On the way to our beverage run, Jaeger and I decided that tonight's gathering truly deserves the title of Megafest. Six participants, seven computers (eight if you count the ancient Mac which provided us with a brief glow in the dark show), I have no idea how many dozens of liters of caffeinated beverages, many bags of chips and various dips, much festing music piped through Bouncing's stereo (although some participants chose do don headphones during portions of the fest), and enough geek energy aura to drive any normal person insane.

Jaeger and the commune contingent arrived at what must have been around 2130. I didn't actually bother to note the time when they arrived. Later than Jaeger's prediction. Earlier than mine.

We proceeded to haul in their equipment, find an arrangement which allowed everyone to sit comfortably at their workstations, and the arrivees quickly assembled and booted their machines. Shortly after, we journied to Safeway to obtain supplies. Initially, we were going to try and squeeze everyone into bouncing's car, but decided it would be wiser to take two, so I proceeded to drive the Toyota with Jaeger in the passenger seat.

I decided to splurge, and bought two 20 oz glass bottles of energy drink (Sobe Green Tea, and Snapple Fire), a 2-liter Pepsi, Mountain Dew, a big of chips, and cheese dip to add to my remaining supply from previous nights. Others bought all sorts of beverages and snacks (chips and dips seemed especially popular. Was CmdrTaco a visionary or what?). We exited the store, and Neelix and Humblik rode back to the house with me. The rest followed in the bouncing mobile.

Jaeger led the opening ceremony, and asked that I play Return to Innocence on Dagobah's speakers to set the mood. Neelix suggested we go around the circle and each state our project, which we did. Then, we turned out the lights, and Scott proceeded to wow everyone by powering up a Mac from the stone age, and the mood was set. The largest fest in festing history was underway.

Jaeger mentioned that he had been having trouble understanding parts of the box code, which I wrote way back in the prior (not) millenium. I suggested that I might be able to look at it and make improvements if given the location of his modified version and read/write access. He supplied the necessary information, and attempted to brief me on how it had been made to fit into the x13 codebase.

I looked at it for a few minutes, but made absolutely no headway in grasping what going on, clueless on which things needed fixing, much less finding solutions to said problems.

For me, this fest has been the least productive, but by far the most entertaining of the week. All sorts of interesting discussions have been happening almost constantly, ranging from a serious debate about the merits of xhtml, a reprise of yesterday's programming languages as art/literature vs practical/science, to obsurdly ridiculous banter about... well, all sorts of junk, much of it quite hilarious.

Attempting to get any real coding done has been for me about as effective as trying to keep up with Slashdot using a threshold of -1 while carrying on any kind of life. It just doesn't work. Not that I'm distraught with it. On the contrary, this has been a most enjoyable and relaxing time. In the future, I think I should just plan to not get anything done when more than 3 participants attend. This somewhat defeats the original festing creed. However, it seems inevitable.

Jaeger noted early on that the three commune members seemed to be getting things done, while those of us on the south side of the room were spending lots of time talking, joking, and figuring out ways to save the world. He speculated that they are used to getting things done on a deadline in the midst of heavy distraction, while us undisciplined ones are thrown off at the slightest twitch. I would extend the Slashdot metaphor to say that they have a higher default threshold in their brains; maybe a 2 or 3.

On his way to relieve himself, Neelix discovered that TNG was being broadcast and proceeded to watch (I'm totally out of chronological order here). I was a bit bored, and decided to join him. Initially, I was unable to identify the episode, but after a commercial, I recalled it was the one where the entire crew was deprived of rem sleep and went nuts until Troi was able to telepathically communicate with the aliens on the other side of the spacial anomoly through her nightmares and find a way to escape by collaborating with them and vent hydrogen through the warp nacells. The scene was very much reminiscent of many a night during our freshmen year at ucollege.edu, when TNG was on nightly at 1800. We regularly tuned in down in the bowels of Prescott, and during commercials we would discuss episodes, Trek history, and all sorts of issues relating to the show. The scene in the Louisville compound was just like old times. Talk about nostalgia!

After it became clear that concentrating long enough to do anything with the x13 box code was futile, I thought it might be easier to work on my htmlobj modules, since they were still in my recent memory from last night's fest. Generating new code is often easier than parsing old. No such luck in this case either. Again, so many little side topics being discussed, and the temptation was just too great to through in a tidbit of my own, which would then launch another tangent ad infinitum.

After a few hours of open xterms and no code, I decided to stop the pretense of coding, and focused my mind exclusively on the babble, which was enjoyable enough. In keeping with the convention of the previous two nights, I decided to document the fest from my pov (although Jaeger seems to have been knighted as the official documenter of fests, probably due to the fact that he takes many pictures, writes everything in his journal, and was the one with initiative enough to register festing.org).

Since I started this rambling, the atmosphere has quieted down significantly, while Neelix and Hublick engage in a game of magic, Bouncing and Scott are elsewhere, and Jaeger journies between Ziyal and Yukon (and just now to Dagobah) performing photo archiving along with other tasks unknown to me. I've said my say. Swap full. Cut.