I attended WordCamp last weekend, and took a bunch of bad pictures with my cell phone. You can see them here.

So, the last few months of my life have been consumed by a co-location center move at work. Now, that project is over, and it feels like coming up to the surface from a long dive underwater. Once again, I have my own life.

I just finished re-reading Damage by Josephine Hart. This is easily Hart's best book, mostly because all of her other books are weak re-workings of the same theme. Ironically, I think my opinion of Damage has gone down over the years, because of how disappointing I found the rest of her work. Or, it may just be that as I age I understand the feelings of the middle-aged protagonist a bit better. Now, I just need to see the movie version, something I have been meaning to do ever since I first read the book.

I finally saw Sin City the other night. It was enjoyable, but far from the great movie that I expected from other people’s reviews. My major concern going into the movie was that it would not be “comic booky” enough, but actually that was the part that they did best. The real problem is the fact that Frank Miller is stuck in the early 90s. There was tremendous progression in Miller’s early work from Daredevil to Ronin to Dark Knight. Since then, he has basically stagnated. Something the movie made far too clear.

I just finished reading Drive by James Sallis. Midway through the book, a character asks, “Where’s Marlowe’s apartment?” That about sums up the book. Although Sallis dedicates the book to McBain, Westlake and Block, it is an extended play on the work of Raymond Chandler. Unfortunately, it evokes Chandler’s later confused work, when he was writing while drunk, rather than his best work like “The Long Goodbye.” If you admire Chandler, avoid this book, and instead pick up Gun, With Occasional Music by Johathan Lethem. Lethem’s book can be read profitably more than once. Sallis’s is merely good to occupy a couple of hours.

this month, that I first used a computer. It was in a school computer lab, and it was a DEC PDP-7. No video terminal, just endless streams of perforated paper. The language we learned was Basic, and when I look at my code, I sometimes get the feeling that I never really got past that. Anyway, if you had told me then,that I would still be working with computers, I never would have believed it.

There is lots of PHP hatred on the web. It doesn’t seem to matter that some of the biggest sites on the web run PHP, including Yahoo and CNET’s own Gamespot: PHP still doesn’t get any respect. Anyway, for all PHP lovers out there, here’s two excellent defenses of PHP: Why PHP Scales – A Cranky, Snarky Answer and A pro-php-rant.

Read A Long Way Down this weekend. It’s typical Nick Hornby: easy to read, and determined to make the point that the only thing that makes life bearable is the small, human connections we make. Not as good as High Fidelity, marginally less depressing than How to be Good, better than About a Boy.

If he’s not attacking Linux, he must be doing a price comparison between Macs and PCs

One of the most frustrating experiences as a parent is suggesting a book that you loved as a child to your own children, and finding they are completely uninterested. That’s what happened to me when I gave Wind in the Willows to my daughters. So, I just re-read it myself. It’s still wonderful.