Long hot days in Montreal -- which means a lot of fun for me. Yesterday, I had lunch with
Marc Laporte, a Montreal Open Source developer and project lead for
Tiki CMS/Groupware. Marc sent me email a week or so ago -- he saw on
GeoURL that we lived right across Parc La Fontaine from each other, and since we had such similar interests it made sense to meet up.
Wednesdays are my Daddy Day with Amita June. I try to work 4 10-hour days a week, and take Wednesday off to spend with the baby (and let Maj get some work done). It doesn't always work out that way -- I tend to work late night and weekends
anyways, and
Wikitravel never sleeps -- but at least theoretically I take the baby on Wednesdays.
So I had the baby, and we went and met Marc at Universel Caf on Cherrier and Parc L.F. It's a nice place -- not too pricey and the food is good. It's also got a
terrasse so we could sit outside in the sun. Marc is a lot of fun -- Tiki's got such an active user and developer community, and such a unique development strategy (very liberal CVS access) that we had a lot of fun and things to talk about.
Marc spent six months in
wt:Buenos Aires developing software, which is just about my dream job. I've wanted to go there for a long time, and it's on our list of "next places to live". We also talked a lot about how active Wiki culture is becoming, and how great that is, and how many blechy parts there are too.
As when most Wiki makers come together, we bemoaned the lack of a
Wiki markup standard, but hopefully the development of a
text/wiki RFC will spur its growth. At least I hope so!
tags:
marc laporte amitajune montreal universel geourl tiki buenos aires wiki wiki markup standard
Allez les bleus
On the way back from lunch, Amita and I stopped in the great playground by the baby pools in Parc La Fontaine, when my friend Niko called and invited me over to watch the World Cup semi-finals between France and Portugal.
Niko lives on Marie-Anne and DeBullion -- about half-way between the Portuguese neighborhood surrounding Iglesia Santa Cruz at rue Rachel and St Urbain, and the Barouf, a bar on St. Denis that has become the unofficial centroid of French World Cup fans in Montreal. Amita June fell asleep on the way there, so we didn't get to Niko's until the game was almost over. But that was OK -- it was kind of a boring game, as far as I can tell, and France won 1-0.
What was fun was walking out to St. Denis afterwards. The police had blocked off the street for several blocks in both directions, so we were able to walk up and down the street, while people cheered allez les bleus and waved the tricolor and generally had a mad good time.
We couldn't help ourselves -- we had to walk down rue Rachel and see how the other half was doing. Which was, in fact, not well -- there were an awful lot of glum Portuguese people hanging out at Rachel and St Laurent. The street wasn't blocked officially, but cars really couldn't get through the crowd of mopey, extremely well-costumed folks.
It got a little ugly -- one drunk France fan came around waving a tricolor and nearly got his hat handed to him by 12 angry Portuguese, including one guy in a red, yellow and green wig with a big red clown nose. A car with a French flag driving up St. Laurent also got stopped.
We figured it was time to get out, so I took the baby home and put her to sleep and hacked on my OpenID MediaWiki extension for a few hours. Things are going well -- I'm really close to a consumer and a server. The little UI niceties will have to come later -- right now I'm concentrating on the mainline functionality.
tags: openid mediawiki world cup montreal amitajune france portugal allez les bleus