Truer Words - A Journal

Other BBEdit Language Modules

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:29:49 GMT

Rich read the Why I Wrote a JavaScript Module for BBEdit story, but like everyone else at Bare Bones decided to respond to me directly instead of posting something on the site. (Jim Correia has been guilty of this so many times it's now an old joke.) Anyway, he suggests that list the other languages/modules I've added to BBEdit since the JavaScript module

They are, in no particular order:

Strings (for MacOS X developers)
Python
Markdown
SQL (five flavors)
Ruby
Java
TeX
Lua
YAML

My favorite is still the JavaScript module. My least favorite is definitely the Markdown module (see Markdown.pl's source code and look for the author's comment, "This is an aspect of Markdown's syntax that's hard to parse perfectly without resorting to mind-reading" and maybe you'll understand my issues with it.)

My second favorite is the Python module, because Guido van Rossum wrote the gold standard of language specifications. He doesn't just describe the language syntax with near perfect clarity, he also has implementor hints! It's like he was in the room with me when I wrote that module, telling me what I should do here or there. His work made my work better, and there have been very few bugs reported in the Python module since its release.

My second least favorite module is YAML, for the same (or opposite) reason. The specification is obtuse, repetitive, unclear and unrealistic. It's full of internal language which you can only comprehend by looking for definitions elsewhere in the document, and inevitably those definitions have more internal language. (I'm working on an update to the YAML module, and the authors of YAML actually admitted to these problems in several IRC chats we had in the last few weeks).

I have various other unfinished language modules sitting around on my computer, waiting for me to make time for them, but all of the above have been released with BBEdit 8.5, 8.6, or 8.7.

A New JS Mode for Emacs, and Why I Wrote a JS module for BBEdit

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:02:51 GMT

Stevey's Blog Rants: js2-mode: a new JavaScript mode for Emacs

For the OOD-loving and API-minded among you, the "beautiful" way to do syntax coloring would have been to finish parsing, then walk the AST using a Visitor interface, applying the coloring in a second pass. I tried it, and it was, as they say, "butt slow". In fact (perhaps not surprisingly) walking the AST takes exactly as long as parsing, so it was twice as slow as doing it inline.

So I bit the bullet and moved my syntax-coloring to happen inline with parsing. Fortunately it only introduced about 30 lines of code to the 4000-line parser/scanner, because most of the coloring happens in the scanner, at the token level. Go figure.

Steve Yegge describes (at length) his new JavaScript mode for Emacs. For much of the article he's talking about (trying to) parse the JavaScript file at the same time that he's applying syntax coloring. It's absolutely NOT a simple task, not by a long shot. He had the benefit of direct access to Brendan Eich (the author and maintainer of JavaScript itself) at least twice so far, but still describes how difficult it was. And this is someone many people consider a superstar programmer who has been working at Google for years.

Well, next to Conversant, my favorite-ever project is/was the JavaScript module in BBEdit. I won't go into all the technical details like Steve does, but I will say, "I feel his pain."

Thinking about this, I realized that I never wrote the story of how I came to be contracted with Bare Bones. With all the explosives experts, martial artists, photographers, and "connected" individuals at BB I need to be careful not to cross the lines of my NDA, but I think I can tell this story safely. ;-)

How It All Started

In early Spring of 2006 — almost exactly two years ago — I was doing a lot of work with JavaScript. Prototype was my new favorite toy, but 1.0 hadn't yet been released. My editor of choice was BBEdit, but I was frustrated that it didn't list the functions in Prototype.js (follow that link for more details, including pictures). I wrote to Bare Bones tech support to ask if they knew of any third-party, BBEdit, language modules for JavaScript.

The answer was "no," but I was told that a couple other people had asked about improvements to their JavaScript support. I wrote back to say that I'd like to take a crack at it, if I could only see "the source to the current syntax module." Hah. Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. "Could you send me some of the source to your app, so I can write something better?" (That's NOT what I said, but that's probably what it sounded like.)

