Last week was a busy one.

On Tuesday, I attended PublicMediaCamp, hosted by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Audrey led a session on location-based reporting and tools for reporting on local tech (sort of a hybrid session), for which I took some notes. During the second hour, Reid, Audrey and I had a good chat with Morgan Holm about running a membership-based organization.

Thursday night was IgnitePortland 9. I didn’t have an volunteer responsibilities this time around, but Sherri was the speaker wrangler, so I showed up early to see how she was doing. Some of my favorite talks this time around were “The vowel “R”, and other linguistic curiosities“, “Gypsy Jazz” and “Carl Alviani – Not Created Equal: The history and discernment of plastics in product design.”

Friday I attended the WhereCampPDX kick-off party at OpenSourcery for a bit and the Saturday I managed the registration desk during the unconference portion at Metro. I don’t know a lot about geography-related tech, but it was nice to be able to help out.

Yesterday was the last day of OMSI’s Einstein exhibit, so we made sure to stop by and check it out. I’ve recently read Walter Isaacson‘s biography of Einstein, so not a lot of the information in the exhibit was new. However, it was still very cool to see a few things like Einstein’s nobel medal and his handwritten papers on relativity and such.

I also picked up a used copy of Joe Armstrong‘s Programming Erlang and have been working my way through it. (I’ve been intereted in learning a purely functional language and a friend suggested Erlang,or Haskell). So far I’m enjoying it, despite the fact that (or because ?) it’s mind-bending at times. One thing that strikes me is how terse the language can be. And it’s making understand anonymous functions in a whole new way.

And, of course, no weekend is complete without at least one cat-assisted nap: