I am ardent (passive, albeit) supporter of OSCON. I have been watching it since 2000 or thereabouts and came very close to making it in 2006. Each year, I vicariously participate following the coverage on blogs, flickr and various video sites. This year, Greg of Railsenvy fame, condensed all of the work in less than 40mt video, which is worth watching to get a glimpse on the diversity of the track.

I shaved my head again yesterday (its been a while since I had done that), as I mourned the death of Randy Pausch - of Last Lecture fame. You can read more about him here and here.
My heart goes out to Jai, Chloe, Dylan and Logan. All our prayers in this tough time for the Pauschs — Makes you revaluate your priorities and life in general…

Here is a recap of a recent dream my 6yr old had, in his words-

I was on another planet. I was three years old. This planet had a rule against science and punished scientists. At 3 years I wanted to become a scientist and chose becoming one. So they arrested me and put me in jail for 11 years. I continued to be a scientist. So after the release they put me back in jail for being a scientist. I was released after that and given a house to live in..

He has been reading Galileo and Newton recently….

For those in Chicago, I will be presenting at the Open Group conference next week on Semantic Web Services. Its a short session and am excited about it. Drop me a note if you are in downtown and would like to meet for coffee or dinner.
For those of you in Amsterdam, I will be speaking at the SOA Symposium in October. Its a little far out, but its a well canvassed event (from the looks of it). I am planning on visiting Dijkstra’s birthplace in Rotterdam, if possible. Would love to hookup with geeks from around Europe who might be attending.
I am tentatively scheduled to speak at Logistics and Fleet Management conference in ATL in October as well. This is special because, I rarely get to speak in industry conferences, this being dedicated to fleet management folks.
I might go to Portal conference in Tennessee as well as the OOPSLA there..will know more later.

[via reddit] Steve over at Ithaca, has used TEX to create his program to solve the IFCP content. TEX was typesetting markup style language introduced by the great Don Knuth. A rough analogy I can give to layman is that this is like using HTML to write the software that controls ATM (the terminal you take money from). As insane as it sounds, he has proved many a things near and dear to both Software Engineering and CS. Hope he makes it to the top or gets a special award.
Way to go Steve…

I havent spent much time looking at solutions of participants from this year’s ICFP contest, but the link is available for anyone else to look at here.
The important thing is the response and the level of participation. There was a neat writeup by Russel, which is a good start to see his thought pattern before jumping into each of the solutions in the projects page.

Part of SMLNJ site, ICFP tasks were posted late Friday afternoon. This years competition is cooler as it induces practical as well as “out of the world” thinking..
enjoy hacking…

I normally dont wait around in anticipation of items to comeout. So, the nuts that stand in line from 1am to get the best Star Wars seat are a puzzle to me…
But for the past few days I have been monitoring the ICFP site daily for any postings. I cant wait for 2pm CST to see what the challenge is…
Now, I know what people go through to stand in line for Starwars or a release of a new video game…

I have blogged before about Half Price Books in and around Austin. This is another plug for their stores.
Lately, we have been shopping in their clearance aisles - some are marked down to a $1. In other stores they are < $3 sales. The cool thing about that is that I found these books on the $1 sale. I purchased $420 worth of books today, valued at Amazon and Half.com, while only paying $62.00.
Here are some sampling from my today purchase-

For a shopper its a delight, as I find different treasures in their various locations around Austin. Mostly we visit the one on Lamar, but venture to the San Marcos one, Houston one and the south Austin location as well.

Short of blogging about my son, I figured I would use this blog as a journal to archive the key happenings around my family..
Jay has been blowing through books -
::June 20th - he completed Along came Galileo
::June 30th - he started on Blaise Pascal
:: continuing to read the World History Atlas book.

He also completed Singapore Math 2A on June 30th and started in Math 2B.

He is making $$ reading books from Half Price Books.