Month: August 2006

Culture

We went to the opening round of the ComedySportz World Championship tonight; it was the first time we’d been in the Montgomery Theatre since San Jose Rep moved into their own building. I’d forgotten how small the place was, but it was the right size for this event.

Parking was a challenge, because something was happening in the Plaza de Cesar Chavez — I don’t know what it was, but there was music and beer, so it was popular. And it was all gone by the time we were on our way home.

The Championship itself started with the procession of the teams and the arrival of the torch — just like the Olympics, but on a one-millionth scale budget.

There were two matches tonight: the Washington Monuments vs. the Hollywood Endorphins and the Minneapolis Ice vs. the Spokane Openers. Hollywood and Minneapolis won, although I’m not sure that matters, since it’s not an elimination tournament. And Jeff got a chance to talk with some of his teachers from CSz Summer Camp, which was nice.

There are two shows tomorrow night, and another two on Saturday night, with the last one on Saturday being the championship match. Rumor has it that San Jose is likely to have a slot in the final.

We probably won’t make it to tomorrow’s shows, though I’d like to see the final match of the evening, Richmond vs. San Jose. But maybe Saturday….

Wiki Wednesday

As I’d hoped, I did go to Socialtext this afternoon for . It had been far too long since I’d gone to an informal gathering like this, at least outside IBM; I didn’t do a good job of catching names, but I had some interesting conversations about favorite computer languages (or maybe it was least-favorite languages…the first thing I heard was “Algol 68”), as well as talking to the Socialtext folks about my experiences installing Socialtext Open and what I wanted to do with it.

The main topic of the evening, though, was TiddlyWiki. Jeremy Ruston, TiddlyWiki’s creator, showed off its capabilities, talked about its genesis and support (in large part, from Ricoh Innovations), and about the community around it. Eric Shulman was also there, and he talked about some of the plugins he’d created (as part of TiddlyTools.

There was also some discussion of the various GTD tools built around TiddlyWiki — I plan to take a closer look at a few of them, especially MonkeyGTD and d3, because I keep falling off the GTD wagon, and maybe having a tool will help me. (Yes, I know that’s foolishly optimistic.)

Eventually, the discussion turned to Open Source software licensing — soon after that, the official meeting broke up, and the aftermeetings began. I spent some time talking with Jonas Luster about Django (and discovering that he liked Rexx).

Most of the group continued on to Gordon Biersch, but I decided to go home and see how Diane was doing — she’s a bit better than she had been (she describes it as having more periods of less vertigo than before), but she’s gonna stay home tomorrow, too. Reading is still quite a challenge for her, and driving would be out of the question.