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It was a Staff Infection.
Could also start with:
His walking stick made him ill…
Just came to me out of the blue while I was taking a shower.
In a few weeks, my good friend Damian is putting on a play he wrote and produced. I encourage you to checkout twintowersplay.com and go see it if you’re in the New York City area. I certainly will.
He needed some background music for a night club scene, specifically a bondage/BDSM club. His request was “German Techno”, which to Damian and me is a very specific sound that we discovered back in high school. He some really great mix CDs from Club Tresor in Berlin. I was more of a NYC techno fiend.
The main result of this Memorial Day weekend was my new track: Kink. Damian was looking for a harsh and dark sound, and I think I nailed it. It’s a banger and it gets a decent groove going for the last minute.
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I did it. Finally, after getting the itch about 5 (more like 10 really) years ago, I now have a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license. I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation‘s Basic Rider Course at Wake Tech over the weekend and had a blast. I am extremely tired and sore but very happy.
Successful completion of the class results in a waiver for the DMV’s skills test. So this morning I wen to the DMV and amazingly got the endorsement on my license in under thirty minutes. I just had to take the computerized knowledge test and get a new picture taken (which looks better too). So yay!
Today is the last day, and the keynotes were quite a bit more interesting than previous ones. First off was the CEO of Linden Labs, the creators of the amazing alternative world/economy/lives Second Life. It was cool to see the new tech coming to SL but I thought his points were rather vague and basically obvious. The founder of Wikimedia was next, talking mostly about how important it is that Wikia, an open source search technology, is to the world and how important it is that search and its data is “open.”
Simon Wardley was originally slated to give a speech about the open sourcing of Zimki, but as the owning company decided against OS, he gave a very witty and duck-oriented speech on why commoditization of infrastructure and IT is so important. I thought this was brilliant and not often said enough: every company spends way too many resources on solving the exact same issues (what he referred to as yak shaving), from networking and server processing power to email and file sharing. We should be pooling our resources into what is basically a grid. Nat Torkington, the conference chair, gave a cute set of keynotes on the psychologies of various open source conferences. And then James Larsson demonstrated some very novel and dangerous uses for older hardware, from an electrocuting monitor-based mousetrap to a leather fetishist’s version of Pong.
The keynotes today weren’t quite as crunchy. A open source guy from Microsoft did give me hope that MS has some people with a clue there. Steve Yegge from Google gave an interesting talk about the importance of branding, especially how it relates to open source projects and software. There was also a crazy Swedish guy who create the Pirate Party: a political party who’s main mission is massive copyright reform, in the sense of basically removing copyright. Another interesting talk was by an academic who was pointing out how biased we can be in our interactions with others. This was especially poignant with the open source crowd, which often tends to be opinionated, vocal, and active yet often assume that their neigh sayers are idiots, corporate stooges, or just plain evil.
