Lacking Credibility

I’ve been in MN for a week. Well not quite a week, last Wednesday Jen and I flew to Chicago early in the morning, we spent the day and night in Chicago then on Thursday we drove through Wisconsin to MN. Luckily the night before I had purchased John Hodgman’s The Area Of My Expertise as an Audio Book. Which provided us with a spectacular 6 or so hours (without the Hobo Names) of entertainment. We stayed at Jen’s mom’s house, and spent a lot of time with Jen’s best friend ever Beth (a spectacular girl.) On Saturday I Jen tricked me into going to a wedding. Which was fine I guess, if you like loud country music in moose lodge for a wedding reception. On Sunday we went to the Mall of America with Beth, and it was awesome. There was pretty decent sushi for the middle coast. On monday we went to Beth’s mom’s house, and then went out for pie and I tried not to die. I was successful in this endevour. Today we went to the mall of america again where I bought the Macbook pro previously mentioned. And also had more pie and spent some time with Derrick. All in all it was not a very spectacularly interesting week unless you were here to enjoy it. Which you weren’t.

Because my girlfriend really needed a laptop for this next week in MN and I really need one because well I really need one. I went out and bought a 15″ MacBook Pro 2.33ghz Core 2 Duo. It’s pretty ‘fing sweet.

All I want for christmas is a MacBook Pro.

1) find 2gb RS-MMC/MMCmobile in the City of San Francisco. I suppose I’ll just have to buy it online. It’ll probably be cheaper that way anyway.

2) transfer files to my Nokia 6682 over bluetooth directly to the RS-MMC card.

I’m considering starting a San Francisco Hacking Society chapter. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks ever since I was at Ritual Roasters with Donovan Preston, Steve Dekorte, and some other people and Steve expressed the desire for a shorter more frequent SuperHappyDevHouse in San Francisco. This is of course exactly what a Hacking Society would be. So for the past couple of weeks I’ve been considering trying to organize one, and most importantly I’ve been reflecting on why the ill-fated Davis Hacking Society failed.First of all it was a poorly publicized event. Really the only way people found out about it was via the Davis Wiki. We lacked the LUG affiliation which most Hacking Societies have, this was by design but clearly there weren’t enough programmers in the Davis Wiki audience.Second aside from the 3 regular attendees (Me, Zac, and Philip) people were showing up who either 1) Didn’t code and were therefor nearly ignored. 2) Didn’t have laptops 3) Were distracting.So what have I learned from the fall of DHS?I have to tell people about it. People need to know about it before they show up. I need to go to BayPiggies, and SuperHappyDevHouse, and even work and scream from the roof tops about this great thing. I need to have a dedicated wiki, and a mailing list, and all those things.I have to listen to other people. I organized DHS in more of a vacuum then I would have liked. It was just hard to get input from people other than “Hey, cool.” So the time and place selections were completely arbitrary. Partly this was because it wasn’t a pre-existing group of people I was trying to organize this with. I was making a new thing, and like most new things it never works right the first time. I intentionally avoided the LUG affiliation because I didn’t want people to think it was all Linux all the time, and we’d just be jabbering on about which distro was better all the time. I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want it to be that. I wanted it to be open, free of prejudices against OS, Language, or Editor. Now of course, there are more organizations from which I can draw attendance, SuperHappyDevHouse is exactly the kind of thing I want, except on a smaller scale so that it can happen more frequently.A weeknight evening might not be the best timeslot. DHS was on thursdays from 7 until the cafe closed. I think people tend to have stuff to do at night. After work or just don’t want to do anything. I think weekend Saturday or Sunday afternoon might be better. The time should be predictable, though I do like the idea of adhoc sprinting it only works after you’ve built up an expansive network of participants, and are able to communicate with the participants.A cafe that was popular because it wasn’t popular might not have been the best choice. I alwasy liked Cafe Roma because of it’s flexibility. It didn’t have a bar, or any tables bolted to the floor, everything was very easy to reconfigure and no one minded when you did reconfigure. It was also virtually empty during our timeslot.I think that about covers it. Now it’s just about the details and not repeating my past mistakes.

• Blick Art Materials - 1414 Van Ness Avenue
• Leland Tea Company - 1416 Bush St. (@Polk)
• SF S.N.O.B. - 1327 Polk Street (between Pine and Bush)

This evening just moments ago, a great honour was bestowed upon me. So great an honour in fact, I shall relate it to you shortly….Now then, tonight I had the great honour to meet John Hodgman. Who in addition to being great and honourable is without a doubt completely and utterly brilliant. This great honour occured at Cody’s Books (a very fine establishment indeed) in downtown San Francisco. He spoke, we laughed, we cried (from laughing), and then there was the brandy and the hobo songs and poetry. All in all it was a wholy satisfying life experience and I think I can now say with complete confidence that I will die a happy man. In addition to the afformentioned festivites there were also the signing of things. Not just books mind you, for no mere book signing would do “The Hodg” (as I feel our long standing friendship of 5 whole minutes allows me to call him) justice. And now for the schwag which I will hereafter also refer to as “the hodg.”First off we have his book An Almanac Of Complete World Knowledge Compiled With Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by me John Hodgman a Professional Writer, in The Areas Of My Expertise which you yourself may have the honour of purchasing at fine booksellers worldwide and on The Internet. This however is not any of those books, this one is signed with a very special inscription.Secondly we have the chalk. The official chalk of hobos everywhere.Third we have the one of a kind “crappy block of wood.” Of course “signed” by John Hodgman with the traditional H in sunrays.And last, but certainly not least, at John Hodgman’s suggestion I allowed him to sign my precious 12″ powerbook. Below is the inscription in 3 parts.For these pictures and more you may checkout thisUpdate: I previously failed to mention that I had this event was also frequented by notable names of the San Francisco “blogodrome.” Violet Blue was there, and I sat a mere seat away from Merlin Mann of 43folders though my crippling shyness and urges of self preservation and avoidance of fanboyism prevented me from somehow injecting myself into the conversation he was engaged in with a number of female cohorts.