Fears

After reading the post directly below, sometimes he fears for her sanity.

Third person

She is working on a writing project now that requires her to write in the third person. She's not sure she's happy about this; it's difficult after years of writing in the first and second person. After thinking about it overnight, she's decided that what she needs to do is get more practice writing this way.

Ugly Mac, redux

In case you're wondering what we've been up to, we've been experimenting with what happens when you combine:

• a Umax J700 Mac clone
• three hard drives (2 Gb, 4 Gb, and 40 Gb)
• two disk formatting utilities (FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit and Intech's Hard Disk SpeedTools)
• one copy of XPostFacto
• two processor cards (a 225 MHz 604e and a 350 MHz G4)
• two CD-ROM drives
• lots of RAM, much of which didn't work
• two monitors (640x480 and 800x600)
• two video cards (one Radeon, one Twin Turbo)
• two operating systems (Mac OS 9.2 and OS X 10.2)
• a USB PCI card
• a 10/100 Ethernet PCI card
• and probably a whole lot more stuff that I'm blanking out

End result: a cheap OS X server for only $60 out of pocket. It runs, but when I think about how many billable hours we put into this thing, it probably would have been cheaper to buy a new G4 tower.

Conference Costs

Kynn Bartlett wrote in our comments that Geek Cruises are too expensive. Here's my response (copied into our rants section, too, btw):

Too expensive has to be seen in the light of, too expensive compared to what?

Here's a quick comparison of MacMania to Macworld NY, which isn't an exact equivalent, but it's close. I've left off airfare, because airfare from CA to NY is approximately that of airfare from CA to Hawaii.

Macworld NYC

Platinum Pass: $1500 (Note: 2002 cost, may be more in 2003)
Hotel (6 nights @ $150/night): $900
Transportation and food (7 days @ $50/day): $350
Total: $2750

MacMania

Conference fee: $1000
Inside cabin: $1050
Total: $2050

Now you say: but the NYC conference includes lodging for two, and on the cruise you have to share a room. Okay, here's the numbers for a couple looking to go to both:

Macworld NYC

Platinum Passes (2 @ $1500): $3000
Hotel (6 nights @ $150/night): $900
Transportation and food (7 days @ $100/day): $700
Total: $4600

MacMania

Conference fee (2 @ $1000): $2000
Inside cabin: $2100
Total: $4100

which is still considerably cheaper. Of course, I've listed only the cheapest class of lodging in both cases; obviously, it's easy to upgrade your room at a higher rate for both conferences. The same goes for the quality and quantity of food.

Of course, what's most important is the value of what you get for that dollar. Like a lot of frequent conference attendees, I think that the most valuable part of any conference isn't the seminars, but the interaction between the attendees and each other, and between the attendees and the speakers.

Given this criterion, MacMania blows away just about any other conference I've ever been to. Attendees don't have a choice about interacting with each other and with speakers. That's who you have three meals a day with, that's who you hang out at the pool with, and that's who you see in the evening. The classes themselves end up being a very small part of the overall conference value in comparison to, say, getting Sal Soghoian to debug your AppleScripts over after-dinner drinks.

I've worked for both conferences in the past, and I hope to again in the future. But strictly in terms of conference value per dollar, I think that MacMania comes out way ahead. And I believe that the MacMania numbers can be extrapolated to those of the Geek Cruises overall.

Geek Cruises and Bias

Simon Phipps spoke at the recent .Net Nirvana Geek Cruise, but had an unpleasant experience. He was the joker that Neil threw into the mix to keep things interesting, but it appears that his talks on Java and Open Source didn't go over too well with the other speakers.

Robert Scoble discusses this on his blog, ending with the comment, "I guess Geek Cruises is another one of those shows where you better expect to only hear one side of the story."

My response: Having spoken at three Geek Cruises, I've never gotten any push whatsoever to slant my talks. Hell, I did three JavaScript sesssions at the first Perl Whirl conference.

In this case, it sounds as if it was the speakers that were complaining and Neil was just trying to keep them happy. When you're all stuck together on a ship, there's a certain amount of effort that has to be made towards helping calm people down that you don't necessarily have to do at a land-based conference. I don't think that it's a GC thing at all, but I'd personally wonder about the speakers that complained.

Robert, I think that you've got this one pegged all wrong. And to prove who's right, I'll challenge you to go on the next Geek Cruise, June 1-8 in Hawaii. See you there?

Human shields retreat

While Tom and I are on the fence about the war, we're agreed that the so-called "human shields" are all idiots. Now that The Telegraph has reported that Human shield Britons quit Baghdad, we now think that they're cowards, too. Silly us, thinking that human shields were, well, going to shield anything. Sorry, they can't—it's "too dangerous."

Kucinich

Some of the Democratic candidates for president are mostly unknown to me (and to most people), so I've been giving each of them a shot, usually by reading an interview or two and trying to get additional information. Here's the Salon interview with Dennis Kucinich, who is probably the most anti-war of the candidates. If you read the interview, you'll see that he also appears to have a rich fantasy life when it comes to the nature and good intentions of other countries, more trust in dictators and the United Nations than any person I want to have living in the White House, and silly notions as to how to get things done in the incredibly unlikely event of his election. In short, he's a maroon. Next!