After lots of email back and forth, on May 10th we had only reached the point where Bare Bones was "planning to update it in a future release." I'm a developer, I know what that means. So I wrote again, and said I was going to start my own language module (based on BBEdit's public SDK for language modules), and could they just send me their current list of language keywords?

A month later, Rich himself finally sent them to me. That was June 12th. I wrote back with a better list of keywords, and told him I was going to start working on my own module unless they told me I shouldn't bother because they already had one under development. They didn't, but Rich seemed to be trying to call my bluff: you go ahead and start working on it, and if you come up with something good maybe we'll work something out. (I've been on both sides of this discussion, and I know that usually nothing happens.)

Three days later, I sent them a copy of a fully functional JavaScript language module, written in C++. (Looking back, I'm all impressed with myself!) When I'm telling this story in person, especially if Rich is nearby, I like to say that they tried to call my bluff but found I wasn't bluffing. I still think there was a little of that, but mostly I think they just dealt with this nagging, mostly-unknown customer the best way they could: "go ahead and do your thing, and yes, maybe we'll work something out."

A few days after that I sent them another one, with some more features and some bugs fixed.

A few days later, I went to RailsConf in Chicago, and found out that lots of Rails developers were using TextMate. I'd barely heard of it! (Probably because I don't go looking for new toys very often when I have work to do.)

While at the conference, I talked to other JavaScript devs about their editors, and showed them what I'd done for BBEdit. I even showed Sam Stephenson, Prototype's author, at the same time that I was showing him what I'd done for custom events in javascript. Everybody liked it, and it was definitely better than anything else out there. I also asked people why they were using whatever editor they were using. Most of the Rails folks who were using TextMate were using it because that's what the top Rails guys recommended, and because it had really good integration with Rails itself.

I wrote up all this "research" and sent it to Bare Bones when I returned home.

Writing the language module, peppering them with lots of email, and sending in the research I did at RailsConf were enough to really get their attention. In early July (can't remember... July 3rd or 5th), Rich came down here and we had lunch at Costello's Clam Shack, right on the water. I got an early look at BBEdit 8.5, we talked about my 1,001 feature requests, and I signed an NDA with a handshake (and later with pen and ink).

Perhaps as import as the business that was done that day, Rich and I became friends (and have had a casual breakfast almost every Tuesday morning since then).

A Day Off for Everyone

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:39:39 GMT

Rich lost a fine feathered friend last night. it's been tough.

He said, "The world is one bird in the "minus" column and that's no good." I replied that it's no good that the world doesn't even notice. It doesn't even notice when a child dies.

So, I propose that we *all* take the day off whenever a loved one dies. With pay. And, at Rich's suggestion, "with donuts."

Happy Birthday Rich!

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 01:42:16 GMT

Today is Rich Siegel's fortieth birthday.

Happy Birthday, Rich! It was good being stuck in traffic with you for most of the day. ;-)

Oh, and one of Rich's birthday presents was (possibly) the coolest camera I've ever seen. I'm not jealous (it wouldn't work for me for a couple of reasons), but I was totally impressed with it. I've been slightly camera-obsessed since Lauren was born.)

Dinner at Zaftigs With Some iFolk

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:20:15 GMT

I had dinner last night in Brookline, MA, with Andy Inhatko, Rich Siegel, Dave Nanian and Steve Siska. (The Four Horsemen of the iPocalypse?)

The evening started with a drive to Rich's house in RI, where he surprised me with a gift: a real chainmail glove to protect my hand from the parrots when they're cranky! Very cool. Corinne and I both think this is something my brother would love, so I need to remember to show it to him when I fly out for his wedding in June. (But knowing Jed, he already has one.)

We drove up to Zaftigs Delicatessan in Brookline, MA for dinner. We arrived a little late because traffic was mostly stopped on Route 128, but everybody else (except Dave Nanian) was late, too: Andy had a chat with a mac user group, and Steve was stuck in traffic just like we were.

