The Big Beer Bash

I think I'm doing a pretty good job. Since so far I've been testing heavily-used APIs, most of the bugs I've found have been weird boundary cases, or peripheral design fuzziness. But that's the job.

Anyway, between yesterday and today I got a big chunk of the verifying done that I needed to do. That felt good. I have other verifying I need to do for which I haven't yet written tests in our test harness. Probably I will write one-off tests to verify each of them since they need to be verified soon, whereas the broader tests for each class encompassing each of them will be done later (because there are, like, only so many hours in the day, y'know?). It's not an ideal solution, but the ideal solution would involve me writing a megabyte or more of finished, debugged source code testing APIs I'm not yet familiar with in the next week. Right.

Of course, you can't entirely escape WWDC. Last night I went to a "Birds of a Feather" gathering for WebObjects, which I expected would be a general gathering of WO developers, field engineers, contractors, and customers, but which turned out to be a collection of mini-presentations of things people were doing with WebObjects and related technologies (actually, it seemed like there were more related technologies than WebObjects!). Overall, this was not especially interesting to me; actually being able to go in and play with their code and see how they did it would have been interesting and maybe useful. Maybe this was more useful to the customers or the developers. Not sure.

More entertaining was tonight's beer bash, which involved a large central stand with many kinds of beer, and various meat and vegetarian food, and many, many hundreds of cookies of different varieties. There were hundreds - maybe thousands - of people there; as I put it, "deck the halls with four thousand iGeeks" (and a few dozen iBabes). There were also booths around the courtyard where people could talk to developers about various Apple technologies. The WebObjects booth seemed to be constantly swamped; it's pretty amazing how popular WebObjects is at WWDC!

I met the wife of one of my cow-orkers (family were invited to the bash), and several of Tom's friends from when he worked in Minnesota, who seemed like nice people. I also learned the name of one of the women at Apple whom I find extremely attractive, since she was wearing one of the large WWDC badges. (When once I pointed her out to Tom, he said, "Ohh, you like attainable women." I should've smacked him.) No, of course I didn't talk to her. What, do I seem brave and stupid to you?

There was also a live group there, performing semi-electronic rock with mild jazz overtones. No idea who they were, but they were pretty good. They reminded me a little of the Ozric Tentacles, if that means anything to you.

Anyway, many many people. Lots of standing around. Too many cookies. Got tired around 8:45 and split.

By the way, yesterday afternoon the middle of my back started tightening up. I stretched and stretched and was not able to loosen it up. This morning it was just as bad. It didn't hurt, but it was really annoying, and I was afraid to do anything too strenuous for fear of hurting myself. (Boy, did I ever long for the days when I was dating someone who could give me a backrub.) I decided not to work out today, as a result, and by this afternoon it had mostly gotten better. I can feel the remnants of the stiffness tonight, but I'm going to try to get to bed in a timely manner tonight and hopefully a good, full night's sleep will help.

I am by nature somewhat tense in my body, constantly slightly on edge and my muscles ready to spring if necessary. I think it's due to being a worry-wart. Paradoxically, I am mentally generally pretty laid-back.

A few comic book notes from this week's haul:

• City of Silence #1 by Warren Ellis, Gary Erskine, D'Israeli, and Laura Depuy (Image, $2.50): This new Ellis creation is marginally better than his recent output for Avatar, but not much: Gratuitous swearing, nudity, semi-cyberpunkish dystopian future, yadda yadda yadda. Is there a story here that needs telling? Ghod knows. Ellis is turning out to be such a hit-or-miss author for me: Planetary is brilliant, Stormwatch and The Authority were interesting takes on the superhero genre, and Transmetropolitan is cuttingly brutal but focused. But the rest of his stuff that I've read is - at best - just nasty. I guess I'll try one more issue of CoS, but I'm not at all encouraged.

• Darklight Prelude #2 of 3, by Teri Sue Wood (Sirius, $2.95): Wood wrote the engaging 21-issue Wandering Star a few years back (now available in 3 trade paperbacks), and this is her next effort, a prelude to what I guess will be a longer, horror-based series. It involves two women renting a house from a group of people who have ties to ancient Egypt, one of whom is a werewolf. It's not especially horrifying, though; the dialogue and characters are sharp and charming and witty. A just-plain-fun comic.

• Powers #2, by Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming, and Pat Garrahy (Image, $2.95): A series about police detective to investigate crimes involving superheroes and supervillains. The first issue was disappointing, as the superbeings were way, way in the background, and the story was all set-up, and not much plot. Things get moving this issue, as the heroine Retro Girl has been killed (how? She's invulnerable!), and our hero, Detective Christian Walker, is assigned to the case with his new partner. He meets with Retro Girl's former partner, Zora, who seems like an interesting case, and she and Walker seem to know each other. A little of the history of the city's superbeings is also revealed. It's got me interested, and I'm actively looking forward to the next issue.

I leave you with the funniest Tom Toles cartoon I've seen in the last few months: