Today, it came to my attention that July is National Ice Cream month, and the third Sunday in the month (the Sunday just past) is National Ice Cream Day.

And what, you might ask, what was I doing on Sunday? Purely by chance, I was making ice cream.

Now, join with me, and in your best tractor pull announce voice: Sundae Sundae Sundae!

Web Logs ("Blogs", as the kids call them) will become so prevalent a means of communicating that there will eventually be no other new content. Instead, blogs will endlessly comment on other blogs, which themselves comment on other blogs.

Manufacturers will continue to make electronic devices smaller until a child chokes on one. Then they will place a warning label on the box and continue.

We will reach a point when, like copyright laws, retirement age continues to be increased faster than people age. Specifically, a child born after 2550 will never be allowed to retire. Also, due to continuing advancements in medical science, that child will be immortal.

The thing that got me thinking about the local news is the current run of television advertising for the Nintendo Wii.

As before, you have two people. But only one of them ever speaks. The other guy just stands there, smiling, while his traveling companion barges into someone's home and forces them to play video games, holding the Wii controller in a vice-like grip borne of pure terror. Or joy. Sometimes I just can't tell. Yeah, it's probably joy. Still, creepy.

BotCon is this weekend. And Providence isn't even that far away.

I haven't been able to watch the local news for years.

It's the two-anchor format. Sure, there's the banter and all that, but when one of the anchors was reading the news, I made the mistake of looking at the other one. The one that's just sitting there, smiling, nodding, and trying valiantly to look interested. Like an automaton. Creepy.

Maybe you should eat some bran muffins.

Maybe you should eat some bean muffins.

It's fun because it makes sense both ways!

It's Free Comic Book Day. It's also Cinco de Mayo, which should make for some very interesting scenes in comic book shops and bars. Good times.

Hmm, now I have spam which thinks my name is Johann Danby.

I'm speaking again at the Red Hat Summit this year. This time, on the first day, so at least if I get sick again, it'll be when I no longer need to be able to form coherent sentences. Yay!

Oddest thing this morning. Weeding through the spam as usual, and one of them not only addressed me directly in the CC list, but put a name to my email address: Mayola Jackson. Not that any of the names of the other people on the CC list matched up, either, but I think that's the first time I've seen that done.

This morning, I almost tried to gargle with after shave. An understandable mistake, really, considering that they're both blue liquids, probably with some non-potable alcohol in them.

I stood there for a moment and thought about it, and concluded that while after shave probably gives decent results if you're looking for that menthol breath (and do not swallow any), it's ruled out because I've long worried that I'm slowly drinking my mouthwash, and I'm pretty sure you have to call poison control if you swallow after shave.

Using mouthwash as an after shave, despite being way cheaper and leaving your face all minty fresh, probably isn't a very good idea, either.

But it can't hurt to try, can it?

Lunch at Asqew. Dinner at Tandoori Oven, which really should open a location near where I work. Westford could totally support a third Indian restaurant.

The connection between Boston and San Jose went through Las Vegas. I've never seen such a well-behaved and laid-back planeload of passengers. And I've never seen so many people drinking cocktails before 9AM. Maybe those are related somehow.

Wow, it's been a while since I made any notes here. I guess I've been busy. Or just lazy. Some of both, more likely.

Continued working on the PKINIT plugin. It's weird, but I'm looking forward to doing some testing at this year's Connectathon. I find it somewhat unsettling that more people not only haven't heard of it, but continue to think I'm making the whole thing up, but hey, I'm a nerd.

I missed out on National Gorilla Suit Day again. Some people toast with "Next year, in Jerusalem." I think I'm going to start toasting with "Next year, in a gorilla suit."

And of course, FUDCon was this weekend. It was, as expected, muy awesome.

Dan suckered me into helping at the SSO (single sign-on) BOF (birds of a feather session) by at first asking for help making sure the right packages were installed on his freshly-reinstalled laptop, and then by making me find that my PKINIT plugin didn't actually build correctly against MIT Kerberos 1.6. Oops. So as I feverishly tried to make it build right on his laptop, first using a recent tarball, then using a fresh CVS checkout, we whiled away the better part of an hour. On the bright side, except for making sure the client trusted the server, and making the plugin acceptable to libkrb5, it sort of Just Worked, which after all was the whole point. Maybe I managed to share the Vision of storing stuff in a directory and having various protocol servers use it as a data store, maybe I didn't, but that's my goal anyway.

I caught hell when I got back from the BOF, though, because I'd volunteered to staff the Welcome desk during that hour. From this I learned, again, that YOU DO NOT WANT TO LET ROBIN DOWN. (Once you've destroyed a house with someone, you just don't do that.) I spent the rest of the day staffing the desk, which I find inexplicably enjoyable (maybe I'm flashing back to the permasmile I developed while working the Drive-Thru), and attempting to direct people to the important goings-on. To a certain extent, you get to feel that you know what's going on in all of the sessions, and the company is quite enjoyable. I even managed to get some work done.

Several people have already made notes about FUDpub, the informal gathering which invariably takes place after FUDCon at one of the local, erm, gathering places. For the third time, the locale was woefully underprepared to handle the mass of nerds, descending upon them, as we are wont to do, like a cloud of locusts. I was not impressed. I'm thinking that maybe we should choose a different destination for next year.

Oh yeah, Happy (belated) Birthday, Ryan!

- So now, if you want to put your laptop to sleep, you just have to close the lid.
- Well, what if I want it to hibernate instead?
- Just hold down the Shift key while you do it.

Okay, that didn't really happen. But the day would have been that much more fun if it had.