Seek Nuance

Rick Harding of Lococast.net and Mike Pirnat from the From Python Import Podcast interviewed me about my PyCon 2011 bus trip. Listen to it here.

A live blog of the day..

1611: That’s all, folks! Will now figure out what to do before leaving to return home tomorrow. And I have some ideas for how to spend my time on the bus; I need to flesh those out.

1430: Lightning talks and closing remarks.

1340: Hidden Treasures in the Standard Library. A clever trick for serializing arbitrary objects and classes in JSON. Good logging tips.

1310: Scaling Python past 100. Meh.

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A live blog of the day.

1745: Lightning talks.

1645: How to kill a patent with Python. A talk directly relevant to my IP Street work. He claims that a patent’s abstract and background are the most relevant for domain searches. He developed display graphs very similar to a couple of IP Street’s lenses.

1545: Handling ridiculous amounts of data with probabilistic data structures. C. Titus Brown is smart && a great speaker.

1445: Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ. Don’t use this on the Internet. Less than my expectations.

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A live blog of the day.

1750: Back in my hotel room. Going to get dinner in the hotel, then decide what to do. Might chill early — must pace myself…

1722: End of the formal sessions. Now there are lightning talks, BOF sessions, and I’m wondering how long keep going before calling it a day.

1645: How to write obfuscated python.

1520: Extreme Network Programming with Python and Linux. Very dry, very interesting. It may be because of the time of day, but I had difficulty absorbing this talk.

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A liveblog of the day.

1316: Documenting Your Project with Sphinx. I could read the docs, but I like being spoon fed.

This tutorial’s a little more basic than what I was looking for. Still useful, though.

0828: Warming up the matter/anti-matter warp cores. Settled in for Python/Django Deployment Workshop. JKM is presenting, and he’s always been a good & entertaining speaker.

VMs may be obviating package isolation technology. Hrm.

A liveblog of the day…

13:12: Getting set for Advanced Python II. Unicode, the broccoli of my world.

0845: Settled in for Advanced Python I. Minor network glitch when I forgot to disable my static IP address, which our home network backups need.

Wow this talk was excellent.

This year I’m monitoring only the Twitter back channel. I mourn IRC’s slow passing from the scene.

It’s been interesting.

• The busses got nicer the closer i got to Atlanta. From Minneapolis on, they were the new Greyhound busses with 110 V power and wi-fi.
• My fellow passengers were ruder the closer I got to Atlanta. And more slovenly.
• A shallower slope, but the drivers’ quickness to irritability increased the more I traveled eastward.

Outside of Louisville, one of my company’s systems got hung. I was on a bus on I-65, working on a VM in a Chicago colo facility, for my Seattle employer. It was neither seamless nor without occasional setbacks, but it was a fascinating situation.

Tonight I check in, shower, eat a sit-down meal, and prep for the first Tutorial day.

Tonight, I leave for the bus station, to travel for 2+ days by bus for a week of PyCon 2011 in Atlanta.

I’ll liveblog and tweet (using the #pycon hashtag) my bus ride through America’s heartland, and then from the conference.

“Kathy,” I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw
I’ve come to look for America“

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, “Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera”

–Simon And Garfunkel, “America“

I expect to gravitate toward talks about optimization and performance analysis; scaling; and deployment techniques.

I’m going to use AT&T tethering while I’m traveling to & from PyCon 2011. CLEAR/Clearwire could have gotten my business, but their service has been so terrible at home. They lose!

I intensely dislike how airline travel is conducted in the US. The TSA’s procedures and behaviour, add-on fees, in-flight comfort minimization… Bah.

In getting to & from PyCon 2011, I’ve decided to try traveling by Greyhound Bus.

Seattle to Atlanta round trip is $245, and 2.5 days each way. That’s about $100 cheaper, two more days each way, and 90% less of a degrading experience than traveling by air.

I’ve never travelled overnight by bus. I’m treating this as an interesting experiment. Will it be relaxing, interesting, and fascinating — or boring, claustrophobic, and tiring? Whatever it will be, I won’t have to take off my shoes and belt and be irradiated by airport non-security.

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PyCon registration is right around the corner.

C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon.