“I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

- Red, “The Shawshank Redemption”

I like chocolate milkshakes, in ways that the HTML “<strong>” tag can’t really convey.

So a couple of years ago, to keep myself from going all Elvis in my senectitude, I adopted a rule: I’d only have a milkshake as we reached each thermometer milestone of 10 degrees Fahrenheit: I’d have one on the first day we hit 80°, one when we hit 90°, another at 100°, and should we hit 110°, I’d still be able to celebrate.

Unfortunately, I was cheated: I was out of town for the first two 90° days, then we went straight to 100°. (And no 110°, boo hoo.)

This year, I’m not taking any chances: I’m starting at 70°. I deserve it, too: we haven’t hit 70° yet this year, and we’re almost halfway through April already. I further deserve it because Cool Moon has been open since last November, just across the park, and I’ve been able to resist.

Tomorrow, however, the forecast is for 75° - Cool Moon, I’m coming for you.

While working on setting up FestivalFanatic.com, I realized that some of its features would be useful to conference attendees as well… and since the obvious domain name was available, I registered it.

Cut to yesterday evening: when I actually finished the work setting up ConferenceFanatic.com, I twittered about it (and mentioned that FestivalFanatic.com has Amazon DVD links now - hint, hint)… and as it happens, someone I follow (and who follows me) is presenting at the PostgreSQL East conference this weekend - she registered and told me about it using the feedback mechanism.

I also noticed that LinkedIn now has a Twitter-like mechanism, so I added a note there about my two sites.

Cut back to the present, 24 hours later: The PostgreSQL East schedule’s up, and half a dozen new people have signed up to use it. Also, I got a terrific email message from another ex-Apple-ite who’d seen the LinkedIn message, saying great things about ConferenceFanatic.com and what it can become - very encouraging.

(I also got feedback via this site’s mechanism, from someone about a startup opportunity - that was encouraging too; Derrek, I’ll be in touch.)

The Portland International Film Festival is finally over, and though I’m exhausted from the arduous schedule I kept (I saw every film I could - 70 features and 4 collections of shorts), I had a great time — even better than last year, largely because of the wonderful collection of people I met during the festival.

One of the best perks of Silver Screen membership at the Northwest Film Center (which puts on PIFF) is the ability to attend the press screenings that begin a couple of weeks before the festival’s official start: seeing the two press screenings each day opened up a lot of slots during the official festival. A nice side effect was that there were a bunch of other die-hards who attended most of the press screenings too, and since we’d all seen the same things already, we tended to make the same choices of festival screenings as well.

I also met several people who introduced themselves as users of FestivalFanatic.com, the site I created to manage my own schedule. It was also nice to see strangers carrying printed schedules produced by Festival Fanatic (note to those folks: improving schedule printing is near the top of my to-do list!).

Incidentally, the schedule for San Jose’s Cinequest festival is up on FestivalFanatic.com now, for my Bay Area friends who’ll be attending.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d been working on a film festival scheduling site, FestivalFanatic.com. Though it went live then, it really hasn’t been useful without any festivals configured.

As of this morning, though, it now has the Portland International Film Festival schedule in it, and nearly everything I wanted in the first release is working — the notable exception being automatic scheduling, which I hope to finish in a day or two.

It’s been hard to find time to work on Festival Fanatic, though, because I’ve been attending press screenings for the past week and a half (two a day), plus there’s been two Portland Center Stage events and Ignite Portland. Starting tomorrow, it gets worse: there are still press screenings during the day, and the regular festival screenings in the evening. I’m really glad my push for 1.0 is done!

(A shout-out to my pals going to Cinequest, the San Jose film festival: I need to get their printed schedule to enter it. Volunteer to send me one in a comment, please!)

Gina and I went to Ignite Portland 2 tonight, a collection of 5-minute presentations where the slides advance automatically every 20 seconds.

That misses the essence, though: there were a huge variety of subjects, amazingly good (and passionate!) presenters, and a wonderful community feel (even with the Bagdad Theater packed with 700+ people).

You can watch the videos, and whet your appetite for next time (I’m ready already!).

