skud

OK so! Music Hack Day! Didn't suck too much, but also just didn't grab me. Plusses and minuses:

+ cool venue (Red Bull Australia HQ) reminded me of ridic startup offices in the Bay Area (I'm actually kind of fond of stupid startup office decoration)
- venue full of stairs, and my knee was being weird and twingey (I think a side effect of some bike-riding strain from a month back), so ow
+ ran into a couple of people I knew and met a few new nice/cool people
- there were a few hipster douchebags there, most notably the guy the ABC had sent to promote Triple J's new open API, who was wearing a shirt with some kind of pinup girl/lingerie model pouting and posing all over it... way to guarantee I don't talk to you about your API, dude.
+ mostly hung out with a really nice guy who was making a Guitar Hero controller out of a plank of wood, and who turned out to be a regular Geek Feminism reader and friend-of-a-friend via many channels
- didn't really find any hardware hackers doing anything I could join in on usefully (guitar hero guy didn't really get going on his stuff til after I left)
- lots of people doing the sort of API hacks that I really didn't want to work on (too burned out after Freebase etc)
- most of the hacking seemed to pick up overnight, at really late hours, which I wasn't all that interested in. I don't feel safe/comfortable staying in overnight at a hack thing with lots of booze, without many friends there, and in a bit of an industrial deadzone with no transport etc
+ some actually quite good and enjoyable discussions about open/structured data... I'm not actually burned out on that subject in general, just on Freebase/Google, so yay
+ good food provided... I ate a whole bunch of the really tasty vegetarian wraps with roasted pumpkin and pesto and goats cheese and spinach
+ MHD tshirt is not too ugly and I might actually wear it
- but of course it didn't come in my size so I ordered a men's XL and will now have to modify it to fit, bleh... tired of having to do this all the time

So I came back to puzzlement's place around dinner time, to meet up with people and have dinner and watch DAAS videos, which was pleasant if kinda low key. Sadly, I think I caught sundress's cold, because today my plan was to wander slowly, via Glebe Point Rd and King St, back to the hack day to see the demos/prizegiving in the afternoon... but halfway there I realised I was cold and shivery and achey and really wanted a) a warm jumper and b) a nap, or else I was going to fall over. So once again, back to puzzlement's, napped, and am now catching up on internets.

When I signed up for MHD I gave myself permission to be as involved or uninvolved as I wanted to be, with no guilt, because I wasn't sure whether I would find it fun or whether I'd find it stressful/unpleasant/triggering. In the day or two beforehand I was on the verge of meltdown level OH GOD NO (especially after they tweeted about how much beer they were getting in for the event) but actually it wasn't that bad, and I quite enjoyed it, and I think if I hadn't been so burned out I would have built something and got more into it.

It looks like there were a bunch of cool hacks demo'd this afternoon, but unfortunately the only ones I've found links for that are available online require you to sign up for Rdio, which I can't/won't do because it requires me to choose a gender from a binary selection, before even allowing me to try the service out. So, no.

Current status: somewhat snotty and headachey, pondering food, pondering packing for my early morning departure. Another 12 hour train ride tomorrow, back to Melbourne. I suspect I'll sleep a lot.

Arrived in Sydney for the Music Hack Day that's being held over the weekend. I took the train up, which was better than flying (since I had the time), but not as good as it used to be ~20 years ago, nor as good as the train to Adelaide was last year, nor (this is the kicker) as good as the various Amtrak journeys I've taken in the last couple of years. Ow.

Not sure what I'll be doing for MHD but I brought a pile of random gear in the hopes that it'll be useful and get me in on something more hardware-y and less API-ish; my fallback project is some kind of shiny visualisation of riot grrl stuff, which may come in handy for a school assignment later. Of course this plan would be better if I'd remembered to bring (at least) that one book I have on the subject. Oh well.

I'm staying with puzzlement and tomorrow I'm brunching with tigtog, lunching with vonstrassburg, Powerhouse Museum in the arvo, and dinner with sundress.

Right now I'm listening to the Sharpe soundtrack (for no very good reason except that I'm re-reading Patrick O'Brian and there was an association of ideas via Spanish Ladies) and about to fall down go boom.