Today was my first day of PyCon, in Montréal, Quebec (my first). I’m headquartered with two other Wells Fargo teammates in the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth (Fairmont de la Reine Elizabeth), a 10-minute walk or so from the Palais des Congrés, where this year’s PyCon is being held. It’s an impressive building, though in the end, one tutorial room and conference hallway look pretty much like another.

I first learned John Harris’ name from personal friend John Scalzi [Ed. John Scalzi is not a personal friend of the author], whose fantabulous series of books in the Old Man’s War series are graced with Harris’ also fantabulous paintings.

AMC’s and HBO’s hits are all the rage for the hipsters on the Twitters, but Jodi and I prefer to curl up with a nice English cozy.

This weekend I started experimenting with Jeff Forcier's Releases library. Releases is a Sphinx extension that makes it pretty easy to maintain the changelog for a python library (or anything you can write Sphinx docs for).

I’m not a big gamer. In fact, I’m not a gamer at all right now. But for about 8 months I played EVE Online, the decade-plus-old MMORG of internets spaceships, and I got hooked. I mean, Internet Spaceships?! I wandered around on my own for a while, got into a corp that got AWOXed, then found Rixx Javix and Stay Frosty, which became my adopted piratey home. YARR!

Well, here in Arizona it’s been Spring for a month or so, even while the East Coast is still buried under record snow. Spring, usually means a renewed interest in my oft-neglected blog, and this time I realized that monkinetic had been down for some time and I didn’t even know it.

Gina Tripani posted her thoughts on what she calls short-form blogging.

So I think I’ll try doing the same thing here. In the early days of Waxy.org, before I launched the linkblog, I used to blog short posts constantly. Multiple times a day. Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started reserving blogging for more “serious” stuff - mostly longer-form research and investigative writing.

Ways Men in Tech are Unintentionally Sexist. I’m in the process of re-educating myself on these issues. If it isn’t your thing, it should be. If you’ve been on the receiving end of this and want to talk about it, feel free to get in touch. If you’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of this and I was the oaf dishing it out, even more so.

@adriarichards @femfreq The value of hearing a message is proportional to the level of insanity raised against it.— Steve Ivy (@steveivy) October 15, 2014