The University was gracious enough to send me out this year to Portland for RailsConf, the big gathering of Ruby on Rails developers and users. The best part about it for me has been the opportunity to finally meet in person several people I’ve only known via the Internet until now: Seth, for whom I used to work, Jim, who worked for Seth at the same time, and Mark, long-time Internet friend.

I came up Tuesday afternoon, a day early, so as to provide a bit of time to run around Portland and its environs before the conference began. Mark and his fiancé Cindi picked me up at the airport, from which we took the light rail and bus back to their place. We enjoyed a meal at the local pub, a fun and busy hole in the wall that featured really excellent burgers, before settling in for the evening. (My plans for becoming a vegetarian keep getting derailed by delicious, delicious meat. Why must you be so tasty, animals?) It was great to finally get to meet Mark and Cindi face to face after years of disembodied communication.

Wednesday morning we went and grabbed a rental car and headed out to Powell’s Books, one of the most expansive bookstores I’ve ever had the pleasure to prowl. It’s an amazing place, so overwhelming that employees hand out maps to the place as visitors enter. We spent a happy couple of hours roaming around, enjoying the rare tomes, odd finds, and general wonderfulness of the place.

From there we headed up I-85 to Multinomah Falls, one of the numerous cascades that perforate the Columbia River Gorge, the immense river valley the waterway has carved into the landscape over the millenia. The falls were lovely, and well worth the 30 minutes or so we spent wandering around. I took advantage of the gift shop to replace my wedding ring, which had leapt off my finger as an involuntary sacrifice to the San Marcos River a week or two before, with a $2.00 mood ring (which has the added advantage that I can keep an eye on it to know when Kathy and I are having marital challenges).

We drove back along the Historic Columbia River Highway, a winding sylvan road that parallels the interstate but is a much prettier drive, as it takes one through forests and farmland with some spectacular views. The most impressive of these is found at Vista House, a striking structure built in 1918 on a rocky promontory overlooking the gorge that now houses a museum and gift shop. It’s a magnificent place; one can see around a dozen miles of the gorge from that overlook. (The gift shop has a $3.85 pennywhistle which turned out to be surprisingly good as well.)

We had dinner at The Edgefield Manor. The Manor bears a bit of explaining: the site was originally constructed as a poor farm, a place where impoverished people could come and live while working to grow produce, thereby feeding themselves and earning their keep — an arrangement that seems a good deal more humane than many modern programs designed to address the same need. Later, the premises became a nursing home for a number of years, but was eventually abandoned. The McMenamin brothers, who had by that point been in the business of acquiring old properties and turning them into great UK-inspired pubs for several years, bought the property for $300,000, cleaned and renovated the place, turned loose a handful of artists on the place, and created an absolutely delightful resort.

The Manor now features a variety of services and entertainment: two restaurants, a hotel, a glass blower, a brewery, a 10-seat bar built into an old gardening shed, a golf course, a distillery, a movie theater, a winery, and herb garden, and a grill. The clever, inventive work of many talented artists is evident throughout, even extending as far as the exposed overhead piping. I had a beer sampler as part of dinner, which featured 6 of their brews. All were excellent, though the porter and the ruby brew (a raspberry ale) were my particular favorites. I even liked their IPA, a variety I’m not normally crazy about.

Mark and Cindi then dropped me by the Red Lion Inn, to which it had never apparently occurred that conferences of technical people would actually be interested in using their “free high-speed wireless internet”, which is neither free, since you have to rent a room to use it, nor high-speed, as I’ve not gotten better than dialup speeds, and is only marginally wireless since I have to put my laptop in the window of the room to even get a connection.

More to come in a later post…

My nerdy obsession of the hour: iStalkr, an RSS compiler that grabs feeds from various services you specify and plots the data therefrom on a timeline. I’ve got mine set up currently to combine the books I’ve finished reading, posts I make to my weblog, twitter messages I post, bookmarks I plop onto del.icio.us, photos I post to Flickr, and movies I rent from Netflix. It makes for an interesting combined view which I’m sure will come in handy for a reference while writing our Christmas letter this year. You can see my timeline here.

We were treated to a Ukelele/Accordion duet this evening:

I like the water fountains here in Portland. They’re handsomely crafted and run continuously — a surprising sight for someone who comes from a place as water-bound as Central Texas:

UPDATE: You can also zoom out on this photo here.

This just in:

Please join us in congratulating Kathy McMains and Julie Henry, recipients of the 2007 IT Scholarships. Kathy and Julie will receive $500 scholarships through the Office of Student Financial Aid this Fall.

