Yesterday I was working in downtown Portland and was able to see the the 10,000-15,000 people rallying for immigrant rights. I’ve seen a couple of protests and rallies in Portland now, but none of them moved me so emotionally. I was proud to be an American, and proud to know that so many people were willing to express their love for America peacefully.

Personally, I’m extremely proud of those who marched. It wasn’t done without cost. At the wages a lot of the people make, missing a day of work has real impact on their lives. When I was growing up my dad ran a screen printing business that employed a lot of Mexican immigrants and I’ve known for most of my life how hard Mexican immigrants work just to sustain themselves and their families, and I’ve always been compassionate to the struggles they face. The right would have you think that the law is the law, and that if you’re in the country illegally, you’re a criminal. I smell bigotry in the guise of “upholding the law”. Imagine if we upheld the law for everyone who broke the speed limit – which is worse? Speeding mindlessly or supporting your family?

Regardless of the impact economically, good or bad, supporting decent people who want a better life than the one their country provides is something America should support and embrace. Criminalizing people who work hard, who are patriotic, who are willing to work hard so their children can have good health and education is a horrible and saddening idea.

I believe sincerely that a significant portion of those who support criminalizing undocumented immigrants are bigots, whether they realize it or not. There was a time when the most patriotic thing you could do for your country was to reject unreasonable laws – our country was born by rebelling against laws that quashed the rights of individuals. We fought so that we could work hard, provide our children with a better future, and to be free. Criminalizing immigrants who want just that is hypocrisy of the highest level.

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One of the best ways to expand your knowledge in any subject is to teach others. And because one of my goals is to become stronger in Ruby on Rails, I’ve stuck my neck out and will be speaking at four great conferences this year. Here’s the schedule so far:

April 13-14 – Canada on Rails
I’ll be discussing the story of llor.nu and talking about how it was my second Rails app. (Which isn’t just me putting a feather in my cap – it’s me saying that if I can do it, so can you.) Registration is still open, and the conference should be great.

June 22-25 – RailsConf
I’ll be talking about llor.nu again, but getting a little deeper into the technical aspects. This event is sold out already.

July 20-21 – Webvisions 2006
The schedule here isn’t firm yet, but the idea is that I’ll be building a simple game in semi-real time (the app will be prebaked to avoid any catastrophes and to make it possible to squeeze it into the hour format).

I’ll likely also be on a panel talking about the pros and cons of using both open source software and commercial software in web applications.

Registration for Webvisions is open, and an early bird discount is currently in effect.

July 24-28 – O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON)
I’ll be talking about llor.nu again and about how making the project open source changed the nature of the project.

If you’re attending any of these I’d love to meet you. I’m fairly gregarious and love meeting new people and enjoy talking about ideas. Also, I’m justly nervous about all the speaking. If I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t find speaking that interesting.

I had this idea the other day that I wanted to stick an RFID chip on every item I own in my office and then hook up a location sensing scanner to my computer. I’d map out where every single object was and quickly be able to figure out if anything was missing or out of place.

It seems a bit silly to do, but it doesn’t take much thought to think of a lot of cool uses. Imagine if I had someone else coming in and tidying up my office. They’d find a book on the floor, and without having to know any kind of organizational system they could begin moving it toward the shelf. My computer could make an audible signal that would increase in pitch as they got closer to the “home” of that book, or decrease as they got further away.

Or they could just ignore any system of organization entirely and let me figure out where it is by asking my computer to show me in a mockup of my office where it is.

Or I could do what these guys did – using a projector I could display a pin point on the book itself as it sat on the shelf. That kind of application is truly intriguing. You could be looking at a box of unmatched socks and ask for the computer to point two laser dots on the pair, peeling away layers of other socks if needed. Projecting images onto real objects is pretty incredible – eventually you could have a sort of super intelligent flash light that lit objects up based on your search criteria.

For all the talk of the evils of RFID I think there are as many or more really cool uses for it that are helpful and clever. I suppose the real trick will be keeping the tech cheap enough so that large corporations governments aren’t the only people innovating with it.

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This was one of the smaller conference rooms at SXSW this year, and yet it’d be considered large at previous SXSWs. It was my first time on a panel (as opposed to speaking solo) and it was remarkably easy. Thanks for all those who came out to listen to me talk about Top Ramen, dolphins, half pipes in the garage, and making big mistakes.

I wasn’t going to mention this until it was posted on the official RailsConf site, but now that it’s leaked I figure I might as well confirm that I am indeed speaking at RailsConf in late June. I’m pretty excited about being able to speak at what will undoubtedly be the best Rails conference this year. The conference is already sold out (it took only a few days) so I won’t recommend you try to go. Let’s hope that for those who aren’t going there are podcasts available.

I’ll be speaking about llor.nu which is exciting. It also makes me want to spend some time fixing some problems with the game before I get swamped with preperations for Canada on Rails. Incidentally, I’ll be giving a slightly short version of the RailsConf talk at Canada on Rails. If you’d have come to RailsConf just to see me, Canada on Rails still has slots open.

