Category: It Happened to Me

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

I’m back from Chicago, where I attended the first international Ruby on Rails Conference, better known as RailsConf. Taking place from Friday, June 23rd to Sunday, June 25th, it was the largest single gathering of Ruby on Rails developers ever held. The vibe there was great — it was a mix of geek congeniality and collegiality at its best, mixed with a very palapable sense of “we’re onto something very big here!”.

Between the rather spotty wireless connectivity at the venue and the events that ran rather late for a conference of this sort, I haven’t had a chance to blog about the event until now. For the next couple of days, I’ll be posting notes and observations about the conference here on Accordion Guy and also on my work blog, Tucows Farm. There’ll be overlap between most of the entries in the two blogs, with the not-as-appropriate-for-the-work-blog stuff — such as the Tale of the Squishy Cows and the Overzealous Airport Security Guy in Latex Gloves — not going into the work blog..

The Cult of Mac at RailsConf

Geek conferences are famous for what I call “hallway gatherings” — clusters of people gathered together around power sources, chatting and working away on their laptops. During the conference, a scene like the one below was very common:

The fourth guy from the left is none other than Chad Fowler, one of the brain trust behind the conference, Pragmatic Programmers author and all-round good guy. The guy in the black shirt who’s two positions to the right of Chad is Adam Keys, the funny geek who invited me to play accordion at his presentation.

While the gathering shown above isn’t unusual, what is unusual is the concetration of Macs. Wherever you looked, you saw a PowerBook or MacBook. Glowing Apple logos abounded — it seemed that there were 30 Macs for every non-Mac laptop. It seemed that among those non-Mac laptops, most were running some distribution of Linux rather than Windows.

I’m not alone in noting the abundance of Macs: check out this blog entry, as well as this, this and this.

Here’s a video where I did a quick sweep of a hallway cluster’s laptops after finding that they were all some form of Macintosh computer [3.7 MB QuickTime]. It’s all “Mac…Mac..Mac…”

It’s another interesting chapter in the rise of the Mac among the not-quite-mainstream programmer crowd, a trend that first became apparent during the first O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference back in 2002. All through RailsConf, I was reminded of Tim O’Reilly’s remarks in his 2002 WWDC keynote, Watching the “Alpha Geeks”: OS X and the Next Big Thing.

The RailsConf Nonconformists

Seeing they were in the minority, Christian Metts handed out “Certificates of Nonconformity” to people sporting non-Macintosh laptops and took their photos. These RailsConf nonconformists were also photographed for posterity, and the photos have been collected in this Flickr set.

The most famous of the nonconformists was none other than the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff, who posed in classic “why” fashion with his certificate:

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Actually, I’ve been in Chicago since late Thursday afternoon and RailsConf since Friday, but the internet connection’s been rather spotty, what with 600 nerds all hitting the local wireless access point all at once. Things have been pretty good, and I’ll have a full report in a couple of days.

If you are one of my friends, acquaintances or business associates, I probably owe you an email, phone call or visit. Things have been rather busy both at work and at home, but rest assured, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I ask for your patience and promise not to keep you waiting like the good captain below:

Click the photo above to see the synopsis for this Star Trek episode.

I’ll be attending the Ruby on Rails conference called RailsConf in Chicago (well, actually O’Hare) from Friday, June 23rd to Sunday, June 25th to learn as much as I can about Rails and the Rails community, as well as to schmooze avec accordion. I’ll be arriving in the early afternoon on Thursday, June 22nd to hang out with Dave and poke about Chicago proper, a city I haven’t had the chance to visit since doing some client work there in 1998, or 1 B.A. (Before Accordion). Chicago is the home of Manly Food, which means meat, and lots of it. I’m looking forward to the trip!

It’s a sure sign that this blog has made the big time: I just got my first legal “nastygram” — a “cease and desist” letter from the hamburger chain Wendy’s International, Inc. Here’s a photo of the letter, delivered to me via FedEx’s “Urgent” sevrice:

And here’s the text of the letter:

Dr. Mr. deVilla:

It has come to the attention of Wendy’s International, Inc. that you have been infringing upon Wendy’s International’s intellectual property rights through your unauthorized and unlawful use of video clips of Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill” on your website www.accordionguy.blogware.com. This is a copyrighted work of Wendy’s International, Inc. It may be reproduced only with the express written consent of Wendy’s International, Inc.

You must immediately cease and desist from any further unauthorized use of Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill”. Should you fail to cease your use of the marks and video clip of the training video, we will be forced to take any and all legal actions available.

In addition, you must provide me with information regarding the source and manner in which you acquired Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill”.

I trust that you appreciate the seriousness of this matter. Please give this matter your immediate attention and notify me as to your intentions.

The video in question features burger cooking instructions done in the form of a circa-1985 funk music video, which makes sense give the average age of a fast food line staffer and MTV back in those days, when they actually played music videos. It may seem silly, but it’s effective: I haven’t watched it since last year, and I can probably still tell you the Wendy’s-mandated proper time to flip a burger and what a “four-corner press” is.

Far be it from me to upset my favourite large hamburger chain. As far as I know, Wendy’s still doesn’t cook their burgers from frozen patties, but locates their franchises close to supplies of fresh beef. They make a far better chicken sandwich than McDonald’s or Burger King, and I applaud their contribution to materials science in the form of their “soquid” research. I cheered during founder Dave Thomas’ cameo in the made-for-TV movie Bionic Ever After, in which he and Colonel Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man himself, exchange a couple of lines in the middle of a hostage situation.

So although the video was posted without malice towards Wendy’s International Inc and I never made a dime from having it on this blog, I have better things to do than to deal with a legal department on the warpath. I have removed the video from the blog entry, thus ending what must have been described in the Wendy’s offices as “the year of terror”.

As far as telling them where I found the video, the best I can do is “I found it somewhere on the internet”. I found it on some website while surfing randomnly last year, and damned if I can remember which one it was.

I intend to send them a note letting them know that I’ve removed the video, and I intend to brighten the day of some junior lawyer at Wendy’s corporate counsel by having some fun in that note, which is where you can help. What do you think I should write? Let me know in the comments!