I'm typing this from the coffee shop of the Wildhorse Casino in Pendleton, Oregon. For those of you who aren't familiar with the region, Pendleton is near…well…nothing. It's about a 3.5 hour drive East from Portland, if everything goes just right. Needless to say, it didn't, so I left at 16:30 and arrived at about 21:30, with quite a few stops in between…
The drive up the Columbia Gorge was, dare I say, gorgeous. But I was pretty sleepy toward the end, so I loaded up on my first caffeine in a week or so. When I got here, I parked (twice actually; very confusing) and got checked in. I was surprised to find that the Casino is basically dry. Go figure. So I'm still a bit wired, and trying to wind down by drinking hot tea. Good luck with that.
Anyway, I thought I wasn't going to make the internet connection here work. It's wireless managed by an Oregon CLEC/ISP known as Rio Communications, and they're awful—I've run into them before. It took me 30 minutes of messing around to figure out that their primary and secondary DNS as listed by their DHCP server were both wrong/borken and returning false negatives; their primary DNS as listed on their webpage, which I could fortunately reach, seems fine.
Oh! What am I doing here? I am speaking tomorrow morning (8AM! Gah!) at an event sponosored by the US Economic Development Agency entitled, as near as I can tell, Growing the Regional Engines Of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. (You may know how I feel about mixed metaphors, so I must think this thing is important!) I have been invited to speak to the title Open Source: An Industry Transcending Time and Distance. (I elided "An Industry," which in my humble opinion makes the title make much more sense.) My talk slides are attached. (These slides contain many images pulled without permission from random websites via Google images. I believe that they are within the bounds of "fair use"; if you feel otherwise, let me know and I will be happy to remove them.)
My slides contain a little puzzle that should be pretty easy for you folks. As you might quickly detect, each slide contains an image of a "vehicle transcending time and distance." Give yourself 1 point for each movie or tv show you can identify from its vehicle, two points for each vehicle whose name you can give, and two more points for a coherent explanation of how the picture/show/vehicle relates to the content of the slide. I suspect most of it will be pretty easy for most of you—let me know how you do.
Well, bedtime. Need to get my 6 hours before my talk and getting back on the road for the long, long drive back to Portland. (B)