Damn, I really need to upgrade. I need to tag for real. Bah. This weekend I'll be heading to the colo. Enough whining.

Of course, upgrading means I'll have to go through and retag all my posts. Sigh.

I read about a study done years ago with cockroaches and competitiveness. In the study, the speed of a single cockroach's walk from one end of a chute/corridor/walkway to the other. After the times were recorded, two cockroaches were placed in the chute and were again timed.

The second time the cockroaches were timed, they were much faster. The introduction of another caused both to speed up, presumably in competition.

The cockroach effect is very much a person effect, too. And not in just, say, sports. Cars driving on the freeway will speed up when another car is going to pass (on the right or the left, actually), people will move more quickly to reach a line more quickly than another person walking to the line, joggers will run faster if there's an audience, small things like that.

Tonight, in a true example of a cockroach effect, I ran the neighborhood loop in 19:31, including a stop for a twisted ankle and two slowdowns to figure out what was going on.

Of course, not dragging Annie the whole way might have helped my time.

Kris went for the run with me tonight, offering to drag, er, walk, er, trot Annie along the way. After about a quarter mile, he asked, "Is this your normal pace?" I hemmed and hawwed, then admitted, that no, he was being my cockroach, pushing me along faster.

Considering I ran the loop on today's snack of champions (two slices of butter pound cake) 6 minutes faster than just a week ago, I'm happy my fitness is coming back. The stretches and strength training are helping my legs considerably.

Hot fscking damn!

Ultimate Fighter 2 starts tonight! Whoo hoo!

Yes, I have every intention of spending Monday nights with the welters (Joe, Luke, Josh, Sammy (Sammy? WTF?), Melvin (Melvin?), Kenny, Anthony, Marcus and Jorge) and the heavies (Tom, Mike, Rob, Seth, Keith, Brad, Rashand, Kerry and Eli).

All I ask from you boys is this: please, please, please have personalities! Leben rocked because he was crazy and a big baby at the same time. And Diego? He does yoga and still kicks ass. BTW, Koscheck sucks.

Matt Hughes (31, 5'9", the most dominant 170 pounder of all time, current world champion and pound for pound the greatest UFC fighter, evar) and Rich Franklin (30, 6'1", didn't come from any martial arts background and, yet, is the current UFC middleweight world champion (and on the card when Liddell fought Couture at the end of the first season of UF)) are the coaches. This'll be fun.

Heh.

The first line at the house, "No one pisses on my bed!" Ode to Leben.

Yay Tivo!

Update: No! No! No! There's Right Guard Extreme product placement in the show. Oh, the horror!

Update 2: What the? 5 minutes at a 5 mile per hour pace, followed by 5 minutes each of 6 miles per hour, 7 miles per hour, 8 miles per hour, 9 miles per hour and finally 10 miles per hour. A 30 minute run. Puh-leaze! Even I can make it through the first 20 minutes of that one without breaking a sweat. Those last five minutes? Okay, I'd have issues. But that first five minutes at a 12 minute mile pace better not break you.

My most linkful post ever!

Did I mention I don't like linking to other sites for fear the links will turn into a 404 (must finish my mirror module!).

So, my first thought for this post title was "back to the real world", but it's a redundant title and, apparently, a recurring theme.

Today was the last day of BarCamp and I'm exhausted. As one of maybe 10 people who stayed overnight both days, and without a Thermarest (how did I forget my Thermarest? Forgetting that was worse than forgetting my Wacom), my hips have floor bruises from sleeping on my side on the floor.

Okay, not really. But that floor was hard.

And I couldn't stand the lack of showers for two days in a row. Somehow, the sponge bath just won't cut it for two days. I drove home and showered this morning. Aaaaaaah. And I couldn't stay all the way through the end, as I had practice (fortunately close) at 3:00. So sad, to miss the last 4 hours, plus FooCamp meet up at a (I'm guessing) noisy bar. Shucky darn.

An amazing weekend. I'm unbelievably happy I went. I met so many people whose sites I've visited, bookmarked, followed and enjoyed (even a Hodson!). I learned, once again, that this world is terribly small. Many of the people knew each other either from previous conferences, friendships, jobs or projects. Fortunately, not knowing most of the people meant I had little fear meeting them. Though, admittedly, I had met some of them last Tuesday.

On Friday, one of Andy's and Chris' worries was about sessions filling up nicely: would they have too many or too few? I countered, if there are too few, the space could be filled with small birds-of-a-feather discussions; if they are too many, people can meet up later, create groups outside, or, to be perfectly honest, decide not to present. In other words, the sessions will even themselves out.

I was mostly right, but a bit wrong. There were actually a ton of sessions, several (not one, but many more) people commenting they wanted to present, but there were no time slots left. The ad-hoc way of creating sessions meant pretty much every slot had multiple good sessions/topics at once. Which then meant we had to choose which one to go to.

Boo.

