The Monday of OSCon week is always fun. While the tutorials start, the regular crowd starts to shuffle in. I bumped into brian early in the morning and we hung out for a while and caught up on things. The network was a little wonky, so we hid in the press room where DNS was working. I wanted to sit in like a fly on the wall for Damian's Best Practices talk, but didn't want to move once I got settled. Fortunately, someone was writing up notes in SubEthaEdit, so I could keep track without being there. A lot of what Damian was talking about is the same material that I covered in my Maintainable Perl tutorial last year, with a very different spin and different depth. And Damian surely gave a better presentation than I did.
After the break, I wandered to see who was lingering in the halls, and I found Schwern talking to Ward Cunningham, and I joined in. We had a really interesting conversation about a whole bunch of things (like most conversations with Ward tend to wind up). We were chatting for a while and then it was lunchtime. Ward works for Microsoft now, and managed to get approval for attending the conference by getting comp'ed for watching the doors and keeping out the rif-raf. So when lunch time came, the three of us wandered down 1st Ave to a Bento place, and kept talking about whatever we were talking about before.
After lunch, I sat in on the first half of Damian's Presentation Aikido . The beginning was quite entertaining, with Nat introducing Larry, and Larry introducing Damian. Then Damian had to explain the meaning of Aikido, so he threw Larry, and Larry reciprocated by throwing Damian. The bulk of the talk felt like Damian taking Dominus' Presentation Judo (20-minute) talk and stretching it into 3 hours. At times, the presentation about making presentations got a little tedious, but in that I'm-not-the-target-audience kind of way. So I didn't sit in on the second half of Damian's presentation (wherein he talked about techniques for tweaking PowerPoint, which I loathe and avoid like the plague in the first place), so I went with Schwern, James, Arthur and Ron to the Mac store just over the bridge in a dodgy-feeling industrial park.
After the tutorials, I got a group together to visit Murata for dinner. Eventually, Brian Jepson, Andy Lester, Leland (the new kid from Chicago) wandered into the restaurant to find Larry, Gloria, chromatic, Allison and other friends and family taking over the middle of the restaurant. Thankfully, there was space in one of the tatami rooms, so we didn't really interfere with each other.
As usual, the evening ended with a gaggle of geeks in the lobby slurping up the wireless. Around 11pm PDT, I realized that my body thought it was 2am, and I needed to get some sleep to be fresh for my tutorial tomorrow.
Re:aikido geeking.
ziggy on 2004-07-28T04:26:08
It was first Damian punching Larry, and Larry helping Damian fall down. Then they did it in slow motion. Then they reversed roles, and did it in slower motion, to highlight the key points - help you keep going in one direction. It highlighted the point that Damian was trying to highlight, either "go with the flow" or something else that I have completely forgotten by now. But it was relevant at the time.Re:aikido geeking.
brev on 2004-07-28T10:13:43
Aikido flows, but it isn't "go with the flow". One interpretation of aiki can be "unite with the attack", in order to gain control over it.
It was probably tsuki kotegaeshi. The crucial move is when he first spins around to face almost the same way as the punch. (BTW, this is a very static, step-by-step demonstration. Normally it's all one motion).
