With Silence Must be Heard playing over the speakers for about the zillionth time in the last 36 hours, I figure now would be a good time to do a summary of festing activities, as per tradition.

Friday night: as indicated in my previous rambling, bouncing and I decided to begin our festing experience a night before the rest of the crew arrived. Although we agreed upon this immediately upon my return from work, the ceremonies didn't actually begin commencing until around 2100.

Once this course of action was decided, bouncing needed to replace Festery's chip fan, which had died on the previous night, so he proceeded to CompUSA. Meanwhile, I, feeling rather giddy, typed up a happy little pre-fest rambling, and proceeded to give my ears a nice dose of abuse, fully transforming my thought patterns into that of the feline-eyed cybercreature of the night that I am. I won't embarrass myself by naming which 80s artist(s) I listened to.

After the family ate dinner, bouncing and I moved Festery and Dagobah into their standard locations, went to buy wake up juice (Friday going down in history as the day I paid for everything in quarters), and proceeded to commence festing. He mostly worked on his threads engine, at least during the moments in which he managed to draw himself away from CTP. He did manage to find and fix a bug in one of the C-based standard cookie libraries his code was using, and emailed a patch to the author. That's fun for the whole family.

For my part, I didn't actually end up writing much code at all on the first night of festing. Most of my time was spent in Gimp, throwing together the probably overly flamboyant red and yellow themed border look that will soon grace each and every page of the new interface. After many hours of tweaking it to display right in both Netscape 4.7 and Mozilla M14, I went down at 0500.

I woke up at around 1000, messed with the look for a few more hours, decided I was happy with it, and proceeded cook hash browns and watch Beastmaster, Cleo 2525, and Jack of All Trades. Quality television programming.

After that, it was time to get back into the real code. Hacked at various perl modules for a couple hours, took a short nap, ate spaghetti for supper, hacked some more, and I don't know where the rest of the time went. 2230, I started watching the Xena rerun, but my brain just wasn't into it. Jaeger arrived with his newly-painted black monitor stand, the first step in the recoloring of his primary output device, and I decided to abandon one CRT to return to the other.

Since bouncing and I were both running low, and Jaeger needed to establish a supply, the three of us went for another beverage run. Shortly after, Scott made an entrance, accompanied by his Packard Bell monitor with the Apple logo sticker on the side. Too spooky.

The usual festing fun ensued, with a good mix of joyful conversation, fun-filled debates about .pl vs .py, One-MouseOver style patents (although not much real debate there, since we're all in agreement), perusal of Jaeger's image archive, and productive coding. Jaeger did some more tweaking of the x13 code to Scott's great delight.

After several hours of this insanity, we proceeded to Denny's at 0400 to discuss the future of x13. (Well, actually, the three of them discussed it, and I nodded my head every now and then, since I'm not actually doing anything on it these days.) One unnamed member of the festing pack, who harbors a strange fascination with the Denny's carafes, proceeded to commit petty larceny upon exit. (Don't ask me why, because I don't know either.)

Arriving back at the Louisville Compound at 0620, I immediately went down for sleep. Awoke four hours later, did some more coding, wrote this.

Lounge status: May put something up later today. May not. The general content display interface is pretty much there, save a few loose ends. As of now, the partially written comment threading engine is still untested. We'll see what it looks like tonight.

The cool thing about this stage of the development is that everything I do produces immediately, dramatically visible results. After months of writing modules whose only displayable output is some debug info and maybe a test page, it's so much fun to -- by using them all together -- make something that actually works for a practical purpose! This is the payoff that keeps me coming back for more.

Alrighty then. Right now, with bouncing and Jaeger sitting there implementing their kludges in desktops full of xterms and ssh sessions, I'm feeling the urge to go back to hacking. The fest continues...