Two Slashes

Alright, so this should at least partially explain my late posting last night.  Yes, I concede defeat, but it only means you’re getting two posts today.  And perhaps a slice of cake.  I hear people like cake.

It’s a funny thing.  Last night, I found myself up until all hours of the night, alternating between working on (an admittedly lame) project for one of my computer science classes (a simple shell, in case you were wondering) and helping a few of my friends set up everything they needed for a conference they were having over this weekend.  An iPhone software developer’s conference, to be exact, complete with introductory labs and plenty of student-provided help on hand.

And now, day one into the conference, and I’ve already found myself walking around wearing an Apple beanie and a lime green shirt with a huge silhouette of an iPhone screen-printed across the front (a shirt reserved for conference staff).  It’s the opposite of what one would expect given my previous rant about iPhones back when they were first announced.

Yes, the same person who was elected chair of the local student Linux Users Group is now running around answering random questions of MacBook-toting attendees.  While carrying around a Treo Pro (which runs Windows Mobile – is that double blasphemy?).  And a Dell laptop.  (If that’s not a sign of me at least being aware of and open to what’s around, I don’t know what is.)  At least most of the people I came in contact with didn’t notice (or at least, they didn’t show any signs of it).

Admittedly, the questions I’ve been answering aren’t so much related to Objective-C and a device with more influence on culture than as they are locating the bathroom or finding out what time a talk starts and ends, and there’s been plenty of me sitting and babysitting overflow rooms full of people (due to the unexpectedly high demand for attendance in combination with being assigned smaller rooms for presentation), interspersed with babysitting a lobby full of hungry people and carrying the remains of the feeding hour for those hungry people out to a dumpster.  I’ve been taking any spare time between (or even during) these events writing posts and working on my shell more.

What I’ve caught of the talks has been fairly informative, though useless to me as someone not all that interested (at the moment, at least) in the iPhone platform, and it isn’t quite enough to make me “eat more fruit.”  That isn’t to say they weren’t well-presented; it seems as though the guy who’s been doing most of the talking has seen this YouTube video about proper PowerPoint etiquette.  (And before you ask…yes, he was using Keynote, so it might not be all him.)

Oh, and while bugs in software are fun, bugs that laugh at you are even more fun.  (Yes, that’s a bug in my code.)

And yes, the cake is a lie.  Or maybe not…