This morning the three-hour drive from Baltimore to New Jersey took ten hours. I left at 10pm yesterday night, and I expected to finish off the trip to my parent's house at around 1am, drop a load of laundry into the conveniently coin-free washer and dryer downstairs, and head off to sleep. I didn't realize how much my work day had taken out of me until about half an hour after I got onto the road and could hardly stay in my lane. By that time I was already through the Fort McHenry Tunnel toll and psychologically committed to continue northward, but there was no way I'd make it up without some sleep.

At around 11:00 last night I pulled over to the Maryland House rest stop parking lot and fell asleep in the drivers seat.

By 3:30 in the morning I finally felt well enough to drive again and got over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and 30 miles up the New Jersey Turnpike before I had to pull into John Fenimore Cooper Service Area and sleep for another hour until I felt ready to finish the trip up to town.

I wanted to be here by 8:00 so I could get to the weekly amateur radio and Eggs breakfast at the Holly Park Diner on Park Avenue with my old hams. At 7:58, I pulled into the driveway and footed it over to the diner for a nice mushroom and pepper omlet, and the fine company of some grande old hams.

After breakfast I spent a nice domestic morning alone in the house doing laundry and out front car wash in the beautiful Spring weather. Around 11:30, just as I was spraying the last few bubbles of soap off my Honda Civic, Seaya pulled up in my driveway in her SUV. We hung around the house for a few minutes while I switched over my whites to the dryer, figured out directions to the Raritan Expo Center and then headed out to the event of the day, the Trenton Computer Festival.

The $12 admission fee seemed a little steep at first, but by the end of the day both of us agreed that it was totally worth the price. After a couple of hours of wandering around, Seaya picked up a bunch of classic computer games from a display for real cheap and I found a nice discount copy of Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

It may not seem like much, but usually when I find a book at a flea market or local bookstore, I jot down the title and author and go to Amazon.com or another online bookseller with my monthly book order. I know, I know, I'm a horrible person that enjoys killing off local businesses and merchants, but it's just what I do. But today the guy behind the table from Caravan Booksellers of Holland, PA took a a good ten minutes to stand with me and Seaya, listen to how both her and I have enjoyed the personal company of jonlasser in Baltimore (while waving around the single copy of Think Unix we discovered on his vendor table) and recommend me some related books on web design theory that he had recently got in from the publisher. Basically he totally impressed me with his desire to actually help me instead of just being a grumpy money-collector behind the table. So he got my sale.

At 1:30 we wandered outside to drop our stuff our at the car and discovered that there was an entire outdoor flea market in the adjoining parking lot. As we got over that way, it was already starting to rain a little, so everyone out there was putting their stuff away and packing everything back into their cars and trucks. All the merchandise out there was the kind of stuff you would expect to be sold from the back of trucks at a computer flea markets, so neither of us were too disappointed.

Then, as we were walking around the outside edge of the lot, when I heard a little kid screaming over and over again. It was that annoying way that little kids scream that sounds just like the bleating of an annoyed goat.

Then I turned to find myself face to face with a frustrated goat.

Yes, I'm serious. In the middle of Edison, NJ, tied with a short leash to a post in the middle of a parking lot at the Trenton Computer Festival was an increasingly wet and vocally annoyed . . . goat. I don't think we ever figured out exactly how a goat got there, and this haunting feeling tells me I'm probably better off not knowing.

At around 2:00 we finished getting wet and gawking at the goat, so we moseyed on back into the Expo Center to catch the keynote address of the festival by Emmanuel Goldstein of Off the Hook and 2600 Magazine fame.

Now, a little background: back when I grew up in New Jersey, Off the Hook was the show that I listened to every week on WBAI radio out of New York. I mean, imagine the joy on the face of a little 16 year old unix.turd like myself when I could spend an entire hour listening to the voices of two real, honest-to-God hackers and phreakers talking about lots of fun exploration into the world of gray-hat computer and telephonic exploration.

My teenage dream of sitting in a room filled with hackers, actually able to see the face and body behind this legendary disembodied voice was about to be fulfilled.

Then, as we rounded a corner, an unfamiliar voice called out to me. It was none other than ahm. This is the guy that basically started my entire career into into the world of Unix many moons ago with his addictive Waffle BBS in Dunellen, NJ. After a few corny jokes like "Hey, you look just like the picture on your web page!" and "God, I bet I look just like the ones on my web cams too!", I introduced him and Seaya to each other. Of course, the first damn question out of his mouth is "So in which post on vees.net did I read about her?"

And the worst part is both Seaya and I blurted out the answer a second later.

So there in a room with a couple hundred balding and pot-bellied hackers, Seaya, my mentor ahm and one of my many idols, Emmanuel Goldstein, I scratched another item off of my Things to do before I die.

In about three minutes, this guy had the room in the palm of his hand with a nostalgic trip down memory lane. For a guy that had his eyes glued to his speech notes the whole time, he did a marvelous job with timing and emphasis in all the right points. My feeble memory couldn't really do his speech or delivery justice here, but if I manage to get ahold of a copy or transcript, I'll update this node and link to it. Needless to say, this was the right choice of keynote speakers for the audience. In spite of some really fallacious pro-hacker rhetoric ("Yeah, Kevin Mitnick pretended to be someone else to gain access to computer systems, but is that really a crime?) he made a lot of good points about the future and our rights within it.

After we got back and spent a few minutes decompressing at the house before we went out for pizza down the street at Salerno's, and some italian ices at Rita's on the way back. Then we headed out to Menlo Park Mall to pick up some stuff. Actually, when I got in the car, I thought I was driving out to Woodbridge Commons, but my car decided it didn't like that idea and the next thing I know, we're in the Menlo parking lot. I knew the old van had a good memory, but how my Honda Civic knows exactly how to get to the mall, I don't think I'll ever figure out.

We got back, decompressed some more, I finished my laundry, and enjoyed an evening out on the porch in the beautiful weather with my notebook. In a few minutes my parents should finally arrive, and out to a bit more more eating and some introductions all around. Then a good night's sleep for the wedding tomorrow, but that's another story . . .

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