After dinner we walked a couple doors down to an ice cream shop, where Rich snapped a picture of Andy (and where, after we left, I took the picture of the group).

It was a good evening with lots of chat about a movie I hadn't seen (Borat) and a certain phone none of us can own until at least June.

Oh, if you're looking at my pictures, don't miss the ironic OnlineRealty.com OFFICE — that's just wrong, Rich and I thought for a moment we had fallen into Second Life — nor the brick building with a wall of fake windows.

Shutdown Day

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 02:13:09 GMT

Can you go without computers for a day?

I can, and will.

March 24, 2007. Go sign up.

(Thanks to Rich for the link.)

I'm Not Budging Until You Fix It!

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:21:05 GMT

A bug in my preferred email client annoyed me enough that I camped out in the developer's own living room until he fixed it and gave me a new build. :-)

I kid you not. Mostly.

Plus, he bought me breakfast. This was really a good deal all around.

(He even took a picture of my breakfast!)

Then we reviewed the other unreproducible bugs I've reported in the last year (I'm as good at finding the bizarre bugs in other people's software as I am at creating them in my own!), and fixed all of them except one. That one was a doozie, though... I think they had bets in the BB office about my sanity. (Sorry, Steve, you lose! Rich saw the bug with his own eyes.)

So my "breakfast" with Rich turned into a very productive, all-day event. I didn't arrive home until 7:04 pm: 12 hours (almost to the second) after I left.

Tuesday's Agenda

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:46:33 GMT

Breakfast with Rich

Our weekly breakfast meeting, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM

Location: A small restaurant in North Kingstown, RI
Fetch Dad from Airport

Dad returns from Florida, pick him up at Bradley International and return him to North Stonington at 12:30 PM

Location: Bradley International Airport, north of Hartford (90 minute drive)
Probation Officers

Important meeting with Mike and Shannon's probation officers, which could greatly affect their sentencing next week.

Time: 1:15 PM to 2:00 PM

Location: Norwich, CT

I'm glad I have a personal clone, otherwise I'm not sure how I'd manage it all. There are no conflicts at breakfast (phew!), but the other two items on Tuesday's agenda would be impossible if there was only one of me.

Somehow between now and that meeting with the probation officers, one of me also needs to make time to write a strong letter of support for these two, to the judge who heard their case and will sentence them next week.

Familial Expansion

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:07:50 GMT

We brought Mike & Shannon to the house yesterday for lunch, for the first time, and offered to let them move in here immediately. They accepted, and so far it's all good.

However, the real point of this post is that Mike came out of their room this morning and found me in my office. To his surprise. "I didn't know you were down here already! You're quiet!"

So there, Rich! ;-)

Macworld 2007 Recap

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 01:27:14 GMT

My intent at the start of my travels for MacWorld 2007 was to provide daily updates on my goings-on and derring-dos. Hah. With all the hours in the show hall, and Dinners (with a capital D) every night, I quickly learned that there was almost no time for writing.

This entry will attempt to provide those details which I can recall…

My previous entry finished on Monday morning, and mentioned my plans for the day. This is where we'll pick it up.

Monday

Booth Setup

Bare Bones rented a 2-meter booth in the "overflow hall". There was room there for two presentation stations, or one station and stacks of literature, window stickers, and CD's. They chose the latter.

When I arrived (30 minutes early), nobody and nothing was at the booth. No boxes, no computer, no literature, nobody from Bare Bones. Nobody. So, I spent some time chatting with the guys from provue (makers of Panorama), and then went back to my hotel room.

Back to the booth again at 2:30. The "media rental" guy was there, and was annoyed that we hadn't received anything yet, so he made a call and five minutes later the computer (Dual G5 tower) and the display (30" Apple Cinema) were delivered.

The mac had the wrong display card for that display (only 64 MB of vRam), so it was only able to drive it at 1200x800. I thought that was actually a *good thing*, as it was for presentations, not "daily use." Eventually everybody agreed (or at least agreed to give it a shot), and I'm glad: the display looked great if you were standing back a few feet. We often had large crowds watching our demos, and the low-resolution display made it possible for them to see everything we were doing.