Kathy McMains, a sophomore working toward a Bachelor of Recreational Administration degree, is the wife of Sean McMains, Senior Programmer Analyst in Instructional Technologies Support.

Julie Henry is the Senior Administrative Assistant in the Vice President’s Office. Julie is a senior working toward a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in English with Creative Writing Emphasis.

Congratulations are in order:

• In spite of carrying an 18 hour load and being home in time (almost) every day for the kids when they finished school, Kathy concluded her semester with a 4.0 GPA. Nice work, sweetieschnoockumsface!
• Maggie has mastered riding a bike without training wheels — another in the list of “last times” as our youngest gets older. (At least as important, she’s begun to remember to put her helmet on when she rides.)

Yesterday marked both the completion of Emily’s 15th year and Mother’s Day, one of those Hallmark-manufactured holidays where, unless you’re a Mother, the best you can hope to do is break even.

We started Mother’s Day with a parade of presents — coffee, chocolate, a piece of wood with nails in the shape of a smiley face, pez dispensers, candles, a set of Mexican Train Dominos — and a rather scattered breakfast in bed, featuring a quesadilla, toast, coffee, and a grapefruit. Kathy was pleased both with the breakfast and gifts, and the celebration seemed to fit nicely with our family’s slightly skewed way of celebrating holidays.

Once the feting of the mothers was settling down, we moved on to give Emily her birthday presents, which included some stuffed animals from Maggie and clothes that she’d had a hand in selecting several weeks before. The big surprise, however, was a custom-make electric guitar. With some help from Grant (the proprietor of our friendly neighborhood music store, good friend and bandmate), I had ordered a Saga LC-10 guitar kit a while back. I then did a good deal of reading and consulting with my friends who, unlike me, actually know something about finishing wood and settled on using a Mirage Color Shift Paint Kit to finish it out. Here’s a bit of video of the color shift effect shortly after I finished painting the guitar body:

I had actually intended to do a bit more with the finish — putting Emily’s name on it, adding a Jolly Roger — but it’s remarkable difficult to build a guitar in the same house as a 14-year old without her knowing about it. Here’s a snap of her and her new guitar (tentatively named “Oliver”) moments after delivery:

After church, Emily’s friends began gathering for her birthday party, for which she had decided she wanted to do paintball. We had both cars packed to capacity as we drove out to Tactical Paintball for an afternoon of shooting each other. Kathy, of course, was the star, and managed to perforate 3 of the staff members in the span of one game. Liam had the dubious honor of receiving the nastiest welt where he got plugged in the back from relatively short range. Here’s the assembled birthday team, ready to do their worst:

So, altogether a great day, aside from the fact that we’ve had to reschedule celebrating Mother’s Day with my mother (who, judging by the fact that I couldn’t reach her by phone all day, was either celebrating happily with other segments of the family or drowning her sorrows in pizza and root beer in a disconsolate corner somewhere).

UPDATE: Seth has rightly pointed out that Mother’s Day does not have its genesis in Hallmark and its sentiment-milking ilk, but in a real person. As usual, wikipedia has all the details. Thanks, Seth!

Sorry normal humans — this is one of my infrequent geeky posts. To mitigate your disappointment, I will provide you with a joke before I tear into the technical stuff, courtesy of Steve Lux:

How many ADD kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I don’t know, how many?
Hey, want to go ride bikes?

So, over the last few days I’ve gone a bit crazy with Microformats. “What are Microformats?” you may well ask. They’re a standard way of creating machine-readable structured data within an XHTML document, which is interesting for a variety of reasons. For example, I’ve embedded my contact information in this page in such a way that it is both meaningful to humans (see the “Who I Am” sidebar) and computers. Thus, when I visit this page now while using Firefox with the excellent Tails plugin installed, an icon lights up at the bottom of my browser window indicating that Firefox found contact information on the page. If I click on that icon, I get the option to add that information to my contact book, send email to me, or get a report on how popular my site is. (For you old-school Apple folks, it’s rather like Apple Data Detectors for the Internet.)

The most interesting microformats to me thus far are hCard, which handles contact information, hCalendar, which provides a framework for calendar data, and XFN, which lets you indicate what kind of a real-world relationship you share with a person you link to. This morning, I took a couple of hours to implement support for hCard and hCalendar in our Content Management System for the University. (Not yet publicly available — I’ll post a link to an example once the next update to our CMS is published on May 25.)

In the meantime, if you want to play along, go grab Tails and see where on the web you can discover Microformats. I’ve embedded a few things here already, and will be adding more as time goes on.

Apple is tackling some of the environmental issues that face computer and electronics companies head on. Good for them.