Finally got the initial release of FestivalFanatic into production today: when it grows up, it’ll be a tool to let people get more out of going to film festivals. It’s also a tool to prove that I can do soup-to-nuts Ruby on Rails development.

Today’s version doesn’t do much (actually, the live version doesn’t do anything yet!), but I expect to add a lot of utility between now and when the Portland International Film Festival starts.

(Today’s also the 24th anniversary of Apple’s announcement of Macintosh - am I really that old?!)

Just returned from a much-needed vacation on Kauai. I’ve been there several times before, but it was Gina’s first time - we both had a great time, we snorkeled, we relaxed & read, the weather was great, wish you were there, blah blah blah.

The high point of the trip was our second day there: we took the tour of Steelgrass Farm.

…a multidisciplinary educational center for agriculture, music and the arts. On the agriculture side, we’re a demonstration farm with extensive plantings of bamboo, cacao (the chocolate tree) and vanilla, working to develop Kauai’s future as a center for sustainable, diversified agriculture by providing hands-on training, workshops, and educational tours for residents and visitors.

Going in, we didn’t know what to expect, but we really enjoyed the tour: we were led by the owner, Tony Lydgate, and his daughter Emily. They’ve been working on this place for eight years or so, starting by ripping out most of the existing overgrowth, then planting a huge variety of mostly-native plants and trees: the selection “was based on the desire to have varieties that provide food, or that are indigenous, decorative or medicinal, or useful in crafts or construction,” and everything is maintained organically.

In addition to the bamboo for which the place is named, they also tried to grow bananas, but that turned out to be a learning experience: there’s a blight on the island, and their bananas didn’t survive it. Almost by accident, they discovered that cacao seem to do well there, and the trees’ natural enemies happen to be insects that the local wild chickens find tasty (organic!). Since then, they’ve been producing cacao seedlings, and have been spreading them around the island - they hope to get enough under cultivation to make a co-op feasible (which the island could really use: we saw hardly any sugar cane in our trips around the island; even as recently as seven or eight years ago, I remember lots of it).

During the tour, Tony and Emily were enthusiastic about sharing their breadth of knowledge with us, in fascinating detail, from botany to economics. They have lots of stories about how the place came to be: what worked and what didn’t along the way. We got to taste a lot of fruit right off the trees, like acerola berries (very tart, just like the vitamin C tablets made from them), Meyer lemons, limes, guavas, and plenty of starfruit; after each sample, the cores, peels, pits, and seeds were tossed in nearby brush - organic! They’re also working on “cultivating” vanilla; though it’s not ready for tasting, we saw pods dangling from the vanilla orchid vines in the trees, and to hear about the manual pollination process they used.

Then, the chocolate. Tony broke open a ripe pod, and we got to sample the seeds as Tony explained the strategies that cacao has evolved that allow it to flourish. From there, we sat in an airy tent and got to blind-taste and compare a variety of high-end dark chocolate bars (and as a result of the tasting, I’ve got a couple of new favorites).

All in all, a terrific morning - if you’re going to be in Kauai, I recommend it (though it’s probably not for kids: there’s a lot of botany before you get to the chocolate).

This morning’s Oregonian newspaper had this story (sorry, they forbid linking to the photo) about a newly-uncovered schoolroom chalkboard that still bore a lesson from 1969: in neat block lettering, the board says:

Apollo 10
Apollo 10 is on the way to the moon.
It has three astronauts aboard.
They will look closely at the moon.
They will splash down on Sunday.

That this amazing simple quote survived (behind the now-worn-out green chalkboard that replaced the old one) is fascinating. However, my favorite part isn’t that quote: it’s this little list visible on the far right side of the chalkboard:

Plans
read
write
work
color
choose

I’m gonna get a reprint of this picture for my office, just so I can use this list in my own planning.

I just finished attending RailsConf 2007 here in Portland, barely a week after attending the first BarCampPortland… they’ve inspired me, and I’m hoping that this post starts a more public period of blogging for me - I’m hoping to have more interesting things to say (but we’ll see!)…