SXSW Interactive 2008

Despite flight cancellations and a last-minute work crisis, I've been in Austin, Texas with a couple work buddies since late-Friday to attend the packed-out South by Southwest Interactive conference. It's been a lot of fun so far. 11 panels into it, the standout for me has easily been 10 Things We've Learned at 37signals by 37signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried. I'll try to post more about the conference sometime after leaving, but hey, if anyone reading this is here in Austin and wants to meet up, grab some drinks, hit an after party, play Rock Band at the ScreenBurn arcade, whatever, send me an email: steves_list [at] hotmail.com.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Some Valentine's-Day-themed geekery from around the intertubes…


A Halo Valentine from II HYPNOTiiQ II and Xbox.com

Grunts are red; plasma grenades are blue. My Warthog has a seat that's open for you!

A hexadecimal / Zero Wing / Valentine / shirt
mashup from ThinkGeek

Roses are #FF0000; violets are #0000FF. All my base are belong to you.

Rosette Nebula


← The Rosette Nebula, Astronomy Picture of the Day for February 14, 2008, from Nasa.gov.

The Rosette Nebula (aka NGC 2237) is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers. But it is the one most often suggested as a suitable astronomy image for Valentine's Day.


Then there are heart surface and heart curve formulas from Wolfram MathWorld. And romantic Perl code poetry—geek love at its finest.

I guess my old expression of regex love is also appropriate here, if anywhere ↓

(you)?
(?(1)
	\u2665
	((?:reg(?:ular\s+expressions?|ex(?:p|e[ns])?))++)
|
	(?!)
)
(?>\1\2)

A Few Art Samples

Here be some old drawings I did back in 2002 or thereabouts (I haven't been drawing since then). They're done in pen, pencil, and colored pencil, with some touch-ups and added color from Photoshop. Most of my old art scans are no longer around after numerous computer upgrades, so I'm mostly just posting these here for posterity — but lemme know what you think. You won't hurt my feelings.

Jazz girl

Contortionista

Manga sketch

80 Secrets to Success

Mountain Dew collection

Behold my Mountain Dew collection at work, originally started when someone asked how much Dew I drank per day. This ended up taking me a couple months, since I slowed down from my previous ~4/day consumption rate right around the time I started preserving the evidence.

The photo is by ColdFusion programmer and photographer Joe D'Angelo, whose single greatest purpose in life seems to be trying to sneak up behind me and getting me to spill whatever I happen to be eating or drinking at the time.

/(bb|[^b]{2})/

/(bb|[^b]{2})/

…That is the question. ThinkGeek is selling that on a t-shirt for the "regular expression junkie + lover of literature." Wearing that around would be a sure way to get me to notice you, especially if you have a nice rack or happen to be Angelina Jolie.

Note that the parentheses are unnecessary except in the case of Perl-folk wishing to avoid using the naughty $& variable for performance reasons. Also, the expression is buggy in that many alternatives to "bb" are not matched, so it would probably be better written as simply /bb|.*/s. For a JavaScript solution you could try var answer = /^bb$/.test(i);.

Alright, I'm done debugging the shirt now.