zerosum dirt(nap)

I'm back on the east coast after a 1.5 week west coast mini-tour, culminating with Railsconf information overload and a couple of great parties. I've written up some session highlights over at DDJ (parts one and two) in case you're interested.

Greets to all the fine folks I met at the conference, especially the Offrails crew and Jason LaPier, my local guide to Portland nightlife and microbrews (also a badass Rails developer who was recently published in Pragprog's Advanced Rails Recipes). Thanks dude!

If you've sent an email and I haven't gotten back to you yet, my apologies; I'm still a bit jetlagged and trying to catch up on a ton of things.

I’ve got my itinerary planned out for Railsconf. I’ll also be hitting up a couple other west coast cities before landing in Portland. First stop is SF to visit my friend Ankit on Friday. Then trekking up to Eugene on the Amtrak Coast Starlite (I love me my trains) late night Sunday to hang and brainstorm with our designer/big-thinker Ty for a few days. Then it’s off to Portland on Thursday.

If you’re in any one of those cities and want to grab a beer (or a smoothie), hit me up on Twitter. Hopefully I’ll see some of you at Railsconf.

Also, I’ll be giving a talk at NHRuby tonight (5/20) on Rack. If you’re in the area, stop by.

There’s a good thread going on over at Hacker News today regarding music for coding sprints. It’s interesting to see that a number of people, like me, have trouble concentrating when listening to music with prominent lyrics, whereas others thrive on it.

A lot of people also seem to really dig electronica. I guess that’s no big surprise. It’s never done much for me, personally, although there are a few electronic pieces I do really like (NIN’s Ghosts being a recent example). Being an ex-hc/metalhead I gravitate more towards melodic post-rock stuff and the occasional poppy masterpiece.

Here’s some stuff in my current work playlist:

• Explosions in the Sky
• Mogwai
• Castor
• My Bloody Valentine
• Elliott
• Pinback
• Isis
• On The Might of Princes
• Jesu
• Portishead
• Dredg
• National Skyline
• Pelican
• Low Frequency In Stereo
• Radiohead
• There Were Wires
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• Mouth of the Architect

Yes I know some of these bands have lyrics. But they’re so fuzzed up or unintelligible that my brain doesn’t seem to process them while working, so all is good. And in the case of bands like Elliott and Pinback and Dredg, the vocals are prominent but somehow almost feel like more of an instrument. Also seems to work. Kind of strange, I guess.

Things have been kind of crazy lately, and blog updates have been few and far between. Sorry about that, it's not that I've run out of things to say. Honest.

The truth of the matter is I've just been really busy with a couple client projects, and some other goodies that I'll (hopefully) be writing about soon. And oh, yeah, I'm getting married this weekend too ;-).

So actually, the answer to the titular question is Martha's Vineyard, where my lovely wife-to-be and I are renting a house for the week. It's great to get away from (almost) everything for a little while.