Brian Arrives

Brian arrived in the area a bit early, but I couldn't leave until 3 so he found a parking space over on Mission St. and then walked over.

We met up outside, and I took him downstairs to the show entrance. Couldn't take him past the doors for the lack of an Exhibitor badge, and the 90 year old security guard was clearly prepared to Take Him Out.

Eventually Rich came out, they met, we all chatted for a minute, and then Brian and I found his car so we could go…

Touring Fisherman's Wharf

Oh the tourist-trappiness. It was nearly overwhelming. Every shop offered kitsch at off-season discounts.

In the mid-nineties, while traveling all over the country at the behest of RR Donnelley's sales people, I'd been to San Francisco with Dirk Samuelson (an RRD employee). We found a shop, somewhere, with some very high quality sweatshirts and I bought a couple for my girlfriend, Corinne. Only recently did those sweatshirts wear out enough to require dumping, so I picked up a couple more. I couldn't find anything quite as nice as the old ones (isn't that always the way?), but I did my best by looking at the offerings of every single store.

Brian picked up some chocolate for his girlfriend (whose name happens to meet Macrobyte's standards, even though he hasn't worked at Macrobyte in many years ;-). Then we dropped our packages at his car and returned to Pier 39 for some pictures of the sea lions and us in front of Alcatraz.

After the pictures, he drove me back to the Marriott and then headed back out of the city.

Brian worked for me at Macrobyte for over a year, and we've been friends for over a decade, but that was only the second time I've met him!

Working the Booth

One of the benefits of working the Bare Bones booth is that everybody already knows about the flagship product, BBEdit. In fact, a lot of the people who come to the booth just want a new t-shirt, want to talk about how they use it every day, or they just want to thank someone for creating it. Very cool. Some were very enthused, and that's putting it mildly. (The one day I wore the shirt all the way back to my room, I was twice accosted by BBEdit fans.)

Bare Bones wasn't there for the accolades. It makes for great PR, but the real point was to demo their newest product, Yojimbo.

Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical about Yojimbo before the show. I'd been a beta tester, and then I'd used 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 a little. I installed version 1.3 but didn't do much with it. My problem was that I was too conscious of what it didn't do, so I never really gave it a chance.

That first day, I completely avoided doing demos of Yojimbo, and instead focused on answering questions and doing anything else I could think of that would save me from having to demo an app I wasn't really sure about. I watched Ciaran and Patrick, though, and some ideas started to gestate.

Wednesday morning, first thing, someone asked me to give them a demo of Yojimbo. Overnight I had thought about it enough to know how to tackle it, so I gave my first version of what would become "Seth's Yojimbo demo." It was effective, and I showed most of the app's features in about seven minutes.

Over the next three days I gave that demo many dozens of times, and kept refining it down to the point where I could literally demonstrate every feature of the application in under five minutes, while at the same time I told a simple story about using the software.

With practice I became more effective, and learned what to say. For example, I could show someone how to encrypt something in the application with a single click, but that always resulted in glazed eyes or the question, "Why would I want that?" However, as part of the story I mentioned that the receipt for the gift I've just purchased is right there for my wife to see, but I can hide it from her by just clicking that encrypt button: immediate comprehension.

People like stories.

Tuesday

Breakfast at the Garden Terrace again, this time with Patrick Woolsey (Rich Siegel's partner at Bare Bones) and Ciaran Benson (who worked the booth with us all week).

After eating, Patrick and I went down to the hotel's Shipping & Receiving dept. to pick up the t-shirts and schlep them over to the hall. Ciarnan went to the printer to pick up data sheets of BB's products.

Once we were all at the booth, we only had two things to do: collate all the data sheets and media kits, and fold a couple hundred t-shirts. Ciarnan worked on the paper while I folded.

