iamcal

Wet noodle victory

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I went up to the City last night for dinner with Cal and Elina. Been meaning to spend time with them, as I had pretty much fallen off the face of their world last year, and seeing Cal at SxSW reminded me that, hey, these two are pretty neat, go spend time with them!

At some point in the evening, Elina commented that she'd pick me in a fight against Cal. Mind you, it'd have to be a drag-out, no holds barred, cheating allowed AND encouraged fight, but she'd still pick me.

Me.

ME!

Against a man who has about 5 stones on me.

Have I mentioned how much I love Elina recently? Probably not enough.

Cal immediately took the challenge, and tackled me.

Well, sorta.

So, I have these years and years and years of fighting with my older brother. I have those other years of avoiding showers at college with four guys trying to somehow, any way, get me into that shower.

I think they liked it when I resisted. Made the game much more fun.

So, here Cal is, trying to tackle me and throw me over his shoulder to claim victory. I immediately dropped into a defensive stance, backed up down the hallway, and, well, sent little love-taps to keep him at bay.

I was mildly unsuccessful in two ways. One: I received the love-taps right back. Two: the floors are hardwood and I was in socks. One good tug and I'm back in the living room, and once again, easily tackle-able.

That's a word, right? Tackle-able?

I had to resort to Annie's wet-noodle technique of going completely limp to avoid being thrown in the air. This, of course, frustrated Cal, as I wasn't exactly playing by the house rules. Which is good, because no one told me I had to play by them. When the two of them played by the rules, both of them got hurt. Me? All I had was the full embarrassment of landing on my ass when the I was flipped backwards.

Eventually all agreed that, yes, Cal was indeed stronger than I am, but I was in better shape than he was.

If we had to run five miles before we fought, well, then, I'd claim victory.

Yahoo hack Day continued

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The day has been full of very interesting workshops. For the most part, they've been YahoO! centric, but not all of them have been completely so. My favorite events have been the hands-on workshops. The hands-on part hasn't been building anything huge, but it has been enough to kick start the use of the various APIs.

At the beginning of one of the hands-on workshops, one where the presenter provides files for the attendees to update and modify, following along with the presentation, a guy three or four people away from me asks the presenter to pause, he lost his wifi connection. The presenter immediately offered to copy files from his USB card to the attendees computer, if only he could find the fob. He started looking around, when the attendee offered to use his USB drive. The presenter said sure, and proceeded to plug in the device.

This exchange struck me as quite entertaining, mostly due to Windows viruses that can be transmitted via USB fobs, some more insiduous than others. The whole event smacked me as a clever social engineering hack attempt by the attendee to get access to the presenter's system.

Later in the day, during Cal's presenation, I noticed an artist drawing Cal. The picture itself was quite good, though the angle I had meant I couldn't really see if the likeness was strong. Later in the evening, after dinner, but before the Beck concert, the artist approached me and asked if he could draw me. Wow, I thought. Of all the people here he could draw, many of whom I think are more interesting than I, he chose to draw me. Cool!

A photographer took a picture over his shoulder of me, and then asked the artist his name and email. David Newman is his name, we'll see how the picture turns out. After looking at his website, I need to provide the disclaimer, I was fully clothed when he drew my picture, thinking, don't move, stay still, give him something real to draw. That, and don't stare back at him.

During the day, I saw Terry Chay, who I went to college with, wandering around. I've seen him here and at his presentation at OSCON last month. Vernon from VA Software (four years ago!) recognized me and said hello. He has an 18 month old boy, still lives in San Francisco.

I've been thrilled that there are more women here than most technical events. I suspect it's because there are actually women here at the company, making the number at the event greater. Not all of them are programmers, but that matters little to me: they're here, that matters.

Now, if only I could figure out a non-ultimate related hack.