The big orange guy stritches gain and yawnies. “Call me Maximus,” he intros. “I’m a genius. I make trouble for fun. What do you do, Sally?”

Eliza Blair’s story reminds me of Cordwainer Smith. The language buzzes and crackles, full of invention and extrapolation.

Dai means big, as in the Daibutsu. Con is short for “convention,” as in science fiction conventions.

That’s why the gentleman in the photo has a giant radish on the back of his tunic.

In 1983, at Daicon 4, a group of animators premiered a fan video. The over the top sequence introduced several visual tropes identified with the team who’d later become Studio Gainax (Evangelion, Kare Kano, FLCL.)

At my job we’re:

• Working on a Course Management System
• Going to integrate a (Job) Candidate Management System into existing systems
• Looking for a replacement Content Management System

Now, I need a Context Management System to remind me which CMS I’m working on.

• It signaled they were prepared to use either language.
• That reduced my anxiety.
• It left the choice of language to me.
• And if my pidgin French failed me, I knew I could try again in English.

Elliot Rusty Harold and Simon St Laurent have been blogging the conference in full. Here’s the presentations that grabbed me so far.

• ERH showed us a tool, written in Java, for ofuscating an instance of XML so you can send it to someone as a test case without revealing confidential information. This was a hit, with several people suggesting additions. He put a sheet down in the coffee break area where we could write suggestions.
• Examplotron, Eric van der Vlist’s tool for generating Relax NG schemas from annotated references, influenced a couple of presentations:
  • Angelo Di Iorio described design patterns for document structures. They motivated their argument with an overspecified model of an address that didn’t fit ‘real word’ instances.
  • Ken Holman showed us a second generation of an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet that produces a stylesheet from an annotated example of an instance document.
• A couple of presentations on Topic Maps and RDF that went right over my head. Both were about trying to reconcile one to the other.
• Matthijs Breebaart from the Dutch Tax Authority showed off a system his group built to describe bits of law and regulation (i.e. the chapter and paragraph) in XML. From there you transformed it into a URI. His department was able to get the commerical publishers (who produce the online versions of law and regulation) to sit down and agree on a common URI format. The benefit of the exercise: his customers have a common way to get to the online documents and commentaries without needing to dive down into each vendor’s website.
• Ann Wrightson taught us some Situational Semantics, that is, under what conditions do human or machine interpretations of observations make sense. She left a challenge: one of Shakespere’s sonnets translated into Klingon, with markup in Tengwar. Under what situation does this document make sense?
• C. M. Sperberg McQueen gave a math lecture. Brzozowski derivatives, an algebra of regular expressions, give you nice way to generate validators without building state machines.

Tomorrow, we get the presentations on overlaps. This is one of the “elephants in the living room” that Tommie Usdin, one of the co-chairs, warned us about in the introduction. The spectre of Ted Nelson will haunt Extreme 05.

My experience so far confirmed my theory that Extreme is the Potlatch of XML conferences. Small, a little clubby (but self concious of this, and people do take the time to say hello,) presentations above the ‘beginner’ level, and one main track of programming.

And the food in Montreal? C’est bon. C’est bon.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden found a entry in Peter Flaschner’s blog about overcoming paralysis by giving yourself permission to make mistakes.

Your brainstem really does equate missing an important deadline with danger. And when it detects danger, it changes your behavior. Run! Hide! …

I’ve found the best way to side-step the run away instinct is to allow myself to make mistakes. … Knowing that my brainstem wants to run away from danger, I need to reassure it that there is no real danger present.

Anyone know of someone knowledgeable about Klingon?

It is a wondrous age we live in when someone can ask this with a straight face.

Given a newspaper or a cable network, Cthulu’d be an American hero.

Now you’d think that a guy who does that would end up, at best, being a colorful crank. But Francis didn’t. He applied to graduate school, in Montana.

It took him two years to walk there, but he finished a masters and a PhD (on how to respond to oil spills.)

He also ended up walking across America. His advice: carry and play a banjo when you travel.

Then, being that he’s an expert on oil spills, he was hired by the Coast Guard to help them figure out how to clean up after them.

Francis now speaks, and uses cars, trains, planes, and buses again.

This would be a great exercise for creating the background in games like Shadows in the Fog.

[ via Ginger Stampley ] She’s part of the new collaborative weblog on role playing games:

On the bright side, it could be a great employment program that would last a long long time. Maybe that’s not enough benefit?

Note for distopian SF writers: since any such program will be offshored at the first chance, you’ll want to work a scene into your next novel taking place in some squalid ontology sweatshop in Russia, India, Texas, or some other place with plenty of English-speakers and limited civil rights.