My latest project to-do list
After I posted this this first time, I thought of a bunch of other things I have to do post-OSCON, and I've had to modify items from the first list.
Every year at OSCON I come home with a head full of ideas, and better yet, a huge list of new things to work on. Since the book is now done, and OSCON is now over, there's a chance I could work on them.
- Ack plug-ins
- I've been wanting to have plug-ins for ack for at least a year now, and I've connected with a number of people like Randy J. Ray who are on board to help me out. First task: Move it on over to github.
- Coverity scans for Parrot
- Met with David Maxwell of Coverity and he fired up the Coverity bot for Parrot, and now I have new niggling bugs to pick at. Plus, Parrot needs dependency building on the C files.
- PR work for first big release of Rakudo
- There will be the first major release of Rakudo in spring 2010, and I got some plans going with Patrick Michaud to figure how we were going to build up buzz for that. I also have the notes from Damian's Perl 6 talk which are a fantastic summary of Perl 6's cool new features.
- Human Creativity
- Julian Cash has been having Jos Boumans do all his Perl work for the Human Creativity project, but I offered up my services to do whatever he wants. Turns out the Julian is also working with Devin Crain, who I've known for years in an entirely non-geeek context.
- Hiring horror stories
- Got some great response to my talk on job interviewing, and as always the stories resound the most. I talked to a few people afterwards who said they'd give me some horror stories I can run on The Working Geek as instructive examples of how not to do things, and why they're so awful.
- Play with R
- I got a book on R from REvolution Computing that seems like a good introduction. Then I ran into Paul Huff at SJC and he gave me a crash course in graphing my book sales and Amazon ranking. Maybe I'll do some statistical coolness at work.
- Play with NY Times' open APIs
- Speaking of coolness at work, I've got some ideas on how to use the open API data for the NYT's best seller lists at my day job.
- Text::Textile needs a CLI tool
- My slides for Just Enough C are in Textile, and Brad Choate reminded me that we wanted to do a textile command-line tool in the package as a front-end to the module.
- Anti-spam and Drupal updates for rakudo.org
- rakudo.org is running straight Drupal, and we get a bunch of spam every so often. I meant to talk some Drupal folks out in SJC, but never did.
For those of you leaving OSCON, what tasks did you just assign yourself in the past week?
Small steps: reports from 
BlackBook 
The versatility of the techniques makes pickling well-suited for experimentation. Taste your brine or the amount of salt as you’re going along, so that you can gauge somewhat immediately whether or not your pickling will be successful. From the beginning, the pickling solution should taste powerful but balanced in terms of sour, sweet, and salty. Experiment with different types of vinegars to see what you like. For Asian pickling methods, I prefer to use rice vinegar, which is subtle but suggestive. Sometimes, I will add some apple cider, red wine, or sherry vinegar to the mix if I’m so inclined. A pot filled with water, or a heavy tin of canned food, makes a good weight to press the vegetables into the brine.
“Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day…. It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones.” Tom Shone looks at what happens when 
In his recent Under the Knife report for 
I have fervently wished for a desktop client to work with 
Alain jumped. The open little jar of Maille cornichons that he always had sent from France spit juice onto his t-shirt. And for the first time, I noticed that he was frightened of me. That he had a kind face, and large ears, and a charming, honest smile. That he had stayed with Maman, when I had moved away. And that he had left everything he knew, from Maille cornichons to his antique car collection to his country, to be with her.
After 
Maybe I’m just drinking the 
Apple quietly today introduced a new 2TB 
On the heels of 
Last night, 
Google 
In his latest essay, Paul Graham describes the difference between what he calls 
email
digg
delicious
Times are of course tough all over, and the newspaper industry has it harder than most, so I suppose one should simply acknowledge that trusted brands will be forced to engage in previously inconceivable practices out of sheer hope for survival. Still, this New York Times gallery of 
It is truly a testament to this nation’s inability to focus on anything lacking a celebrity component that the quotidian story of a black man arrested for being surly in his own home continues to get major coverage well over a week after the initial event. As the President prepares to host Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police officer who collared him at a White House summit meeting, the press is asking the important question: 
inspired and motivated me, especially early on when he was a big supporter of the blog; and I hate to think he may no longer be covering the Mets. I hope he is savvy enough to use this and spring boards himself in to a being a columnist, where I think he would be more influential than he is.
because they had one of their own attacked.
Now, the only real rule in supper club is that whatever the dish you bring; you must have never made that recipe before. (Four of us are ex-bakers/pastry chefs and the remaining member is a wonderful, but frustrated home cook with a family of picky eaters.) This allows us all to try new foods, expand our cooking skills and get out of our cooking ruts. I (Lisa B. this week) had wanted to roast a whole pig for the longest time and since I had never done so, this made it a great candidate for a supper club event. I really did seriously consider digging a pit in the back yard, but a friend of one of our members (Thank you, Kevin!), graciously offered the use of his Caja China, a wonderfully clever contraption that efficiently roasts a whole pig in roughly 5 ½ hours! (Find more info on the device as well as recipes and cooking instructions at the 
I was curious about how I’d react to dealing with the entire animal. I mean, I’ve done a whole goose before, a whole fish, tongue and organ meats, but a pig is roughly the size and shape of my dog. But, since I do dearly love pork, I thought that at least once in my lifetime I should encounter it the primal form. The report: I was not horrified or grossed out by having Mr. Pig looking back at me. I did have a distinct sense of gratitude, fondness even, and really wanted to do right by him and make his passage a worthwhile celebration. I think our dinner guests shared those feelings.
Mr. Pig was presented with great fanfare including sparklers I’d saved for the occasion. He was delicious! The meat literally fell from the bone it was so tender. The guests ate and ate, about half the pig was gratefully consumed that evening along with an enormous variety of wonderful appetizers, sides, home brewed beer, wonderful cocktails and desserts. At the end of the evening, when it was time to put away the food, the remnants of Mr. Pig filled 3 half sheet pans.
I remember the exact moment I heard Obama utter those words. It was as though someone had played a horrible chord. While the statement was the closest he apparently went to expressing any sort of a feeling about the Gates incident, I immediately knew it wouldn’t go down well at the police station. As most certainly know by now, they didn’t, and Obama had to subsequently retract them. “I could’ve calibrated those words differently,” he said, right.
Yet, in the wake of Obama’s comments, Crowley, right, has received a phone call directly from the president, and accepted an invitation to the White House for a beer with Gates and the president, and invitation Gates has also accepted.
Part of it, certainly, is borne by long-time, frighteningly brutal associations between racism and the deep underclass—poor, uneducated white people; hillbillies, rednecks, and their ilk, right.
Of course, the supposition there is that the profound system of race is a conglomeration of accidental propositions—a whirlwind that went through a junkyard and formed a 747, right. However, I’d offer that any system that works well and precisely, coordinating richly over vast stretches of time and space, never does so “accidentally,” but with both planning and purpose.
…jezuz, please, guys, stop calling press conferences… good lord, quit it now, i’m begging you… 
What we’ve seen in companies that have been successful through the last year—so we’re excluding, say, the car companies and most of the media companies oh and real estate and physical goods, etc.—is they’ve both shed staff and, both independently and relatedly, increased their revenues. Interestingly, 
44 arrests and 
The way I see it, if the Mets want to pull off a miracle and win the Wild Card, they need to go roughly 45–20 during these final 65 games of the season.
In other words, in the mode of Lloyd Christmas, there is a chance, because if the Mets can win a bulk of these next 28 games, they will also be tacking on losses for the very teams they are chasing.
