DrBacchus' Journal

At a time when scientists warn that autumn will kill us all, I'm starting to feel that I need the days to get longer, not shorter.

In addition to a huge deadline at work, I have three writing deadlines the first week of October, and two conferences coming up (Ohio LinuxFest and ApacheCon) in the next few weeks too. And two books that I've promised to do reviews for, including one preface.

Somehow I need to figure out how to sleep less and still be productive.

As DNA observed, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

In just a couple weeks I'll be giving a talk at Ohio LinuxFest titled "20 Things You Didn't Know Your Apache Web Server Could Do."

I picked the number 20 mostly at random. I figured that was a good number for a 45 minute presentation. It turns out it's hard to come up with 20 things that I think most of the audience at OLF won't know. They tend to be a pretty knowledgeable audience.

Tonight I came up with the last few things, and I think I'm mostly ready to give the talk, although some of the items require a little more detail. Not too much, because 2 minutes per item is pretty tight.

I figure that most of the audience will find 2-5 of the things to be something that they already knew, and that a few very experienced folks will perhaps know as many as 10 of the things, but I'm betting that nobody in the room will know more than 12. We'll see. It will be a fun talk, whatever happens.

Oh, yeah, I'll be giving the same talk at ApacheCon in Austin. Rather different audience. I imagine there will be a person or two in the audience there who will know all 20 things. But perhaps I'll even teach them a few things.

The last two cons that I've attended - ApacheCon and OSCon - I've hardly taken any photos. I've relied on the photographers more talented than I, or at least more shutter-happy than I, for my photographic memories. That seems to have worked out pretty well, but there's something just more satisfying to having one's own photos, even when they aren't very good.

So I'll try to take more photos this time around.

As a number of other people have pointed out, the latest version of Keynote (3.0.1 for those keeping score) blows away .svn directories when you save a file. And, for the record, it also blows away CVS directories.

It used to preserve them on save. No longer.

This means, in short, that I can't store my conference presentations in revision control.

Given that most of my conference presentations get updated and recycled and rewritten and reused several times a year, this makes me very very nervous. Any document that's important to me, and not in revision control, makes me very nervous. After all, laptops get dropped. Files get deleted by mistake. Changes get made unintentionally and need to be reverted. And I really need to retrieve that example that I used to have in here on slide #26, but which is gone now.

I'm really not sure what to do. I could go back to using PerlPoint (writing in POD, generating HTML - several generations removed from something TomC wrote many moons ago), but I have grown quite attached to the things that Keynote lets me do.

Oh, and when I went to the Apple bug reporting website, I got "An Exception has Occurred (click triangle to view)".

Charming.

I guess I'm just out of luck for now.

Today we visited the Air Force Museum, on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they've got (at least) one of every plane that has ever flown for the US Air Force. I had very mixed feelings about the visit.

On the one hand, I was (very literally) slack-jawed for 2 hours while looking at a simply amazing collection of planes, many of which I've read stories about for years. Including the Bockscar, which dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki to end WWII. Including Spitfires. Including the Blackbird, and the Stealth Bomber, and B52s, and Meserschmits, and Zeros, and several Air Force Ones, and on and on. Alas, I wanted to see a P51 Mustang, and one of the volunteers there told me that there was one, but I never did find it.

Photos here.

On the other hand, I felt a profound sense of how much death and misery this collection of hardware had caused in the world over the last 60 or 70 years. Many of the planes had markings on the side indicating how many bombs they had dropped, or how many enemy aircraft they had shot down.

I watched a number of war movies over the Memorial Day weekend, on AMC. I continue to have a difficult time understanding the concept of solving international disagreements by killing one another's young men. And the way that we hated the entire population of various nations, at various times in our history, is very saddening.

Anyways, enough with the deep thoughts. The photos have almost finished uploading, and they are very cool. I expect Matsu has some even better ones, and perhaps can be persuaded to post them at some point.