Saturday, March 22, 2008

Spring Retreat 2008

:: swag ::
I'm online from the Pauling House, shooting the breeze. Anagrams of Wanderers with the word "nerds" in 'em were on the board last night, but on Sir T's recommendation I consulted an anagrams server to get Errands, We and Darers, New.

Also, Kirby Thomas Urner anagrams to Your Bankers Mirth, which has an apropos grunchy flavor to it.

Patrick and I compared notes on the recently concluded Pycon, where I represented my firm as senior partner.

Lots of talk about ToonTown, its heritage (through art books and websites both), plus a subplot of me trying to upload raw video from my Pycon talk (session #53), through a Java applet running on Ubuntu, supplied by Google.

Some discussion of goofy hollow earth theories, adhered to by some Nazis.

I've strewn swag on the table, including Cuisenaire rods, an XO (green and white), some literature, some geometry toyz. A toy microscope showed up (blue and white), which Bill has been trying to repair.

But the gizmo that takes the cake is Terry's new Apple Xserver with three terabytes of storage. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with it out of the box.

Catching up regarding Eris, Quaoar and Sedna, thanks to Cosmos by Giles Sparrow, a beautiful gigantic tome.