I've safely landed to Brazil, ready for tomorrow's hackathon with fglock++. On Thursday cmarcelo++ will join us, so it'll be an excellent chance to get the new generations of Perl 5 and Haskell runtimes rolling again.
Another good news is that I've finally recovered a bit from rapidly shifting time zones, so I'll start retro-journaling about the U.S. part of this strange and wonderful journey.
However, the sad news is TimToady++ will not join the hackathoners as expected -- he was feeling a bit under the weather, and had to cancel the Brazil trip. :-/
As an unexpected consequence, I'm now charged, as the TimToady++ surrogate, to give the opening talk on Optimizing for Fun, which put me immediately into omg-I-have-no-slides-must-JIT mode.
Fortunately, geoffb++ had summarized the fun-for-Hackers side pretty well, and the fun-for-Users side is also well covered by kathysierra++ (Creating Passionate Users) and raphpkoster++ (The Theory of Fun); all I need to do is threading them under a metaphoric theme, as TimToady++ did in his previous State of the Onion talks, namely Evolution, Semiotics, Chemistry, Music, Perl 6 (ok, that one wasn't metaphoric), Scientific American, Impossible Objects, Screen Savers, Espionage, and Families.
As my mind was recently filled with São Paulo's beautiful restaurants, I decided to free-associate on Gastronomy. We'll see how far that'll take me in the next 48 hours...
Thank you very much for cherry picking (and linking) the State of the Onions.
Even when I have been disappointed with a State of the Onion speech (eg espionage/2005) it is only because of the high quality in evey sense of the word of the others.
The one on postmodernism (impossible objects) really hits a nerve/pushes a button for me because it was written after TimToady++ had suvived serious surgical complications and a 12-18 month convalescence during which he said "I will never take eating for granted again".
Thanks for all the links (and the other millions of things).
Posted by: thickas | 2006.11.03 at 10:04 AM