Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …

I am in Portland this week for OSCON. I've got a couple of talks to
do this week (and a MySQL 5.1 Tutorial to do today).

I am a bit cavalier about short trips, I don't double check my
packing as much as I should. Therefor I neglected to pack my Treo's
charger. Last night I was thinking that I would need to get up this
morning and go buy a charger and then I remembered an article I read
on LifeHacker.com about hotels having boxes of power supplies just
sitting around collecting dust.

Its true!

This morning I went down to the front desk of the Double Tree and
asked if they had a box of chargers. Down to the basement they sent
me where I found not one box, but a few boxes of power supplies.

My Treo is now happily charging :)

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

I just got the word from my manager that I'm going to OSCON this year. Whee! I've been wanting to go since '98, and it seems that this is the first time I'm going to be able to make it. I'm looking forward to it.