Eventually, I figured out how to fold the shirts so that the Bare Bones logo was centered on the front. I showed Patrick and a volunteer from another booth how to fold them. With three folders we made short work of the pile.

Then I helped Ciarnan finish with the media kits and data sheets, just as hundreds of visitors swarmed the show floor.

Rules of the booth: drink a lot of water, use the Purel (hand sanitizer), and ask everybody if they have a question. Most will say "no," immediately before asking a question.

Rich's Friends

A bunch of Rich's friends came to the booth toward the end of the day, expecting that Rich would join them for dinner. He had other plans already (see below), but they still hung out at the booth for at least an hour. The bantering was fun.

Someone fussed that BBEdit doesn't support a certain, very simple file type used by Mac programmers. So that night I started throwing a module together, hoping to finish it by the end of the show. Didn't quite get there, but I did have it fully functional by Sunday night. (In fact, it's already in that gentleman's hands and is being beta tested.)

Dinner with the New Rock Stars

Brent had written to a small group on Monday night about having dinner on Tuesday. In his words, "A post-keynote, post-first-day dinner with a few smart folks sounds like just the thing." Apparently, a typo resulted in my receiving the invitation also, but rather than point it out I simply accepted. ;-)

So, Tuesday night we met at the top of the escalators before walking to the restaurant. Attendees included Brent Simmons, Buzz Andersen, Gus Mueller (his page mentions meeting me, in a funny way), John Gruber, Niall Kennedy, Patrick Woolsey, Paul Kafasis, Rich Siegel, Ted Leung, myself, and possibly one or two others whose names I can't remember (sorry!).

Update: Here is Ted's picture of the dinner.

I don't remember what I ordered, but it was terrible. Yuck. Niall — sitting right next to me — made me very jealous with his gigantic, juicy hamburger. Wah.

After the introductions, we mostly talked about the death of Apple Computer, Inc. (the pundits were right all along!), the new Apple TV, and the iPhone. Most notably, the lack of 3rd party app support on the iPhone, which bit everybody in that group right in the tuckus.

Oh, and I told my...

Funny John Gruber Story

What John Gruber story? OK, here:

BBEdit 8.6 added support for the Markdown language. (Markdown is like HTML shorthand, basically.)

Writing the Markdown support for BBEdit was very challenging. This is a language that's designed to be processed once, to convert the markdown to HTML. Speed of processing was not a consideration. However, I (that is, BBEdit's Markdown module) need to process at least part of the Markdown content with every keypress, so as to figure out what to color and how to color it.

While John was beta testing the module for us, he had a bunch of very particular bug reports and feature requests. He wanted everything to be just so. It was tiring, but I appreciated it because we needed a lot of testing very quickly.

Then he submitted one last bug report. Apparently, inline links can have titles (which I knew), and those titles are delimited by quotes. Here's an example:

This is some [linked text](<link_url> "link title").

The syntax docs on John's site said that inline link's titles were delimited by double quotes. Markdown.pl, John's implementation of Markdown in perl — the canonical Markdown interpreter — used double quotes to delimit link titles.

John's bug? He pointed out that even though it's not documented, and the interpreter doesn't actually support it, it's (somehow) a bug that BBEdit did not support 'single-quote delimiters' around the link titles.

(I still think it's funny, but I guess I can see why nobody else would.)

Wednesday

I don't remember much about Wednesday except the MacSB dinner, which was a couple blocks from the show.

After walking down there, I almost went into the wrong place. The restaurant I could see had a sign that said "Chaam Cafe," so I assumed I'd been given the wrong name. However, as I drew near I saw another restaurant next door, and the part of the sign I could read said, "t Cafe". I found out Thursday that others actually went into Chaam Cafe, and two of those with whom I spoke enjoyed a Mac-related party with a bunch of people they didn't know, and got a free meal out of it!

I ate with Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba, Jerry Kayne, and Willian Van Hecke from The Omni Group. However, the restaurant was very crowded and I was tired, so I left as soon as I was done eating.

