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...

My instructions to log out once per day were well received by some, but not by others and it's clear that I need to clarify a little.

Mainly, there are three points I need to address.

Firstly, my friend Flip pointed out that since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was released, the OS makes sure that your "cron tasks" run later, if they're not able to run at night because your computer is shut down or asleep. So, it's totally ok to put the machine to sleep at night. (I wasn't aware of this change.) However, that doesn't affect my other point about logging out and back in again.

Secondly, some people have been quite vehement -- even quite rude -- in disagreeing with me about logging out and back in again. Jim's main point seemed to be "don't do it becuase you shouldn't have to" (with "shouldn't" meaning software should work better than it often does). Jim moderated his tone a bit in his second post (thank you!). The other guy can't seem to tell the difference between logging out and rebooting.

(Hey Charles: logging out won't affect your uptime!)

There were some people who clearly agreed with me, like Michael Tsai (maker of some apps I use every day).

Finally, if you know the difference between a memory leak and a cron task, then my instructions weren't for you. ;-) Power users, programmers, and sys admins: go on about your business. Most of you probably already tell your users to log off occasionally anyway! I was talking to the regular user, or even the app-crazy user I described here.

By some odd coincidence, three times this week I've come across Mac OS X users who don't know the benefits of logging out. That is, they either leave the machine running at night (still logged into their user account), or they put the machine to sleep. They rarely -- if ever -- log out, and only reboot when "something is wrong" or after installing a system update.

My advice: log out once per day. You might just log out at night when you're done using the computer, leave the machine running, then log in again in the morning.

(It's ok to let the monitor/display/screen/whatever-you-call-it go to sleep.)

This accomplishes a couple of things, at least:

• If you generally run the same software applications most of the time, it will clear out a lot of memory and give those apps a chance to "start over." This is a very good thing for nearly every modern program: most will run faster, and it will put a stop to some "weird behavior" (that's the technical term). This helps on Windows, too.
• Leaving your Mac running (but logged off) at night allows the system (via a utility called cron that you'll never see) to run some system maintenance utilities: another minor performance boon, and it will save a little space on your hard drive. (I actually don't know if Windows does anything like this also.)

There may be other benefits I haven't thought of.

Update January 28, 2006: Please see this post for some clarification and more information.

Flip, Jim, Greg, Steve, and Brent (update: and Apollo, Daniel, and Terry) have each linked to the story about the Firefox book. I really appreciate it... this is a very big deal for me, as most of you know.

Brent said that my description of the SOAP hack made him feel like "Unfrozen Caveman." If anybody has a clue stick, I need a beating. (Did it make him feel a bit behind the times? Out of touch with the tech? Really old? Maybe it thickened his brow and made him a good shot with a spear?)