Because that meant, we were almost guaranteed to miss out on interesting topics.

For example, I managed to miss the Women in Tech session, presented by Eris Stassi (yay! figured out how to spell her name!), though I managed to attend most of the follow up session, a women run open source project.

The Microformats session from Ryan and Kevin was a good introduction to the topic, though the room was incredibly stuffy and hot. I think that everyone was sweating by the session end.

I need to check out my notes on the rest of the sessions I attended. Some were great, others interesting, all totally full of energy and enthusiasm.

Happily for the weekend, I met many really cool people. I'd trade no sleep for the chance to meet all the people I met again.

Heading to practice afterward was a mini culture shock. Going from disk talk to disc talk (or talking tech to running my ass off) was transitioning between two subcultures, each with somewhat well-defined, but very different, accepted behaviour. And I love both of them, but they are different. Easiest example: I'm more likely to grab a teammate's butt than a BarCamp attendee's.

Especially if said attendee is Scoble.

For example.

I find meetings with large groups of people fascinating. The interactions between people and among groups have to be one of the most interesting things to observe.

Individual behaviour in a group is also interesting to watch. Some people rise to the occasion (I love watching Ben schmooze a crowd), others freak out. Some thrive with the stress, others complain and whither.

Depending on the circumstances, I can go either way. I'm more to the stress and flee side of the range until I become comfortable with the group. I certainly can't work a room like Ben, nor can I be "on" like Andy (and I wonder if anyone can switch as quickly as he can), but given the right situation, I can hold my own.

For the first night of BarCamp, Messina asked me to greet people as they came in, let them know what was up, and ask them to sign our scroll with their names and hand-drawn pictures of themselves. How could this possibly be a better situation? I do well one-on-one, where large crowds overwhelm me (in as much as I have to fight every fiber of my being desiring to run away, flee, hide out on the sidelines and watch), and I get to meet each and every person one and one as they merge into the crowd.

Perfect.

It was also the perfect opportunity to watch interactions of various people in the crowd.

For the most part, the tech crowd is completely different from the ultimate crowd. Where ultimate is about athletic performance, bonding as a team, throwing discs, running hard, goofing off, revelation of intensely personal details that would embarass me if the revelations weren't to my teammates, and flashing breasts (hmmmmmmm.... should I delete that?), the tech crowd is about talking tech (well, duh!), work, and interesting problems. There's no discussion of breasts (really!), or personal details (work related is okay, family if you know the person, the size of your breasts? no way). There's no physical contact, no hugs, no cheers, no butt slaps, no high-fives, no holding hands, no shoulder-to-shoulder huddle and cheer. Tech is strange, and sometimes terribly lonely.

That's the general idea of the differences between the two groups. The individuals, well, that's a different story.

At a previous job (one of many, many of them), a coworker was this worked up, can never have any fun, uptight (yes, redundant, I know), always busy, life-is-hard, high strung woman. Nothing was ever quite right for her. Life was difficult. Things didn't work out the way she wanted them to. Ever.

Tragically, she was a poor communicator, too. Which made things worse for her boyfriend, another coworker, who became her ex soon after I started working with them. I became closer to him, as she was an emotional vampire, terribly draining and hard to be around.

You see where this is going?

From my perspective as an outsider with respect to all the relationships these people share (the longest I've actually known any of these people is 4 days at this point, with Messina being the slight exception, having met him in passing 2 and a half months ago, and Kaliya about 6 months ago in Berkeley at a talk for Greg), and recognizing said perspective is completely coloured by my experiences and that I really don't know these people at all, one of the people here reminds me of this woman ex-coworker. Everything needs to be perfect, she's not happy if there's something to do, she's completely stressed, and bringing down everyone around her.

Yep. She's high maintenance.

I did my best to help her out. I smiled. When she complained in my presence, I countered with offers of help and suggestions (that were actually reasonable suggestions). When she stressed, I asked if I could help. When she freaked, I stepped aside. Her personality was exactly like that ex-coworker's personality, to the point of near flashbacks for me.

*shudder*

May I never become high maintenance.

Ever.

Or, as Andy says, "Showers are for wimps."

Morning of day two of BarCamp 2005 has begun, after staying up way too late, sleeping on the hard ground (also known as an office floor), greeting daylight way too early, and, well, desperately needing a shower.

Ah, the sponge bath.

After, I think, 4 hours of rough sleep (tap dancing on egg shells here with the disrupted sleep patterns), I joined Andy and Kaliya on journey to Whole Foods, all of 2 blocks away, for Day 2 breakfast. Nothing terribly exciting there, except for Andy's glorious rendition of (I had to ask) Kiss Me Kate's Brush up your Shakespeare.

Few people get that glorious wake up call.

So, at 11:30, the conference is well under way, with Riana leading the session on Industry Darlings.

Geez, let me be able to stay awake until tonight.

I might need to take notes to keep the eyes open.