I promised I would post the picture when it got downloaded from the camera. That is one expensive motorcycle right there.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

So the best thing to do when you miss updating a day is to just smush it in with the next one. It is basically for this reason that the ampersand was invented.

During the mornings of the last two days I’ve been able to take in a few more sessions. One was pretty good, a couple were ok, and one was downright awful. But, considering I only had one real dud in my entire time here that’s not half bad. (I guess it would be more like 1/7th bad.) The afternoons were then spent hanging out in the Expo booth talking with people or wandering around talking with journalists.

One of the biggests kicks I had at the Expo was seeing the Intel Chopper that was built by Orange County Choppers. I’d post an image of it but the pictures I took are on Angie’s camera. The matter is further complicated in that Angie’s camera isn’t actually hers, it belongs to Rick who I hear borrowed it from Kelly. The end of this story is that someone that isn’t me has the cable needed to get the pictures and whoever that is is probably in Cincinnati right now. I’ll post them once I get back.

Another interesting thing I’ve been doing this week is looking at the type of notebook computers that are being carried around. In our group there was me with the Mac and then seven other Dells running Windows XP. My unscientific survey showed this percentage to be a little high, I would say there was approximately one Mac for every nine XP laptops.

Notice that I said Windows XP specifically.

I saw nothing running any kind of Linux.

I saw nothing running Vista. Interesting isn’t it?

That’s all for tonight, tomorrow morning is more fun with flying.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

The conference is officially on. I mean it’s ON. Well, I guess that’s how the kids would say it. Today was the tutorial/experimental day of the week which is a fancy way of saying that the classes were three and a half hours a long.

I attended a Design Patterns session in the morning and after lunch it was a few hours of XUnit Testing Smells.

Now, I should take a moment here and explain a little bit about these conferences work. Generally what happens is that someone has a written a book about something that they then turn into a presentation. For illustrative purposes we’ll call this person The Teacher. To keep everything clear we’ll refer tor everyone else as The Class.

The Teacher, or perhaps the The Conference Organizers, then give the name of the session a catchy title in order to attract more members of the The Class. It’s a simple operation that you can try at home. First, you need the list of acceptable words:

Agile
XP
SCRUM
Test Driven Development
Patterns
Unit Testing
Requirements
Smells
Refactoring

To make a session title just stitch as many of those words as you want together. For example:

Refactoring SCRUM Unit Testing Requirements to Patterns
Test Driven Development XP Smells
Applying Agile Patterns Unit Testing Requirements

I jest with nothing but love. Actually not love, I refactored it to adoring this morning and encapsulated it into a Bridge Pattern.

On the surface it sounds like a great deal of marketing and not a whole lot else. If you walk in with a real cynical attitude toward it, you’ll probably find it that way as well. “I’ve been developing sofware for sixteen million bazillion years and, well quite frankly I’m the cat’s meow so I’m not going to buy into this marketing drivel. Where’s the bar?”

Truth be told though, this kind of thing is a great way to push the boundries of what you thought you knew. I mean, just this morning I woke up and bought up a bagel quite convinced that unit tests couldn’t smell. Now I know they can. Who knows what I’ll learn tomorrow, maybe I’ll get an English muffin and see what that brings.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

First things first, I really don’t care to fly. It isn’t that I’m afraid of heights or anything like that, I just find the whole ordeal uncomfortable. Waiting in airports, waiting on airplanes, sitting on airplane seats, the whole thing I’d just as soon avoid.

Of course driving for hours and hours bores me to tears so flying becomes the lesser of two evils. Comfort aside, at least you get to where you are going fast.

Anyhow, because the first day of conference is Tuesday, and the sessions start bright and early at 8:30am, I flew in on Monday. It was this flight that allowed me to experience something that has never happened to me before on a commercial airline:

My flight got in 25 minutes EARLY.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person shocked by this since the grounds crew was nowhere to be found when we pulled to the gate. The captain had to get on the intercom to explain that we’d thrown them for a loop with our super promptness.

I can just imagine the conversation now.

Control tower (calling grounds crew): “Flight 6343 has just arrived at gate A12 twenty five minutes early. They are requesting baggage unload.”

Grounds Crew: “Uhh, tower, did you say early.”

Control Tower: “That’s an affirmative, we repeat they got in early, copy.”

Grounds Crew: *Silence*

Control Tower: “Copy that grounds crew.”

Grounds Crew: “Right, uh, tower we’re talking this over down here, what does the word ‘early’ actually mean? None of us have heard it before here.”

After finally being allowed off of the plane all that was left was the typical white-knuckle taxi drive through the Williams tunnel to the relative safety of the hotel. More updates coming once the show actually begins.

Sometimes an email that crosses through my inbox that really catches my attention. A recent example of this phenomenon:

“Joost beta is not available for Mac”

So I opened it up thinking that for some reason the Joost guys had dumped Apple completely. Turns out the “not” was supposed to read “now” which pretty much means the exact opposite. I figured having invested two seconds into this so far that I may as well sign up. A few minutes later I got the beta acceptable email and downloaded the client. It didn’t take long to find this…

Yep, that’s full screen GI Joe right on the old laptop. This got me thinking:

Grant (right now): Wow, I don’t remember them bending reality so much on this show as a kid. I guess the thought of a giant teleporter machine that runs on red crystals, water, and dirt seemed scientifically reasonable back then.

Grant (as a kid): No way I’m ever going to be able to watch EVERY SINGLE AWESOME EPISODE on a computer. And a computer that has NO WIRES attached to it, yeah right.

The software itself worked fine except when it didn’t. (How’s that for profound?) It’s been a long time since I’ve written used software that a kill -9 didn’t stop. That only happened once though, the other times kill -9 worked great.

The one kind of strange thing is how it handles commercials. I’m thinking that the 1980’s animators didn’t really have distributed network video delivery in mind when they wrote the shows, so a commercial would sometimes randomly start right in the middle of the action. On the bright side, the commercials worked as well as TV commercials in that I have little recollection of what products were being pushed. All I remember is that LaDanian Thomlinson ran around in one and there was one of a dude that was painted silver. I’ll have to pay more attention next time, but I’m not currently in the market for a running back or silver paint so it probably just didn’t resonate with me.

Nitpicks aside, I give it a solid: