the world is small and awesome

The list of blog posts I owe myself includes and is not limited to:

• guy kawasaki
• lean startup conf (& the notes i took that are on Blazing Cloud’s blog now)
• organizing a railsbridge
• buying an erhu and a cajòn
• skydiving over xmas break
• epic music party at our house on nye
• ouya – blazing cloud’s dev console, modifying their sample asteroids game (we added asteroids), lee and glenna learning unity, and my kinect+ouya dreams involving a raspberry pi between them
• women who code ramping up, and lightning talks at parisoma on thursday, which were super fun
• not sleeping enough is breaking me but there’s not enough time for anything
• this is really sad: farewell to aaron swartz
• Spot is gonna put on a concert next month
• hey I am a featured editor on Wikipedia’s thank-you / fundraiser page which is pretty cool!

But instead of all that, I’ll just write about what I did today. First, yesterday, I had a chocolate shake at in’n’out at 8pm, which resulted in terrible diarrhea at 1:30am. I knew this would happen and did it anyway because shakes are delicious and I don’t carry lactaid around for some unfathomable reason. Fortunately in between these events there was group juggling, Terraria, cards against humanity, and a lot of raucous laughter surrounding pictures of an ostrich pillow.

This morning I was no longer in severe pain but my intestines were still making strange noises and reconfiguring themselves, so I stayed in bed a while and talked at length about Pokemon Black 2 with Fritz. Then he decided to go to archery and I got dropped off at bart so I could go over to the east bay and participate in Karleen‘s photo shoot!! She has a new clothing line coming out soon called Isis and she did a video for it a few weeks ago, but needed more still photos for the catalog.

It was fun! Karleen put makeup on me herself, and I got to wear two outfits. The first was a really awesome bird dress with tons of amazing colors made out of this really incredible fabric from stonemountain and daughter. It has magenta and green and white and blue and birds and some beads and a blue trim and a little sort of ruffle on the straps and a bird “medallion” on the front and everything. And I got to wear enormous jangly earrings that Curtis got on the top of a mountain in Colorado. I love noisemakers. The second outfit was one of Karleen’s really nice printed moth shirts and a super comfy grey skirt with crazy cool colorful yoga leggings. I learned that a thing that models are supposed to do is “smile with your eyes, like there’s a boy, and you’re playing games with him, because you’re not smiling with your mouth, but you’re looking at him” lol. I also learned that it can be difficult to aim the reflection of sunlight, that when you place your hands you usually want your fingers to stay together, that sometimes it’s an okay look for my hair to be sort of in my face (I kept trying to tuck it behind my ears and the photographer liked it NOT behind my ears, which is weird to me), and that my “serious face” makes me look really forlorn. When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time looking at my own body in the mirror because of dance, and then I didn’t dance for many years, so I don’t look at my own body anymore, and now when I do it’s really weird because it is so very different. But it’s okay. This is hilarious because I am a fashionless nerd that makes weird faces, not a stylish model who knows how to do blue steel. HAHAHA

Then four of us stayed and we sang christmas carols for hours. Two were sopranos and have a shared choir history and knew dazzling descants for all the things, and I knew/made up alto for a bunch of things, and we sang some rounds, and it was great! Also vegetable broth, and bean bags! And communal squeeing over awesome pictures (of epicness! Thanks Karleen for pursuing your life’s dream and making such awesome designs, Curtis and Rosie for vrooming us around, Irene for being so patient with novice models (lol) and yet doing a great job of being mindful that the sun goes down and everyone for being awesome!

Then I barted back to the mission and met up with Fritz to go to southern pacific. I recognized the convener of the night from her hoodie getting on bart and was sad to have missed her. Once there, we learned about why Ruby is so slow to start up (on every require statement, it checks to see if that library’s already been required; also garbage collection) and how it was fixed (cache the absolute paths that got looked up… I’ll link to it later when I have time to go find it) and when we’ll get it (in Ruby 2.0), CVE-2013-0156 and I’m calling it that because of how hilarious it is to use that number to reference it, more on why Ruby strings longer than 23 characters are slow which I’d read about a while back and was pretty much the only thing I knew about Ruby’s implementation, that Asheesh will be back in town later this month, and that Southern Pacific’s brussels sprouts are really good (bacon! apricot! orange glaze!). I also realized enroute to bart that one of the people looked familiar because he was one of the people I didn’t know sitting at the same table at lunch at PyCon last year, and I ended up talking to them because Jean-Paul works on twisted and lives in a yurt on a farm, one of them told me about database transactions, and the third works on pypy. He was the pypy guy. Also I finally met Mark, who I had missed back and forth last year at iron-blogger gatherings.

In conclusion, life is a swirling nexus of interconnected nodes, and is awesome.