Wait a minute, I was ON this cruise!

It's already been a week since the cruise ended, and I am sure I'm not the only one having an increasingly hard time believing the whole thing ever happened. My new Joco twitter friends, the steady stream of content from the trip appearing on youtube, and the official Flickr group page go a long way to help keep my energy and mood high.

I have mentioned that I didn't take hardly any photos on the cruise. I'm just not a good photo taker, partially because I have no eye for such things and partially because that would require me putting down my drink. Luckily there are a lot of great photographers in our little group of sea monkeys, and I coincidentally wound up in a few photos. Some of them I knew about and some I was delighted to discover on the aforementioned Flickr page.

***

I'll start with one of the photos I did take. My husband, Taylor (posting here as ghalidrim), was on the forums for the Joco cruise publicly gushing once he realized the Randal Schwartz posting was THE Randal Schwartz -- author of the O'Reilly book Learning Perl and general Perl guru.

I've only ever seen Taylor more excited once, when he found out Palpatine was going to be using a lightsaber in Episode III. The prospect of meeting Randal Schwartz evoked what I'd call an 8.7 on the "Palpatine-lightsaber girlish squeal and little dance" scale.

So when we were picking up our badges and there sat Randal Schwartz, Taylor "had to get a photo":


This was as excited as I saw Taylor on the entire cruise.

***

Our first interaction with an official celebrity was with Jonathan Coulton
himself. During the launch party JoCo mingled to make everyone feel welcome.
Kudos to Rangerrick for this picture, which illustrates the following exchange:

Jonathan Coulton came to tell Famous Tracy how much he enjoyed her excellent essay on Mr. Fancypants, but stayed to chat with our circle of Portland-based friends. The conversation turned to Paul F. Tompkins, and Jonathon Coulton said, as he did during the first morning announcements (6-minute mark), that we should burn all the mustaches in effigy after the memorial formal. The conversation went something like this:

Taylor: To burn them in effigy, first you'd have to form them into one big mustache.

Aaron (in red Hawaiian shirt): That's a ride I'd like to take.

[blink, blink]

Taylor: Really? Really. A giant, flaming, mustache ride.

***

I thought this photo was the closest I could come to proving the exchange I talked about with myself, John Hodgman, and Peter Sagal:


That's Taylor's arm holding the iphone with Paul F. Tompkins (photo from paulandstorm). I'm directly off camera to the right. Incidentally, the look on Hodgman's face is him asking, "Why is Paul in a Star Trek uniform?" I replied, "Why wouldn't he be? This is a formal occasion."

It turns out that Randal Schwartz, who took a lot of great photos and video on the cruise and manages the flickr page, actually got a shot of me talking to Hodgman
too.

It's a testament to his photographic ability how clear the shot is, because in my memory I was shaking uncontrollably. The only time I was more terrified on the trip was when I asked the question about pet peeves during the QA. Randal Schwartz also got a picture of that:

Video should be up from Cernoise soon.

***

There's more, but I'll finish this post with a quick photo from the mustache formal. I got a lot of nice compliments on my mustache socks (here's another great Randal Schwartz photo):

I just wanted to pass it on that these are socks from Sock it to Me, a Portland company that has a lot of cool stuff. I'm completely addicted to their wares.