If I announce a contest,

If I announce a contest, I suppose I ought to annouce winners. First place goes to Greg Neagle, who found the Oregon Shakespeare Festival theater addresses on their site. Second place goes to Taine Gilliam, who found the same office address that I'd found, but (unlike me) made the assumption that the theater address and the office address were the same, which turned out to be the case. What threw me off in both cases is that I'm used to theaters having not only separate addresses from the office, but separate addresses from each other. Giving one address for three theaters and one office made me think that they were only listing the office address. Now that I've been there, I know that they're all within a few feet of each other.

Oh, and Titus Andronicus was amazing--like a cross between a horror film and the nightly news. Just when you thought things couldn't get uglier, they did. While it was gruesome and gory, it also had excellent acting and was an amazing show in general. If you get a chance to go to the festival, I recommend it.

Problem: You're reading email using

Problem: You're reading email using Entourage, when you come across a URL. You click on it, and when you switch over to IE/Mac, you get a 404 error saying that the Web page couldn't be found. You've fallen prey to the # bug, where the Entourage/IE combination changes the pound sign in the URL to %23... but the Web server doesn't understand that.

Solution: Use this # Fix bookmarklet to fix the URL. Drag it up to your Favorites bar in IE, and after you get that 404 error, click on the bookmarklet. It'll fix it right up. Or at least it should; if it doesn't, let me know.

Good news, bad news: I

Good news, bad news: I have a bad habit. I see a conference that I really want to speak at, and I think of half-a-dozen things that I think would make good proposals to that crowd, and I pitch all of them to the organizers. So what's the bad side about that? It's when they accept all or most, and I find myself rushing around trying to do everything at once. Or, in other words, it looks like I'll be doing 3 sessions at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference.

Maybe what I need to do is get involved in conference organization, so I can pitch the sessions without having to actually give them all myself.

And yeah, this was one of the two conferences that I said a few weeks ago to think good thoughts about my being invited to. I haven't heard back from the second, and I'm still hopeful. Keep up the good work!

Oddly enough, the world didn't

Oddly enough, the world didn't stop changing just because I took a vacation. For instance, I may be the last one to blog WarChalking, but it's still a cool concept: cryptic signage to note where wireless net access may be found, based on hobo signs.

The first time I met

The first time I met Dan Lyke, I told him stories from Tom's days in the rag trade. It appears that Dan's now working there himself. Best of luck with the new gig, Dan!

Just an update, so that

Just an update, so that y'all know: I'm home, after 3 states, 1765 miles, and lots of hugs. To those of you I saw: it was wonderful, we gotta to it again sometime soon, and you're always welcome here. To those who I wasn't able to see--sorry, next time!

The Programming Soviet is an

The Programming Soviet is an interesting takedown of some of the Open Source zealots and their worldview. Overall, I think open source is a good thing, but I take issue with those who think that a software license is more important than the person who uses that license. That's idiotic; it's just another religious view. I read these screeds by Linux fanatics who are programmers who can't comprehend that the vast majority of other people are not interested in programming, and simply don't care about how powerful or cool a bit of software is, if it isn't easy to use. In the open source world the fanatics inhabit, things like, say, customers aren't important.

When I was on the MacMania cruise a few weeks ago, Adam Engst told me a story about open source fanatic Eric Raymond's speech at the MacHack conference two years ago. Raymond spent a few hours preaching the wonders of open source to this crowd of Mac developers, and was then asked "But where do end-users fit into this?" His response was something like "Users are dark matter." The Mac programmers, disciplined by years of actual customers who punished them for bad interface designs, jumped on his shit with both feet. One of the most interesting developments with Mac OS X has been its adoption by many Linux geeks who want a Unix system and a decent GUI and lots of mature, easy-to-use software. The intersection of the user-centered world of the Mac and the programmer-centered open source people is already leading to some interesting ferment in software.

For those folks who got

For those folks who got a good laugh out of the binary joke I passed along a week or two ago, check out The 12480 Writing System.

For those keeping track of

For those keeping track of my peregrinations, I was here, I'm now here, and tomorrow I get to meet him. It's been a good few days.