Through great blessings and a wonderfully understanding family, I find myself once again in Portland for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. It’s just such an honor to participate in such a cutting edge conference.

I’ve posted the results of my first day over on the O’Reilly Broadcast blog. I’ve also uploaded a new set of photos from the OSCON Cloud Summit over on Flickr.

Overall, it was great to see some old friends and in general be in the company of a lot of really smart hackers. Today, the conference officially kicks off with Tim O’Reilly’s keynote speech, which is always intriguing to witness. Then it’s into the maul of the beast with hundreds of sessions anf the always jam packed exhibit hall. Sounds like a great day ahead of me.

Even though I take massive dosages of Xanax to get to sleep every night, sometimes I’ll just wake up at like 4:00 a.m. I don’t know why, because most days I feel a little “hung-over” from the Xanax. Yes, I didn’t know it, but some medicine can cause you to suffer through a hang-over. While it’s not the uncomfortable alcohol triple whammy of nausea, vomiting, and dehydration, there are some medicines that will cause an adverse after affect.

Well today was one of those days. I popped awake at 4:30, and from experience, there’s little reason to try to get back to sleep. So I got up made a cup of excellent Puerto Rican coffee and I was off. First, I wasn’t liking how my twitter background image looked on smaller screens so I gave it a couple of tweaks. Since it points to this blog, I decided to carry over the skull motif, which required playing around a bit with the custom template. Now everyone know that skulls make any design cooler, so I was off to a killer start.

While I was at it, with the help of the WordPress documentation and this support post I setup automated posting using e-mail. While I never really needed this before, I’ve gotten used to using my Sharp Sidekick for updates to Twitter, Facebook, and my Blogger blogs, it’s nice to be able to update my blog when I only have cell phone at hand.

Finally, I got comments working again. I have been slammed in the past by comment spam pretty heavily so I had’em shut down. So I got those back online, just hope I don’t make it back onto some spambots list. Next up, I’ve got to get a life stream feed going for all of my me related social media accounts.

While I was in high school and college, I always enjoyed listening to Devo. Hey what was not to like, catchy riffs, techno/punk rock, with a geeky concept? With smash MTV hits like “Whip-It”, “Satisfaction”, & Through Being Cool” they were always fun to watch and listen to. When I was off at college my brother Alan, who has always been a big influence on my musical tastes, turned me on to “Oh No! It’s Devo,” (1982) which was a masterpiece of prog-rock/punk fusion.

Now fast forward some, umm, well, a lot of years. Again, my brother Alan re-introduced me to Devo. You see, he’s picked up the drums and has been pounding on those things like it was the bosses head. And you guessed it, one of his favorite bands to jam to is Devo. We each rediscovered Devo’s greatness. Through the deep well that is BitTorrent, I was able to score their discography as well as some videos of complete concerts. After seeing them perform live, well at least on video, I was totally blown away.

Now I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my day. Some bands, just don’t transfer well to the whole reproduce their recorded sound, live. Well that’s certainly not the case for Devo. I guess essentially being a punk rock band helps. As my brother and I have come to realize many mainstream bands start off as punk bands, then evolve musically into more complex genres. Incubus and the Police are two such bands. My conclusion was that, when you get right down to it, punk rock is about the most simple type of rock there is. Sure there’s a big difference between the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and Devo, but I think they all share a certain pureness that emerges from their simplicity.

After “Oh No! It’s Devo,” Devo only released three more Cd’s, the last coming in 1990. Now after 10 years, they’ve released “Something For Everyone.” Ladies and Germs, let me tell you, it is another masterpiece. Check out this brilliant video from one of the singles “Fresh” If anything, I’d say they sound better than ever. They’ve also picked back up where they’ve left off and are pimping the new CD all over late night television talk shows and have also hit the road for a new 2010 tour. Of course, they’re going to be performing in Indiana, and I hope Alan’s going to go, but the closest they’re coming to Puerto Rico is Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s easy to say that after watching them perform live and the total awesomeess that is “Something For Everyone,” I now want to see them more than ever. I remember them playing the 9:30 Club back when I was living close to Washington DC, but I’d have to say that was about the only opportunity that I can remember. So I’ve started to make some noize locally with a local promoter and will soon ratchet up the noize to see if there are any other Devo fans stuck on the island. My mission, and I’ve defnitely chosen to accept it, is to raize enough stink to get them to come to Puerto Rico; something which I don’t believe has ever happened. So how about, “Are we not men?”