Sweet. sweet. sweet. I just got the proof-of-concept for my new, super duper, elegantly abstractified, object oriented CGI form data system for Bitscape's Lounge 2.0 working. All the form objects are inherited from the entryform type, and it uses a funky little hash whose values are references to anonymous subs to handle the various input types. This should free me from the kludgy mess of manually writing laborious CGI forms forever! Plus, it's highly extensible, and will be even more so after I've done a little more tinkering with the method interfaces. Fun fun fun.

So, how did this little impromptu fest come about? Well, last night around midnight, when I was just preparing to take some overdue sleep, bouncing talked me, we chatted for a bit and I helped him get festery setup to route through Illian, the funky new TEAM box I took home from eSoft. (Which has an entirely separate story that I may relate later in another rambling.)

He said he had Scott on another channel, and then out of the blue, asked if I cared to wander over to Scott's house, bringing Dagobah along, for an impromptu fest. A very tempting idea indeed. Obviously, I gave in, despite the fact that my brain and body both threatened to shutdown and reboot on general principles. Nothing a little caffeine and guarana couldn't take care of. :)

I shutdown Dagobah, and promptly as I could, gathered together the necessary items and loaded them into the bouncing-mobile. As we were leaving the driveway, I commented to bouncing that I don't quite have this down to a science as Jaeger does. I'm not accustomed to packing Dagobah up for short, night-long visits to other houses. Aside from fests at ucollege.edu, this is my first fest outside of the Louisville Compound.

Of course, bouncing had scully, so his preparation took a grand total of probably 30 seconds.

We made the customary beverage run on the way, stopping at Albertson's in Boulder, where we both grabbed a couple of those funky 20oz glass bottles of supercharged liquid, along with a couple of the more traditional 2-liter containers of carbonated programming power. I decided I had a sweet tooth, so I grabbed a bag of licorice, and we proceeded on our journey.

Upon our arrival, Scott was in the process of spring cleaning. He promptly cleared away a big pile of junk to make a space on the table where Dagobah now rests.

While bringing Dagobah's components in, I noticed that one of the keyboard attachments which holds the cover in place had managed to pop off somewhere. A thorough searching of bouncing's trunk was unsuccessful, as was an examination of the ground between the car and the house with a flashlight. Scott speculated that a search during daylight would be easier, and it's also possible that the part came off at the Louisville Compound, in which case a search there will be in order if it is not yet found.

The three festers proceeded on their various tasks. This fest bears the rare distinction of being the first in recent history to take place without any of the involved PCs being networked to one another. Bouncing brought his hub, but he forgot his PCMCIA adapter, and Scott's PC did not have an ethernet card installed. That left Dagobah, which was perfectly capable of networking, but without any other PC's to connect to, what's the point?

Scott dabbled with various games, did a little surfing, and then downloaded some python development tools for the evil OS at bouncing's advise. Bouncing worked on various python scripts, and may have done some things with the campusgeeks.com code as well, but spent much of his time instructing Scott in the ways of Python. I began work on the Bitscape's Lounge version 2 lounge::entryform and related modules, and managed to get a test CGI script which uses them properly running, and then raved about it at the top of this rambling.

Of course, as is typical during fests -- even productive ones -- much talking, joking, and general goofing off fun took place. Scott lit a candle, jokingly called this the candlelight fest, and the discussion took off on a tangent in which the festers all wear cloaks and hoods like monks in an Enigma video. From there, it went to comparisons to certain scenes from Eyes Wide Shut. "Now there's a fest!" Much laughter ensued.

Another moment which I found funny was when during his demonstration of campusgeeks.com, Scott pointed out that one of the customizable boxes was for some Xena fan discussion site which I've never been to. (Hey, this show has a big following. No one fan, even an insanely obsessed one, could ever visit all the web sites which have been published about it.) He said he had included there it especially for me (awwww, I'm touched. lol.), and proceeded to click on a link to one of the stories. He read it in a Larry King-like voice, as I provided running commentary about Lao Ma, Eli, and how I didn't believe Eli could be a reincarnation of Lao Ma, because given their ages, they would almost certainly had to have been alive concurrently. Of course, nobody but me really knew what I or the article was talking about, but Scott did seem to perk up when I pointed out that it is commonly believed that Xena and Lao Ma had a fling together. "Wait a sec... Is Lao Ma a girl or a guy?" A girl, Scott. A girl.

Much fun was had, and productivity occured (at least on my part). Scott started running a black spider that he and bouncing had previously authored which visits all the web sites it can find and gathers email addresses, and also fails to check for or honor robots.txt. I don't even want to know.

Scott and bouncing zonked just after 3, and I kept programming. Strange. I thought I was the tired one. Well, it was fun, and my swap is full, so this concludes this report.