Dev Con!

I have bad news for anyone who wanted some peace and quiet in Austin this week: we're having a developers conference at work! Yeeeeow! The streets will be flooded with programmers doing shots off of their graphing calculators and asking girls to flash in exchange for a gmail invite. If you don't want your kids hearing any salty jokes about object oriented programming or viewing lascivious ASCII art, then for the love of God, keep them at home. Turn off the lights, lock the door, and refuse to answer if someone comes knocking about using your wifi.

What is a developers conference, you weinerbiscuits may be asking. Well, it's where a group of developers meet for a couple of days to talk about programming. "That sounds boring," you may think. Well, allow me to counter: "that sounds awesome." And it IS, if only for the discussions. The discussions usually start off in a friendly, cordial manner with an interesting topic like Coding Standards. If these discussions go long enough, though, things get woolly. Very woolly. In a matter of minutes, you can go from enjoying the company of your coworkers to holding the point of a ballpoint pen to someone's throat and screaming, "What kind of idiot indents four spaces instead of five?! Incompetent! Incompetent!"

Much like Global Thermonuclear War in "War Games", the only way to win is not to play. Whenever someone tries to start riling me up, I stand up and with all of the dignity I can muster, I say, "Excuse me, good sirrah, for our opinions differ. I respect the validity of your views, but sadly, I cannot concur. Let us come back to the issue where our tempers are less flared, lest we lose our gentlemanly demeanor. Also, you smell like a pig. I don't agree with no pig man, ya heard?"

So, if my entries here contain less vim and vigor than usual for the next few days, let us all blame the developers conference. Also, if there is a blue puncture wound in my neck that's roughly the diameter of a Bic, just assume I learned my lesson.