Well, Dan Berger has posted his short list of people he wants to talk to at the Ruby Conference next month and I have inexplicably been overlooked. I have therefore started a little list of my own, with the people I plan to snub next month:

1. Dan Berger

Well, that’s all I’ve got so far.

It shouldn’t be hard to avoid him, what with the expected 195 attendees milling around. It’s a little surreal to imagine that many people turning out for a Ruby Conference.

Back in 2001, barely a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I drove my new Honda CR-V down to Tampa, Florida to attend the first-ever Ruby Conference. I was going to make a presentation on FXRuby, a new GUI toolkit for Ruby. There were probably only about 40 people in attendance, which made for a very relaxed setting (in the best sense). Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (the authors of Programming Ruby) were there, and meeting them was like meeting a couple of rock stars. I think that was the conference where Nathaniel Talbott gave a presentation on Lapidary, a unit testing framework for Ruby that eventually morphed into Test::Unit. Ryan Leavengood gave a presentation on a sort of packaging concept he called “Ruby Gems,” that petered out but was reborn a few years later at the 2003 Ruby Conference in Austin. Matz was there, and I think David Black, Chad Fowler, Avi Bryant, and some other folks I didn’t know but have gotten to know better over the last few years. It’s interesting to reflect on how much has changed since that time.

A side note: I also recall that in a separate conference room, across the hall from ours, a precious gems dealer had set up a table with his wares. I wondered if he had mistakenly assumed that the focus of our conference was the other kind of ruby.

I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion when I was kid, and still try catch at least part of the show on the radio every weekend. I’ve read several of his books, and the show’s even on my list of 43 Things to do some day.

So I was disappointed to read this afternoon about a lawsuit that Keillor’s brought against a blogger for a t-shirt that parodies his show. When you consider the show’s tradition of poking lighthearted fun at people from all walks of life and political persuasions, Keillor’s reaction really just reinforces the stereotype of the humorless liberal. I’d like to believe that these are the actions of an overzealous lawyer, that Keillor’s not aware of how petty this makes him look, and that he’ll still take the opportunity to retract his cease and desist order against the blogger and his Web site, but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen.

I saw a case of Coca-Cola’s latest offering, “Sprite Remix Aruba Jam”, when I stopped at Publix on the way home from work this evening. I really hope they’re not trying to market this in Mountain Brook.

I can’t believe I waited this long to try Apple’s Pages word processor. I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated trying to use Microsoft Word (from Office v.X) to lay out the AKAA newsletter, and have found Pages to be a lot easier to use.

One of the primary things I like about Pages is a feature that it didn’t borrow from Word: the disappearing frames trick. For whatever reason — and I admit that it’s probably something I don’t understand about Word’s workings — text boxes and images will often hop around, or just disappear, if I insert (or delete) text from a page. I’ve tried different approaches to make a text frame “stick” to the spot where I place it on a page, but nothing seems to work. This makes for a very fragile editing experience, and Pages doesn’t suffer from this at all.

Some problems I’ve run into:

1. There doesn’t seem to be a way to specify different formatting for left and right pages’ headers and footers. More specifically, I’d like the page number to appear flush left on the left pages, and flush right on the right pages. 
2. There has to be at least some text content on a page, or Pages will try to get rid of it. In other words, if all of the content on a page consists of text boxes, images, etc. you’ll need to add some invisible dummy text (like a carriage return, or some spaces) somewhere on the page to make it “stick”.
3. When I insert a new text box, Pages always seems to place it in some awkward place, disrupting the text around it in the process. I still haven’t figured out the scheme it’s using for the initial text box position.
4. A minor thing, but there’s no easy way to create drop caps as you can in Word. The solution in Pages involves creating a text box and then fiddling with its size to make it look right.

I’m not sure what to expect from Pages 2 (whenever it sees the light of day), but given Apple’s recent track record for making really useful updates to their software applications (and operating system), I suspect I’ll be a customer.

Just try it. This one’s pretty well done.

About a week ago I added Cyan Worlds’ Headquarters as one of my 43 places. Today I read on Slashdot that, as of last Friday, they’ve closed. (Actually, it’s the second time in as many days that Slashdot’s reported this news, but if you’re a regular reader of Slashdot, you’re used to that sort of redundancy in their reporting).

The fifth and last installment in the Myst series, Myst V: End of Ages, is due to be released by Ubisoft on September 20. Beenox Studios is developing the Mac OS X version of Myst V and lists its target release date as September 20 as well.