I've been too busy to blog this weekend (gasp!), but I'm happy to
report a productive week. I spent Monday writing an Emacs 22
pre-release review for Don Marti of LinuxWorld.com. I'll send the
author contract on Monday. (Yay! Another $350 for writing!)

I attended Enterprise2.0Camp on Tuesday, and I shared some of the
things we talked about at CASCON2006. I'm getting a little tired of
saying that I don't have the answers to the questions I raise, though,
so I should probably sit down and help figure things out. ;) It was
great catching up with Tom Purves,
Goran Matic, and the rest of the Camp folks.

I spent Wednesday concentrating on my KMD2004 paper, blogging most of
my raw thoughts as a way of getting around writer's block. See,
blogging can be productive procrastination… ;) I've been slowly
reworking the blog entries into a more scholarly form on my hard disk.

Thursday was a bit of a blah day, though. I was feeling low-key
because of the different things I needed to work on. I was supposed to
meet Jed, but he was offered free concert
tickets, so we postponed dinner. I did end up making a nice set of
business cards, though. People like the new design which includes a
stylized portrait.

Friday was a very productive day. I woke up early and rewrote my
research proposal, adding all sorts of nifty diagrams. After that, I
hung out in the Emacs channel on IRC for a bit. I had fun catching up
with people there while waiting for Jed to call.

Jed and I had dinner at Simon Sushi on Spadina, then went to the Night
Lights event at King's College Circle. We met Quinn there, and then we
headed to Second Cup for warm beverages. Chatted a bit. Ran into
Pavel Zaitsev. Went back to the Night Lights
thing, hung out for a bit, then headed over to meet Simon, Shane and
Lara, who had attended a lecture by Deepak Chopra. It was fun hanging
out.

I insisted on walking Quinn home, partly for company and partly for
security. Good thing Simon and I accompanied her, as there was a
homeless person sleeping right in front of her door. She had to go in
through the back entrance.

I spent the weekend deepening my connections to people and getting a
fair bit of exercise. I learned something on Saturday about how I
prefer to spend my time, but that's worth a separate blog entry. Other highlights: dinner with James Iveniuk, Mike Bailey, Simon Rowland, Roger Yang, Eyal, and Mariette. We passed by the arcade, too, where I beat Simon at driving and shooting! I don't know if I'll ever let him live it down. ;) We played foosball there, then went to Graduate House for even more foosball and some table tennis. Fun. =)

On Sunday, I went to the Toronto bead fair and picked up whatever I
needed to make necklaces and earrings. I have a few diodes and chips
I've been meaning to make into stuff for a while now, and I wouldn't
mind I also picked up a rather classy set of rose glass beads that
look almost like pearls, and I'll probably make an elegant choker or a
bracelet.

Sunday evening was terrific, too. Gabriel Mansour pinged me about hanging out. Given that he lives in Markham (near IBM, in fact), it was a bit of a mission for him to commute downtown in order to hang out for a few hours – but it was well worth it, I think. He probably didn't expect to be given seatwork, though. ;) I gave him a stack of index cards and some colored markers, and told him to brainstorm what he wants to do with his life. ;) I like knowing what my friends are interested in and what they want to do… Anyway, that was good. =) We chatted over hot chocolate / tea, but then my contact lenses really started bugging me.

Very good week. Wrote a lot, learned a lot, and managed to sneak in time for deep socialization. Looking forward to next week!

Random Emacs symbol: whois – Command: Send SEARCH-STRING to server defined by the `whois-server-name' variable.