ah, my busy social calendar...

There's always a week in July where everything happens at once and you just can't keep up. This year, that week is this week. OSCON runs all this week, the Oregon Brewers Festival starts up on Thursday, and Le Tour is in the Pyrenees through Wednesday. Oh, and I have to help plan a birthday get-together for someone for Wednesday.

We supposedly hold all these events in July (birthdays excepted) because the weather's better. Has anyone freakin' looked outside recently? Weather not so good.

A couple pieces on OSCON from Wired, InfoWorld and Blankenhorn on ZDnet.

And a few local beer blog posts about OBF '07 at Gone Ronin, Portland Beer Blog, The Brew Site, PortlandBeer.org, The Beer Retard (great name, btw) and probably others.


I expect to cover both events here. I've already picked up my OSCON nametag, although things don't really get rolling until at least tomorrow. I should note that I'm attending in my professional, non-bloggous capacity, so looking for my nym on a nametag would be a futile exercise. I dunno, it just seems like attending as a blogger would be sort of... precious. Besides, nobody's ever heard of me or my silly little blogs anyway. It would just be a poor idea all around, I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

As for OBF, I'm busy scanning this year's list of brews, trying to come up with a short list of stuff to try. As I've learned over time with this beer-blogging thing, drinking a lot of beer is easy. Having something intelligent, or at least intelligible, to say about it is not quite so easy, and it doesn't get any easier as the day goes along. One minute you're a respected conoisseur, holding forth on the relative merits of the festival's double IPAs, and the next you're face down in the beermud (i.e. mud made with beer, not unusual at this type of event), and you can't remember how you got there or who you were talking to a moment ago, or however long ago it was. Actually that's never happened to me, not in public anyway, and I plan to keep it that way. So I'm winnowing down a short list. No, I'm not going to say what's on the list ahead of time. Then everyone would go get in line ahead of me. I just know it.

Here's a YouTube clip of that Asahi beer-dispensing robot. Its pour technique leaves much to be desired, but still, it's a freakin' beer-pouring robot.