Well I’m out here in Portland for the first day of OSCon. {Kimsal} and I arrived yesterday, arriving so early that we couldn’t check in for about an hour. Due to a goof up, we had to stay at an airport hotel the first night. Once we got situated we headed over to the convention center to pick up our registration materials and explored the facilities and surrounding areas. We also went to a Zend/MySQL party at the DoubleTree and ran into the president of Zend (who is good friends with our COO) and Cal Evans. Plus I ran into {Andrew} and his co-worker Dan who I had met at the last TriJUG.

The keynotes were pretty good. Tim got up on stage and gave his usual prognostications. Some guys from Intel put on a little show to announce the open sourcing of their new Threading Building Blocks abstraction layer. It actually sounds quite neat, but as it’s for C++ it might a while before we see the concepts they’re introducing in things like the JDK. An interesting Microsoft researcher gave a presentation on new conceptual ways to deal with parallelism (beyond the 30-year old concept of locks and condition variables) which I thought was very cool. His implementation is only implemented in Haskell, but again I could see the concepts eventually in the JDK. synchronized and waitFor are lame.

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Alright, well I’ve done it again. I started this tune over the weekend. I downloaded a new “refill” for my music software which contains new instruments or “patches.” One of them, what is both the stabby / pulsing bass and lead, really had me playing around and I ended up with this. At some point I decided to double up the lead and bass with the piano, then started cutting back and forth between them, and then eventually ended up with 4 distinct voices. It is also my first time using any sort of drum loop, which ended up being the ultra-light percussion running through the majority (not the boom-tick-tick, boom-boom-tick-tick).

I really like this one. I spent most of my time at work today listening to the near final mix. Somehow I’m still not tired of it, so that means it’s a winner! Enjoy it. And thanks to Stompp and eXode for all of their fantastic refills!! They’ve been continual sources of inspiration.

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I’ve been home bound lately, mostly because I got sick two weekends ago and am slowly recovering. I’m not entirely sure, but I have the sneaking suspicion that my chimney deconstruction (still not complete, but I’ve got eight feet cleared) had something to do with it — inhaling all that soot and dust on the first two days. Man, I hate being sick.

One of my projects that I could still manage, whilst sickly, was to start converting my old VHS tapes to DVDs. I bought a Sony machine to do it and once I’ve finished I will take it up to Delaware to start in on my parents massive collection. Paramount are the many tapes my dad made, and continues to make, especially around Christmas time; we have them all the way back to 1981! There is some truly fantastic stuff in there that would be tragic to lose to the forces of electromagnetic entropy. And let us not forget the video of my 2nd grade, directorial debut, performance of Cats!

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I’m a big fan of the show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. Every week I get to see Mike Rowe engaging in insanely dirty, greasy, messy activities that most of us never stop to think about. You can watch Mike get filthy doing jobs such as cleaning grease traps, processing human food waste, mining coal, emptying septic tanks, making charcoal, etc. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

So I’ve had my own dirty job over the past few days. I’ve been removing an old brick chimney/flue from inside the walls of my house. My house was built in the 1930 and, I’m almost certain, was initially heated by coal. To vent the coal smoke there is an old chimney that runs up the wall of the original kitchen (which has its own flue for what I presume was a wood stove). I believe this project qualifies as the dirtiest (corporally speaking) thing I’ve ever encountered or attempted. You cannot believe how dirty an 80 year old chimney is!

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So I just saw a testimonial video for this thing called WorkSpace and I’m impressed. The idea is to create a monthly-membership place for individuals to do their work. One of the banes of working from home, especially as an independent, is the lack of community. There is something nice about being surrounded by peers, or even just other smart professionals. The traditional solution is to sign a fairly lengthy and expensive lease and all the normal operating costs are yours to absorb. At WorkSpace they provide a cafe, internet, VOIP phones, meeting rooms, projectors, privacy booths, etc and it’s all available with just month-to-month commitments.

It just makes so much sense to me. Were I currently an independent contractor (and living in Vancouver), I would be all over this place. I bet we’ll start to see spaces like these in other cities, if they don’t already exist. Especially in the large and tech/trendy urban areas like SF, NY, & LA.

I can really see this becoming much more of the norm for all but the largest of companies (who might have enough people in an area to warrant paying for a dedicated space). But for everyone else, go to the nearest location of whatever national “work club” you’re company’s a member of. Improvements in multi-node teleconferencing could really make this feasible and nearly transparent.