manager, Dragoslav, (who we ended up inviting to sit down and have a drink with us).  (As a random side note, apparently the owner of the restaurant is Dragan Stojković (a.k.a. Piksi or Pixie), the former Serbian national footballer!)  He is Serbian, from Belgrade, but living in Montenegro to run the restaurant.  Getting his perspective of the war was really interesting.  I was initially timid, but perhaps the bottle of Montenegrin Sauvignon-blanc loosened me up, but eventually I asked him what his opinion of Milosevic was, and gave him the impression we all get in the west of a genocidal war-criminal.

This was the first time I’d ever talked to someone directly face-to-face who, without any hesitation, proclaimed Milosevic a hero and a patriot to the Serbian people for trying to hold on to some sense of Serbian identity and pride (prior to my reading and our trip, I had no idea Kosovo holds a special place in Serbian history as a legendary battleground for them… it’s akin to an American Gettysburg, or Scottish Falkirk).

Having now left, I’m still reading my last book on the region and still fascinated by the tensions that I can see still exist in the general populace there. Across the regions we visited, I saw desire to not be involved in any more conflicts, and to move on with life and build up some semblance of a tourist industry – but at the same time, I didn’t necessarily see a desire to forgive and forget. The people we talked to seem to still have the strong national pride, and the museums we visited (including the memorial in Dubrovnik to the soldiers and civilians killed in the shelling of Dubrovnik from Montenegro) still very much evoked a “look at how we were wronged” attitude.

I really really hope that the region can heal… it’s an immensely beautiful land.  Honestly, it’s one of the most beautiful areas I’ve ever visited.  The bay towns of Dubrovnik, Kotor, and Budva will be huge tourist draws (Dubrovnik already is, Kotor and Budva less so… at least internationally).  They are beautiful medieval-era cities with a ton of history, with friendly people, fantastic food, and just overall are incredible towns to explore.  I’d encourage anyone reading this to travel there soon.  While we were in Kotor we came across two EU Election Observers (there to observe the parliamentary elections to ensure fair elections, a requirement for EU admission), and I can honestly say that was the first time I’d talked to someone in the past 8 years who was genuinely excited to see an American tourist. 

If you try to reach me by email and I’m slow to respond, I apologise… but I’ll get back to you soon.

Random travel review (and we haven’t even left yet!)… I’ve always liked flying Eva Air, but their new travel tips email they send out the day before your flight is awesome. It includes your finalised schedule (in case the exact flight times have changed), contact info for Eva Air in all the various countries you’re visiting on that itinerary, as well as the closest travel offices to the cities you’re staying in, airport information including lounge information/location for the airports you’ll be transiting through, and weather for the various cities you’re visiting. The absolute best part though is that they include pictures/icons and voltage information for the electrical grids in each cities. Amazingly handy little email.

On Friday, we ran 5 miles in the Mt. Shasta 4th of July Fun Run. Jaime and I kept pace with each other and came in at 51 minutes (10:12/mile). I’ve no idea whether that’s a good pace or not (Zac came in at 38 minutes, so I suspect not ) but that was the first time I’ve ever done a timed race past P.E. class in high school, so I was pretty happy. That was also the first time I’ve run any distance more than a mile or two, and I felt it…

The rest of Friday was spent stretching groaning calves and quads.

A sane person probably would have taken Saturday off to rest and recover. Instead, we chose to hike 2 miles in (with a 1200 foot elevation gain) in Castle Crags State Park to the base of Six Toe Rock, where we climbed Six Toe Crack, an absolutely gorgeous 5.7-5.8 3 pitch crack. The weather was beautiful… sunny (but the route was in the shade) with a cool breeze. The first pitch had a tough start, and a tough second crack – but was definitely doable and within the 5.7/5.8 rating. The second pitch was where things got tough. I took my longest trad leaderfall yet, falling about 20 feet. I placed a #7 Trango Flexcam, got about 5 feet above it, and was stuck in an off-width 5.9 shoulder jam. I worked it for a minute or two, thought I was making progress and ended up pitching off, and falling my total 20 feet.

It was strange, it happened so quickly – I don’t even remember the fall. All I recall is my left hand losing grip, me pitching backwards, screaming (yes – my first scream of my climbing career too… this weekend was full of firsts), and coming to a stop looking down at the sky and my feet. Yup, I’d managed to completely invert myself. I righted myself, took a few seconds to catch my breath (some combination of the fall and the harness tightening had knocked the wind out of me), and checked myself out for injuries. I ended up hitting my left calf against an outcropping getting some road rash (all superficial, so it should heal fine – though showers will be a bitch for the next few days), and getting a nasty nasty rope burn on my right bicep (which strangely doesn’t hurt – but is making for a real pretty bruise).

Anyway, I took a 5.7 variation off to the right hand side after that, finished the pitch and brought Jaime & Zac up. After some route-finding (the guidebook was vague as to the finish for this climb), we ended up on the summit, rewarded with a fairly large summit top, and a gorgeous 360 degree view of the rest of Castle Crags, and Mt. Shasta in the distance.