Thursday

Breakfast

As with every other day on the show floor, we had breakfast at the Marriott. Rich joined us this time, and Agnes (one of the Omelette chefs) recognized him immediately and asked where he's been all week!

"The Fetch guys" sat with us.

MacBrainiac Challenge

Rich was the captain of the developers team for this year's edition of the Macworld game show, which pit the developers against the reporters with trivia questions. Chris Breen was the host.

At the last question — which was actually a challenge, not a question — the teams were tied. The challenge was to send Chris an electronic birthday greeting from their computer (one computer per team), without using email and with the understanding that his laptop was completely off the air.

The solution was to send an SMS message to his cell phone, from iChat. The contact info had been pre-loaded onto both machines, but you had to know how to use iChat with SMS. The reporters tried to use text-to-speech to have their mac deliver the message to Chris vocally, but that answer wasn't accepted. (This really annoyed Andy Inhatko.) Frankly, I think the only reason it wasn't accepted is that it's not the answer they expected. The question should have specified that the solution had to work whether Chris was in the room or 1,000 miles away.

Anyway, the developers won.

Show Floor

My Yojimbo demo was in full swing by this point.

The last couple days of the show mostly blurred together, but I think this is the day that Merlin Mann interviewed Patrick at the booth for about fifteen minutes. You can watch the video, here.

Patrick is about 6' 4" (Update: that said 6' 1" originally. Sorry Patrick. All you little guys look the same!) and weighs a good and very solid 280-290 pounds. Throw in the dark hair, the beard, and the low, rumbly voice and you'll see why I call him Paul Bunyan. :-) Put a knit cap on his head, a plaid, flannel shirt on his shoulders, and an axe in his hand...

Rich wasn't around for most of the day. He spent all day meeting with press people, being interviewed about BBEdit and Yojimbo.

Dinner

Rich made dinner reservations for us at a Chinese restaurant, Brandy Ho's. I walked all the way (a couple miles) in, which felt great. Man, what a city for people-watching. (Corinne wouldn't have enjoyed the walk quite so much, but as I walked I thought about how much she would have loved seeing all the people.)

In attendance at dinner: Rich, Patrick, Naomi (BB's PR person), Sandy (former BB marketer), Sal Sahogian.

Yeah, that's right. I had dinner with Saul, who you all know. :-D

He told a very funny and very memorable story about his days as a nightclub manager in NYC. No room to retell it here, but the best line was, "Sal, I'm starting to get upset," said in a very quiet voice.

After dinner, Rich joined me for the walk back and we mostly talked shop until we had to split for our separate hotels.

Friday

Friday was a blur of exhaustion, sore throats, and Yojimbo-demo-burnout. ;-)

The show ended at 4 PM on Friday instead of 6 like the rest of the week, and most of the hall was rolled up by 4:30!

I couldn't find anybody at the show who was actually selling iPods (how crazy is that?), so after the show I walked to the Apple store to buy one for Corinne. Picked up a 30 GB black (which she seemed to really like when I gave it to her Saturday).

Apollo

Update: I met Apollo on Friday, for the first time ever. Not sure how I forgot this when I first wrote it up, except that I was tired of writing!

(Apollo is a cyclist from the bay area, who has made some very generous donations to my PMC fundraising efforts in the last couple of years. He also had a horrendous bike accident that nearly ended his cycling for good.)

He works right down the street from the Moscone Center, so he took an extra-long lunch break to meet me and see the show. Rich and I were out wandering the show floor (after a friendly, thirty minute chat with the tm boys). We had stopped to talk to a known BBEdit user who happened to be 6' 6" tall (Rich said he felt like a hyphen between us), when this stranger walked up and said, "You must be Seth Dillingham!" He figured it out based solely on the fact that there were two guys there wearing BBEdit t-shirts, and I was really tall!

