mangos

Sunday, I was visited by friends Sadelle and Ann from Vermont, who came to Toronto for the 9icb conference. Ann's work (middle-school) paid for their travel, all the better. We spent the evening Sunday catching up, talking gender theory, and so on. They are involved in so many cool things: they started a Gay / Straight Student Alliance which is now the largest in the state and they're part of Bennington Pride Coalition which is quite strong- (the group's first public event this year was in April, and they're hooked into the progressive religious community in Bennington as well). I'm sure there are other things that when I heard them I went "wow" but I'm afraid I don't remember them.

The theme of their visit was quite possibly "Mango." We went out to a chinese restaurant within walking distance (review to follow, for locals). One of the dishes we got was chicken with mango; surprisingly delicately flavoured (not one-dimensional mango or very sweet at all). It came with five large mango halves (thirds, more likely) with lots of good stuff piled on top with a mango sauce. Yum.

Sadelle and Ann brought two mangos from Kensington Market which we had yesterday morning with breakfast; a "Sweet Mango" and a regular mango for taste comparison. Mmm. Happy taste-buds. I liked both, and the sweet did have a different flavour (more intense, as well as more sweet).

In the morning, I had to leave my guests early because of an 8:30 meeting, so we had an hour of chitchat while I was becoming caffinated. Hopefully I didn't do to many dopey things. I remember trying to convince them to take leftovers with them, even though they were going to try and get sushi on the way (in Niagara Falls; I had even helped them plan that the night before. Duh.)

The visit was great, if too short. I keep thinking they should meet other friends of dan's and mine; at minimum, I'm trying to convince Sadelle to get herself an LJ-name so she can follow fine folks on my friends-list.

A funny moment; after settling in, they said, "Wow, you read Bitch Magazine? How cool." They started telling me they had discovered it about a year ago and I said, "Um, I know, dan and I told you about it last summer." Heh.

I got a few photos of them, with Rover, which I hope to post tonight.

There are other things I was going to post, but I'll do that tonight, since I've stretched my lunch break as it is. (elbie_at_trig and I went for mulligatawny and fried dumplings off-campus, and talked about graphic novels, assimilation in Canada vs. US, grad school, and the fact that he's now a truncle (a word I just coined; he doesn't expect to ever become a quadruncle, even though I think that makes a better word).

Web 2.0

I'm going to Chicago for a perl conference that starts Monday. This is the most geekish group I am involved with. In addition to many other things about YAPC that I enjoy, I like the opportunity to learn what all the alpha-geeks are up to these days. The conference flavour is not particuarly higher-ed, corporate, or trade-show. It's more like a smallish con, or a swap-meet trading in programming ideas. I always learn something interesting, and often something I can take and use at work immediately. But a lot of it is just plain fun. (For example YAPC was my first exposure to massive numbers of laptops with wifi, in '01 or so.)

This year's mailing-list and wiki have been gearing up for a few weeks, and people are starting to make their plans for hacking sessions, being tourists in Chicago and so on. (I've made plans for a less herd-oriented tourist experience; emaki , another friend Arguile, and I will be touring in a small group on Saturday and Sunday).

The conference planners are taking advantage of the stuff that seems to be called "Web 2.0" these days, including social-networking services, AJAX (which is less server-intensive web tools built with javascript and xml), and "mashups" between web tools. This makes sense; the organizers this year include a number of bloggers, a podcaster, and a part-time magazine-publisher.

Yesterday, they announced the "official tag of YAPC". I initially scoffed, thinking it overkill. Then I thought about what it would be used for; del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, perhaps technorati blog-searches, and google searches. So yes, it makes sense to standardize on a tag, and since most people will be bringing laptops, cameras, blogging, and maybe bookmarking whatever they discover at YAPC, it makes finding stuff in these web services much easier for those of us who come along a bit later.

This morning someone converted the official schedule to ical format, including abstracts. Someone else posted it to Google Calendar, which is pretty handy for me, though I'll probably use ical for the duration of the conference since there isn't a guarantee of network quality.

So what's the point? I suppose it all comes down to laziness. ;) And, hopefully, building on the work of others (and giving it out for others to do the same in an open-sourcy way).