This was definitely the most challenging lead of my life so far… this whole day I’ve been thinking “What if that #7 cam hadn’t held?” I would have ended up pitching down about 40 feet – almost certainly injuring myself seriously. I’m thankful I sank that cam, and I’m really thankful it held. Taking a leaderfall occasionally is a good reminder not to get lazy and run things out unnecessarily.

Some thoughts and notes for anyone looking to climb this rock: The guidebook is good, but gives no sense of scale. I went in thinking this would be like Castle Rock in Saratoga… a meandering trail with rocks scattered here and there to climb. WRONG. The hike isn’t easy (though the trail is fantastic), and the rocks are MASSIVE. Purportedly there is a 8 pitch 1000′ climb (which I’m dying to do next time I can get up there). The rock quality is great (not as good as Tuolumne/Yosemite, but definitely better than the sandstone we get here in the Bay Area). I highly recommend Six Toe Crack – it’s one of the most beautiful cracks I’ve done, and is a great rewarding climb with solid anchors. (3 pitches, the first belay station is 2 old bolts backed up with a new bolt, new chains, and new webbing. Second belay station is a solid outcropping/flake slung with at least 6 pieces of webbing and rap rings. Contrary to what the guidebook says, the summit is topped with one old sketchy bolt (the one it says to rap off of), with two brand new bolts and two shiny shiny chains). We ended up rapping the three pitches back down the crack instead of doing the sketchy looking descent gully.

this is somewhat problematic since i need it to go to london this weekend. hrm.

“Do you know where WuFenPu (a shopping market) is?”

be accidentally mis-pronounced as:

“Do you know where I farted?”

Answer: Chinese

And, for what it’s worth, the response from the girl I asked it to was as you would expect.

sigh. Never underestimate my ability to make a fool of myself in any country, in any language, at any time.

…

…

deep and provocative, i know.

i’m pretty exhausted; we’d had a busy week of packing up the kitchen and living room in preparation for our kitchen remodel and (minor) living room remodel (we’re adding recessed lights to the living room and doing some drywall repair on one wall). we got our marriage license yesterday (the county of Alameda apparently sees no reason why Wendy and I should not be wed – though they did for some reason insist on putting “England” as my place of birth instead of “United Kingdom” because (and I quote literally): “people might abbreviate United Kingdom as UK, and UK is not a state in the US.”)

we’ve packed up our bags (mostly) for our honeymoon, practiced our first dance enough times that we’re now sick of it, and i’ve been working on my vows, while checking the weather report for Saturday about every hour or so.

okay, i’m heading out. it’s off to my rehearsal. this will be the last time i leave my house as a bachelor. the next time i come back, i’ll be married. weird.

but anyway, i digress.

i’m swamped, bogged, marshed, whatever…

the SCM Migration Project is predictably going slower than we planned. on the plus side, i’m seeing lots of interest from other engineers – but we haven’t been getting the internal resources we’d hoped for, so for now it’s primarily me, richlowe, and kupfer plowing ahead. we’ve picked up a couple guys from ERI that should help.

of course, the other major thing on my plate at the moment is my very-very-upcoming wedding (18 days!!!), so my days are oft filled with wedding errands and such.

so of course, with all this stuff going on in our lives… wendy and i thought it would be best to …. remodel our kitchen. a combination of a decent tax refund, and the realisation that the one-month estimate to remodel our kitchen (during which our house would be a disaster) coincided nicely with the one month of time we would be taking for our honeymoon and vacation. so now we’re rushing about trying to secure contractors, and get permits in the two weeks before we leave.

i feel like our lives our pure chaos right now. on the one hand, it’s hectic, crazy, and i’m getting crappy anxiety-ridden nights of sleep. but on the other hand, i’m really starting to appreciate the small quiet moments… like the 8 minutes i took after the electrician left today during which i just laid out on the sofa/futon with one beagle slumped across my feet and the other splayed out next to me resting her head on my chest. within 45 seconds, both were snoring. those 7 minutes and 15 seconds of blissful peace (i won’t say quiet, since they were filled with the snores of two hound dogs) and doing nothing but vegging felt great.

erik: you threw an awesome bachelor party. it was everything i thought it’d be…. 3 days of kick-ass powder. it was great to just be able to ride hard non-stop and then crash in the hot tub and chow down afterwards.

thanks again everyone for coming – i had a blast…. the riding was great, the snow was amazing, the food was heavenly (from the goat cheese ravioli…mmmm…droool…. even to the corn dogs), the drink was plentiful, and the company was brilliant.

even if i did “crap my pants”

cheers, steve da pimp

(thanks for taking the photos dan!)

not only do i believe in it…. i was just there.

heaven (or at least something akin to it) is flying down a double-black on your brand new snowboard crashing through fresh untracked fluffy light powder…. and then doing it again…. and again….. and again. repeat for 3 days straight… toss in a great dinner, great friends, and a ridiculous amount of eggs, corn dogs, beer, and a bottle of Laphroig – and you have the recipe for an awesome bachelor party.