The most notable moment for Apollo, though, was clearly when the cute Australian boothbabe stepped in front of him and offered him some information about some product. Let's just say she could have sold him any software... ;-)

Apollo went back to the BB booth with me, experienced The Yojimbo Demo, took a couple pictures, and went back to work. Nice to meet you finally, Apollo!

Bare Bones took us out for a huge steak dinner at Harris' Restaurant. A little too far to walk (I was told), but totally worth whatever it takes to get there. Wow. Second best steak dinner I've ever had, and certainly the best ever at a restaurant. This was a celebratory "family dinner," with Rich and Patrick, Naomi, Ciaran, and myself.

Saturday

Saturday morning I packed my suitcase and caught a cab. There were five people in line ahead of me for the cab, but they all got on a shuttle.

Took the taxi to Rich's hotel to pick him up, and then to the airport. So far, it was all smooth...

Airports Schmairport

My itinerary said United Airlines, but when I tried to check in with United they told me I was supposed to go to US Air. GRRRRRRRRR. That's in another terminal about 500 miles away. So I said goodbye to Rich and hurried over there (though I had plenty of time).

Check-in took forever because my bag was overweight. This also cost me $50. It took them 20 minutes to print the receipt for that $50. This meant that by the time I got to the security line, I was already pretty frustrated.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the metal detector.

"Sir, you'd better take off your watch and your belt. If you beep a second time, we have to do a personal inspection." That sounded ominous.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the same metal detector with a tiny, forgotten pillbox in my pocket. I had to strip down to just shorts and t-shirt and stand in a phone booth which is rigged to detect eplosive residue. After that, the "personal inspection." I had to stand with my arms out the sides, palms up, while they wanded me from head to toe. This is all done right out in the open, of course. For your protection.

I checked my anger. Humiliation is the order of the day when you fly, now. It's the next best thing to security!

On the flight to Philly, I sat next to a Java programmer who was very jealous of how fast my MacBook Pro could wake from sleep (he had a Dell), and an old consultant to the printing industry who knew all about the startup of the RR Donnelley Lancaster West plant (which is where I met Corinne). He even thought he recognized her picture.

Philly to Providence was just a 40 minute flight, and I sat next to a couple who cuddled and made out the entire time. Touched down in Providence just a few minutes early, and walked straight to the baggage claim...

... and right past Corinne, who stood there looking amused. I realized what I'd done just a second too late. ;-) (In my defense, I was expecting her to be waiting for me outside, and I was trying to read the signs to see where my bags would come in.)

Thank you, Bare Bones, for letting me help out at the booth. It was a great week! (And it's even better to be home!)

Flight to SF, Dinner with Rich and Friends™

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:29:38 GMT

Flight

The flights from Providence to Washington/Dulles, and from Dulles to SF, were exactly how you want flights to be: utterly boring and uneventful.

Thai Food

In fact, everything yesterday was boring except for dinner! I'm staying at the Marriott San Francisco, but Rich is at the W. So after I was settled in and caught up, I walked over there so we could figure out what to do for dinner.

The W has a slightly bizarre lobby. It looks like the entrance to a nightclub. I told Rich that it looked like they were sizing people up as they walked in, to decide if they were dressed well enough to get into the club. About an hour later the third (of four) for our dinner party showed up, and he also said that it looked like a night club! (I even walked most of the way around the building trying to find the real entrance.)

Rich, of course, has a ton of friends out here right now as he's been in the Mac software business (and successfully) for a long time. So I'll just consider myself lucky that he was able to go to dinner with me/us last night: doesn't look like that will happen again until (perhaps) Thursday.

The dinner party of four consisted of Rich, Ciaran (another friend of Rich's who will be helping out at the booth), someone who used to do the Bare Bones marketing but whose name I can't currently remember (sorry!), and myself. We went for Thai food.

On the way out of the hotel, Rich asked the concierge where a certain Thai restaurant was that he remembered from years past. "It was a little hole-in-the-wall place up on such-and-such a street..." The concierge didn't want us to go there. In fact, he repeatedly recommended something closer, and in the end he actually said, "It's much nicer, but I think you'll like it anyway." I repeated that twice after we left the hotel, shaking my head. What a snot.

