On our way across the country, Jason and I passed through and stopped at a number of interesting places. One of the states we drove through was Oklahoma, which I have fond memories of from when I was a youngster (okay, okay, it's because I fell in love with rattlesnake while I was there). Anyway, I took some photographs while passing through - here they are.
There's just something about wide-open spaces, especially deserts, that call to me. I don't know what it is or why, only that it feels like home. It's why I love visiting places like Oklahoma, Arizona …
A little over two weeks ago Sitwon, Haxwithaxe and I made the trek to Barcelona, Spain for the International Summit For Community Wireless Networks, partially because we thought that we might get some useful things out of it for Project Byzantium, but also because Project Byzantium had been invited to attend and present some of our work and ideas for the community at large at the conference. So, arrangements were made in due course, and our journey took us from Baltimore to Philadelphia for a layover, and then an eight hour transatlantic flight carried us to Spain. Sitwon was traveling …
I don't ordinarily do that, because I think there's a conflict of interests between writing in a personal blog and talking about things I get paid to do, but sometimes it can't be helped. The last couple of weeks have been spent preparing for a fairly major server migration (e-mail service for a couple of offices and a couple of dozen employees), which for once didn't involve significant hardware wrangling (though that's going on in other areas) but does take a fair amount of time (most of it spent writing documentation …
For man years I'd always looked somewhat askance at Terrence McKenna's talks about the year 2012, his hypothesis of time having a fractal nature, and Everything Changing in the year 2012 of the common era. That I've taken for myself the name of a certain British science fiction hero (and have a certain interest in Time) aside, it never seemed, well, plausible, to put not too fine a point on it. I even went so far as to ruminate about it a couple of years back to get it out of my system. Then, earlier this year I conceeded …
Project Byzantium will be presenting at FOSScon 2012 this upcoming Saturday. We'll be in Linode Hall at 3:20pm to present. We'll also have a box of CD-ROMs of Byzantium Linux v0.2a with us, so between 1:20pm and 2:10pm we'll be in Workshop #2... well.. giving a workshop on how to use Byzantium Linux. Bring your laptops, USB keys, and something to write on because we're going to be fleshing out the Hardware Compatibility List this weekend...
"This is our SUV, the Nebuchadnezzar. From it, we hack into the Matrix and broadcast our pirate signal."
That pretty much sums up our trip to CarolinaCon 8, held last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina.
CarolinaCon, now in its eighth year, is a small, intimate hacker con founded by people who believe that sharing information with one another is the best way to both learn and advance the state of the art. It's the sort of con where you will see a talk by someone who may have learned about public speaking from watching Jerry Seinfeld's …
Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and …
As you've no doubt guessed, the reasons for my radio silence have been many and multi-layered, and now things have calmed down a little. I've been scrambling with the rest of the development team to get Project Byzantium in such a state that it was ready to show off at ContactCon. ContactCon, held late last week, was an unconference dedicated to showcasing and networking the developers of next-generation communication technologies that was driven by the attendees presenting their work rather than gathering to listen to people speak on stage. Most of us who attended are working on technologies that are …
In an attempt to beat the snow predicted for the DC area sometime today, Lyssa and I left Pittsburgh late last night (0007 EST5EDT) and arrived in DC somewhen around 0430 EST5EDT. After unpacking the TARDIS we promptly passed out for the next six hours. It's been trying to snow off and on all day. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll see any of the snow they've been predicting.
We're home. We've been busy and traveling. We visited our respective families in Pennsylvania and exchanged gifts. I now have a kilt and a silly hat.
Note: I started working on this article the day after the first one went up. Since that time, I've been keeping an eye on things while on vacation in Pennsylvania and collecting another queue of a few dozen links to sort through. I've also had a couple of disressing conversations with people which went something like this: "The TSA is there to keep us safe when traveling. It's worth being imaged nude to stay safe. It's worth being skin searched to stay safe. No, the TSA would never hire screeners who abuse their power. No screeners are abusing their power …