I’m suffering from a social interaction hangover of far greater magnitude than those suffered from previous SXSW conferences. During every waking moment I was meeting someone new. Attendance was nearly triple from last year, and I remember last year feeling overwhelmed by crowds. If there was any question about whether we’re entering into a new sort of bubble, attending a single day of SXSW 06 would have made it crystal clear based on head count alone, not to mention all the parties.

This year I come away with a renewed interest in building fun web applications and enabling the communities that rise up around them to help shape those applications. Building monolithic and tightly controlled applications makes for a rotten user experience. Building applications that allow those who use them to help shape and control the application engenders support and loyalty. Sites like flickr and threadless thrive because their communities of users thrive. Their communities of users thrive because the applications are constantly improving the user experience as a direct response to the common voice of the community. If you want a thriving community, applications with democratic tendencies will always, always crush centrally controlled user experiences.

Talking with people this year helped me remember this valuable lesson and reminded me that I’m failing at this. I let bugs persist too long on llor.nu, and don’t make constant incremental changes. It’s a game that could be boiling over with user contributed creativity and activity if I made it more open. I control far more of the user experience than I should while ignoring its cries for help. Its completely possible that if I ignore it for too long, it could vanish. But if I just start opening things up and allowing players to have far more control over their experience it will explode in popularity.

Despite the exhaustion and the current downside of the high that SXSW produces I’m, as always, grateful I went and grateful for the relationships created and strengthened. The top lesson learn: open up, encourage those around you to share and support your ideas, and incrementally improve. It works for life as much as it does for building web applications.

I’m in Austin for my fourth SXSW and I’m fixin’ to have a rip roaring good time for the coming week. Every year I come home after having met even more good people than the last time and I end up a better person from the experience. The excitement is different than my first time which was a mix of apphrension and excitement. This time I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones and filling every evening with good food and conversation.

I have two events that I’m a part of, and if you’re here at SXSW I’d love to see you at both. First there’s my panel on Saturday afternoon, and then there’s the Ruby on Rails Happy Hour.

Also, the first rule about SXSW is to meet and greet. If you’re coming and you haven’t met me, please come up to me at any time and introduce yourself. If you’re feeling like a wallflower at the very least consider that most of the people here feel that way.

The day after complaining about the MacBook Pro shortage I got an email that said:

I was obviously stoked. With the single simple action of what I consider to be a dedicated Apple Store employee all of my discouragement was tossed out the window. Within 45 minutes I had a MacBook Pro booting up in my office. Thanks Apple Store.

I’ve been doing an informal study of Apple’s current distribution model for their new MacBook Pro machines by calling my local stores every day and asking a couple of questions. At first I was just interested in replacing my current, two machine, setup with a single capable machine, but now I’m getting more sucked into the game of just trying to get one, period.

Granted this is all anecdotal, but it’s interesting to try and unravel a sort of mysterious thing. So here’s my data gathering routine, done every day for the past ten days:

I call each store and ask:

• Do you have MacBook Pro laptops of any variation?


• If no, Did you have any come in today?


• If yes, How many?


• Where am I on the waiting list?
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Based on the answers I’m getting it seems that Apple is only shipping out about 2 laptops a day to each of the five stores in the Portland area that are likely to have them. Some days they get none. The downtown Portland Apple store is getting more per day, usually at least three.


So, in the ten or so days that they’ve actually been shipping, a total of five retails stores that serve a population of 3.4M (one that’s arguably more likely to buy Macs than Windows machines) has had a total of about 100 laptops to sell. I find that sort of disproportional and discouraging, but there are two other tidbits that increase my discouragement.


First, there is absolutely no shortage of the Intel Mac Minis that were announced just a few days ago. Most stores would only say “we have plenty” when asked, but one of the local stores said they had over 250 for sale of both variations, and that they were moving like “flapjacks” (I assume he was being clever, if not so up on the breakfast food as metaphor terminology).


Also discouraging – out of the three Apple retail stores in the area, you can only be on a waiting list at one of the three, and you can only sign up for one of the three possible variations of laptop. Somehow I got signed up on the “Ultimate” list, which is the fastest of the machines with the 7200rpm hard drive. A fine machine I’m sure, but when I signed up I said “I’ll take the first one you get in stock of any variety”. I learned about being on the “Ultimate” list just the other day, and as it turns out I’m number two on that list. Had I been on any of the other lists, I’d be writing this post from a MacBook Pro today (well, probably not considering I’d have no fuel for my flames).


I appreciate good marketing tactics, and I see this for what it is. It’s either scarcity by design or by coincidence, but in either case when I’m in the whirlpool of supply and demand I feel uncomfortable. It’s entirely my fault, for sure, but part of me just wants to be able to have Apple work like the well oiled machine I believe it is. They announce a product, I go to the store, I buy it. I’d much prefer that than spend over a month trying to convince myself I can do without a faster, more portable, machine, only to fight back, break down and call the Apple store, again.