Still, we went where he recommended, and the food was good, and served very quickly. There didn't seem to be any waiting at all, but we were discussing a tentative plan for World Domination (via fobs and keys, of course) so the wait may have just passed very quickly.

Rich has a picture of the dish I ordered... it was very pretty. If he sends it to me, I'll update this post.

After dinner we all went our separate ways, and then I went to bed.

Breakfast

This morning I went down to the buffet (at the Marriott's "Garden View" restaurant) for breakfast. Wow! The food was good, but the wait staff was amazing!!! There were at least two staff people (in vibrant, cobalt blue shirts) per guest. Seriously. But they were all very good at not getting in the way: when I walked from my table to the buffet, they always stepped aside or changed course, so their numbers were never a problem. And they were all very friendly... lots of "good mornings" and smiles all over the place.

(I'm not a big fan of formality, nor the effort to make the guest feel like royalty, but I admit that their almost-choreographed behavior was impressive. Still, I prefer the genuine friendliness of our waitress at Snoopy's, and Corinne still makes the best breakfast I've ever eaten.)

Today

We're setting up the booth this afternoon at 2pm, but that should only take an hour, maybe a little more. Brian is going to show up at about 3... I'd like to introduce him to Rich, if he's available, but then he and I are going to find something to do for the rest of the afternoon. The weather is nice, so perhaps we'll go to Golden Gate park (his idea).

Home Status

Corinne says she's doing ok at home, and managed a decent night's sleep last night (two down, five to go). Unfortunately, she woke up with a sore, puffy cheek. We knew she needed some dental work, but now it's urgent so she made an appointment for Wednesday. :-(

Mike's lawyer called my cell phone a few minutes ago to find out "what I wanted." I just "wanted" to know if he felt a letter of support for Mike & Shannon would help their case at all. He changed his tone very quickly: he feels it would, indeed, be quite helpful. So now I know what judge to write to, but I still need to speak with Shannon's lawyer to make sure she feels the same way and to let her know to expect it.

Happy New Year, One and All

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:22:11 GMT

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...

What Is In that Bread Pudding, Anyway!?

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:08:26 GMT

By now most everybody knows that Macrobyte is doing some work for Bare Bones on BBEdit. I've also become friends with Rich Siegel, the president at BB.

How did this come about? Rich tells the story in short form, and along the way heaps praise on me, Corinne for her cooking, and even does appropriate obeisance before the telekinetic bread pudding.

Rich is awesome to work with, has proven himself a true friend on at lest one occasion already, and (frankly) I'm benefitting massively from his years of experience in this field. All this praise from him could go to my head, though, if I didn't know it was really the bread pudding influencing his thoughts. ;-)

My favorite line:

… she obviously enjoys cooking: big family events, small catering jobs, to say nothing of keeping Seth appropriately fed and watered. Which brings us to the sentient bread pudding …

Truer Words - A Journal

Other BBEdit Language Modules

A New JS Mode for Emacs, and Why I Wrote a JS module for BBEdit

How It All Started

A Day Off for Everyone

Happy Birthday Rich!

Dinner at Zaftigs With Some iFolk

Shutdown Day

I'm Not Budging Until You Fix It!

Tuesday's Agenda

Familial Expansion

Macworld 2007 Recap

Monday

Booth Setup

Brian Arrives

Touring Fisherman's Wharf

Working the Booth

Tuesday

Rich's Friends

Dinner with the New Rock Stars

Funny John Gruber Story

Wednesday

Thursday

Breakfast

MacBrainiac Challenge

Show Floor

Dinner

Friday

Apollo

Saturday

Airports Schmairport

Flight to SF, Dinner with Rich and Friends™

Flight

Thai Food

Breakfast

Today

Home Status

Happy New Year, One and All

Happy New Year!

What Is In that Bread Pudding, Anyway!?

Happy
New Year!