Chasing Nuts

Six years in a row now I have spend one Sunday more tired them most any other.   This is the Sunday night after Penguicon and this year was no exception to the rule.   Penguicon 6.0 has now come to a close and my head is swimming with all the great memories of this weekend.  First I have to say that the Tech guests of honors totally rocked.  All the guests of honor and nifty guests totally rocked the Penguicon house and I am thankful they agreed to take time out of their busy schedules to come. 

A few highlight from this weekend was the weather, the people, and Giant Singing Tesla Coils.  There have been Penguicons where a blizzard has dumped inches of snow during the event; this year we had plenty of great spring weather.  What I like most about Penguicon is the chance to meet and talk with exciting people.  As an organizer I am fortunate to have Thursday night and often times Sunday night to interact with the guests on a bit more personal level.  This year was no exception and the food and company for my Thursday and Sunday dinner was terrific.  This year at Penguicon we introduced a new guest type, Hack of Honor.  The inaugural Hack of Honor was no other then the Giant Singing Tesla Coils.  I really did not know what to expect but I can say that any expectation I had was completely blown away!  The amazing spring weather with the beautiful lighting and fun music was one of the most interesting experiences I have ever had.  The music was a selection of video game music, popular tunes and a bit if classical.  If you ever get a chance to see the Giant Singing Tesla Coils in person I would not miss it for anything. 

I am very tired after the weekend and will write more about the weekend in the coming week. 

Penguicon is only a short week away and I have already started packing.  It seems the closer the convention the more stuff I manage to bring.  It does not help that I have always brought much of the AV equipment needs for the last five Penguicons.

If you are reading this and have some time this Friday I am looking for volunteers to help load the AV into the truck and then unload it at the hotel.  The plan is to meet in the Hotel Lobby at noon on Friday there I will pass out directions to the warehouse about four miles away where we need to load the truck.  Once we loaded the truck we will head back to the hotel where we will unload the truck and get the equipment staged to go into each room at 3pm. 

My laptop screen has never looked so interesting and it is all from a little water. I have a backpack that I have had for years that I keep my laptop in. I also have the backpack loaded with miscellaneous other item, you know usually backpack stuff: papers pens and, most days, my water bottle.

The water bottle is where things went all wrong yesterday. I filled it up as usual in the morning and tossed it into my backpack. When I arrived at today’s work location, I opened the backpack up and was a tad surprised to see an empty water bottle. I remember thinking to myself: hmmm I thought I filled that. Not yet alarmed, I went to grab my laptop and this is when the horror struck me. I pulled my laptop out of my to have it draining water all over the floor. I look into the bottom of the backpack and see that there was over 2 inches of water in the bottom. I was suddenly impressed with Eddie Bauer Backpacks. This one is over 10 years old, and with a half liter of water in it, the backpack was nearly completely water-tight. I took the backpack over to the sink and poured out all the water. I wiped it out and it has never been cleaner.

I run back to the laptop which is still dripping and pop the battery out, but to be honest I had written the system off at that point. It was still dripping and it sat hard drive-end in the water for at least 10 minutes. I started wiping the laptop down, opening every cover and ejecting the battery and drives. The hard drive was soaked, and I thought there was no way this thing would ever work again. I let everything dry out for 12 hours and put it back together and crossed my finger. I was shocked! The system booted up and the only problem as a resulting of its bathing is a funny pattern on my screen.

I am grateful that the laptop is working because with Penguicon only a week away I do not have time to operate with a broken laptop. I would guess that the patern is from water stuck in the screen and that it will dry out better with time.

It is only Wednesday and it sure has been an exciting week for me.  I am going to be speaking at two great Tech events about PostgreSQL.  My friends over at e-Mol are lining up eager customers for their amazing product. Lastly, I just had an interview with a really great company that went very well.
I have been evangelizing about PostgreSQL every chance I have for years.  Mostly I spend my energy evangelizing locally, local LUG or MUG meetings and of course Penguicon.  From time to time I get the wonderful opportunity to speak about PostgreSQL  at a tech event more than a simple car drive away.  I recently found out that I am traveling and speaking at TWO great Tech events!  First I will be speaking at PGCon 2008 coming this May 22-23 at University of Ottawa.  Next I will be flying the other side of the continent and presenting at OSCON 2008 happening July 21-25 in Portland Oregon.  It will be my first time to a PostgreSQL only event and I am looking forward to learning lots from the other people there.  I will be presenting at OSCON for my second time and there too I will be sucking up information and knowledge like a sponge.
At both events my presentation will be “This is your PostgreSQL on drugs”.

PostgreSQL is known to be a powerful open source relational database with many uses. One such use is warehousing EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) from oncology practices across the country. PostgreSQL, Perl, Apache, Ubuntu Linux and OpenBSD are all used for their strengths to deliver information to pharmaceutical companies to see what their drugs are doing for individuals in real world scenarios. Do you have a large amount of data that needs to be searchable, aggregated and extremely secure at the same time? See many of the creative solutions that have been deployed to help facilitate how we put PostgreSQL to the task of drugs.

The talk is mainly about what my genius friend Brian has been building, with a bit of help from yours truly, for the last year: a simple way to manage and data mine medical records for HUGE numbers of people.  The end goal is to make healthcare better for everyone and the best part is that this week he has two large customers clamoring to work with him!
If all that was not enough to make excited I just finished an interview that went very well.  I have to say that I am not a huge fan of formal interviews.  You know the ones, where they ask you to explain a time when you worked in a group and there was a conflict and you helped resolve it.  My interview today was with people high up but was more of a conversation.  They asked some questions, we talked about some things and then I asked some questions.  I feel it went well and I think I will be seeing them again the next round of speaking with the company.

With all that has been going well I think it is time to run out and buy a lotto ticket.