To cut to the chase, this was my favorite Cirque experience; I’ve seen several of their shows over the years, starting with a private performance for Apple folks in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, sometime in the late ’80s. This time, the music was great, and the athletic performances were stellar — especially the new “Wheel of Death,” which, even with our under-the-end view, was pretty amazing.

The clowns were great, too, and Cirque’s sense of humor is always my favorite part of the show. Funny story: y’know how they pick people from the audience, and you wonder whether those people are “plants”? I now have firsthand experience that they’re not: tonight they picked me. In the five or so minutes I was up there, I got dragged around the stage, had my leg humped by one clown, the other picked a fight with me, and the ringmaster tased all three of us. (If you get picked for this, do nothing when he tases you the first couple of times. He’ll point at the other two, twitching on the stage, then tase you again – then you fall to the floor too, twitching like the others. Twitch some more when he tases your crotch.)

All in all, an incredible evening. Go see the show – it’s a lot of fun, even without me in it. Who knows – perhaps you’ll be!

Where I am in the book (p71), there’s a quote, the last paragraph from a September 1753 letter from Franklin to botanist Peter Collinson:

These Thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ’till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attentions of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so become the Occasion of more exact disquisitions and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.

(You can read the whole letter, which details Franklin’s recent researches into electricity, here — it starts on p148, ends on p153.)

I’m inspired to post this here because I happened to have just registered to attend Portland’s Open Source Bridge conference, coming up June 1-4 — the open source movement is the next Age of Enlightenment.

Here’s Dad’s 1974 card – it’s one of his easier ones, made even easier when I tell you that those white dots on the right were made with a punch and go through the card. Merry Christmas!

1. I ignore chain-letter-like things, which is why it’s taken me so long to give in and make this list (and why I haven’t tagged 25 more of my friends – you can thank me later).
2. I started kindergarten when I was four.
3. My partner Gina got me on Craigslist.
4. Hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” usually makes me tear up, for about four different reasons.
5. I’ve visited 38 states, mostly in one summer journey in my own small airplane.
6. The least authentic of those visits was to Montana, where I did a touch-and-go at the southeasternmost airport, and only briefly put one wheel down.
7. The most authentic of those visits was in Albany, Missouri, where I was introduced to the town doctor by his cousin who’d picked me up on the road into town (and I wasn’t even hitchhiking). The doctor bought me lunch (at one of the two open restaurants in town), showed me his restored car collection, took me on rounds at the hospital and introduced me to his patients, let me buy him & his wife dinner (at the other), put me up for the night, and gave me the keys to one of the cars to drive myself back to the airport in the morning.
8. I can open champagne with a sword, one of many important things I learned from my father.
9. The only times I cut class in junior high school was to watch the film & TV companies that often shot near where we lived (in a trailer park in Malibu). I was there when Fonzie jumped the shark.
10. My first job was in the kitchen of the Sandcastle restaurant in Malibu, the blue and white building outside Jim Rockford’s trailer’s front door.
11. I got into computers by getting lost my first time in Santa Monica, near a closed pizza place, a sketchy-looking bar, and the first computer store in the world. My first job in computers was entering BASIC programs from a book there – I never finished the book, and was never paid. (Hi Greg!)
12. When I was into citizen’s band radio in the mid-70’s, my handle was “Condor”.
13. I see a lot of movies: around 200 last year, around 80 so far this year (mostly at the Portland International Film Festival, underway now). The only genre I don’t bother with is horror.
14. I value my oldest friends exceedingly highly; though I’m rarely in touch with them, I think of them often and miss them deeply.
15. I once drove from Santa Monica to Malibu with my late best friend Lad, with my seat fully reclined and me unable to see, in traffic. I worked the pedals, he steered. This was about the limit of our high-school hijinks.
16. My favorite movie line is when Harold gives Maude a coin stamped with “Harold loves Maude”, and she throws it off the pier and says “So I’ll always know where it is.”
17. Everything I know about bowling, I learned from watching Dad: Get a heavy ball. Throw it really hard.
18. My favorite film is “The Shawshank Redemption.”
19. Baseball is pretty much the only sport I like watching, yet I don’t like extra innings; nine is enough. (Worst baseball decision ever: at a San Jose Giants game, I turned down a job offer from Mark’s friend Pierre at then-nascent EBay. I think the Giants lost that day, too.)
20. I play guitar, but not very well. Other instruments I’ve attempted include drums, cello, piano, flute, banjo, ukulele, clarinet, and French horn.
21. I never snuck into extra movies at the multiplex until my Dad got me to, when I was nearly 30. Now we rarely do, because we need to get home to the dog.
22. Nowadays, I write software mostly in Ruby. Other languages I’ve been paid to use include BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Bourne shell, Postscript, c-shell, Perl, Bash shell, Java, Javascript, and Python, roughly in that order. Oh, also: 6502, 6800, 8080/Z80, 68000, and ARM assembly languages.
23. I have a high-school diploma *and* a California high school equivalence certificate.
24. Our dog is named after the little girl in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, of course.
25. I own a straitjacket. Surprised?

It’s been 35 years since the first of these cards – I’m starting a new tradition, posting them here for the holidays. Here’s the first one.

“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”

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.

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.)

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.

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!)