RailsConf 2007 was good. I'm glad I went, and I believe I pulled from it — mainly from the other attendees — exactly what I wanted.

It's no surprise, of course, that the best part of the weekend was finally meeting and hanging out with Jim and Sean. Exactly as it was with Greg last year (who I missed this year (but not as much as Corinne and Lauren!) ... lousy timing on the pregnancy, Greg and Kt!), we hung out and chatted as if we've been doing exactly that for many years. Which we have, of course, but only virtually. This was our first meeting, and it was a good one.

The second weirdest experience of the weekend was meeting John Gruber's twin. He hasn't said anything publicly, but he confirms that he has seen it, some of his friends are calling the other guy, "Fake John Gruber," and John referred to it as Very Weird. Rich (who has known JG far longer than I have) agreed the similarity was eerie. They really were identical, in the sense of identical twins. Just as identical twins have little differences that help you tell them apart, these two are not identical in every little detail... but it was still weird.

However, the number one weirdest part of the weekend was that Sevin Sayers was here! (Ok, his name isn't really Sevin Sayers, but he's being very weird about this and wanted his name removed from the site. So it's something *like* Sevin Sayers. (Let's just say there's a reason I haven't seen ‘Sevin’ in years.)) He was completely out of context, as though my life's threads were suddenly exchanging objects or pointers in some way that surely indicated heap corruption and would result in an OS shutdown (kernel panic!) any second.

I first saw ‘Sevin’ on Friday morning, but never really thought it was him, just looked and sounded a bit like him. Then again that evening, but it was just after I met John's dopplegänger so I decided my brain was having a little more fun with me. When I saw him for the third time on Saturday, I stared at him for a few seconds trying to find the subtle differences that would make him not look like ‘Sevin’ anymore.

He finally looked back at me, and immediately looked very confused. "Seth?!? What are you doing here?"

"Right. Funny you should ask that."

2006 was a good year for me and mine, in many ways.

To all of my family near and far, to my ecclesia here and worldwide, to all of my friends new and old, close or distant:

Happy
New Year!

Hoping 2007 will be even better, for all of us...

RailsConf (the first 'official' Ruby on Rails conference) ended Sunday afternoon. I'm very glad I went.

Highlights:

• Having Corinne there with me, for a lot of reasons.

• Meeting Greg and hanging out like old friends, making plans for future work, and getting help with problems in one of my projects (he has more Rails experience than I do).

• Watching one of my clients (M.C.) scurry around with a big backpack, and talk to anybody who would listen about his project. The man really seems to love his work.

• The jets taking off right over the hotel, and the huge trains rumbling by on the tracks across the street.

• Dave Thomas's keynote on Friday morning, throwing down the gauntlet.

• All the keynote speakers bluntly disagreeing with all of the others, without hostility.

• DHH's keynote on Saturday night

• The Homesteader's Guide, by Nethaniel Talbott

• The code-related sections of the "performance" by "Why the Lucky Stiff"

• Meeting with Sam Stephenson, author of Prototype, for an hour on Sunday, and being told that he loved what I showed him. It seems I really did figure out something NEW in JavaScript, and wasn't actually deluding myself. (Note: JS-related validation from Sam is a bit like Ruby-related validation from DHH. That is, he didn't write the language, but he is considered one of the elite and there are many, many thousands of people following his lead.)
  
  (Yes, I'll have a LOT more to say about this soon.)

• An email I received from a brand new client. I had to work for this one, but in this case that's a very good thing. I can't wait to say more about this!

• The macs. It was totally nuts. 550 attendees, and I've seen estimates between 80% and 95% mac coverage. Some joked that "in the future, everyone uses macs." I parried that this wasn't the future, it was the alternate universe where things had worked out like we always knew they were supposed to.
  
  Check out some of the pictures. I'm even in one of them, from the neck down. ;-)

• Giving the (other) last remaining mac geeks (about twelve of them) in the bar just off the hotel lobby a whole pizza (our leftovers after we ordered two smalls). They couldn't believe their good fortune! I told them they could have it if they promised not to get any on their MacBooks. They looked at me funny, one guy said that his runs better with pizza. I said, "you don't need to put it on the macbook, the pizza is already cooked." Took them all a second to figure that one out. :-)

Now the lowlights:

• My babe being bored out of her mind. The conference kept us so busy that there was no time for us to do much of anything, and who wants to play tourist by oneself? (Not her!) Lesson learned. For future conferences, we'll be able to make a more informed decision about whether or not she goes with me.

• Some of the sessions were desperately boring and lacking in any useful technical information. Some were good, many were not.

• All the rest of Why's performance. Some people totally loved it. I'm not one of them.

• Paul Graham's keynote presentation. He has this awesome rep, and I truly enjoy most of his essays, but all he did was read it! Dude. Look at your audience more often than when you're making a joke. (It was funny, though, that he kept saying, “I’m going to leave THAT part ouf of the essay on the site.”)

• That it ended so soon. Sigh.

Back to work!

I'm afraid that Agile Tortoise (Greg) has lowered its flags to half-mast today. A couple days ago, an old friend died in a shoot-out with some corrupt Florida prison guards. Today, CNN is reporting that Darwin's Tortoise died. (Greg has a long-standing thing for turtles. Don't ask.)

Watch out, Greg. They say these things often come in threes.

Greg has produced a set of Ruby scripts for editing your Conversant site's templates, javascripts, and stylesheets *locally*. It downloads them all via xml-rpc. You edit them in your local editor, then run the upload script and it sends back whatever has been modified.

Very handy when you're doing a lot of work on a site... such as when you're trying to perfect your design for your next entry in the patterns contest!