I've never actually mentioned the WhatTheCast podcast, which is done by several of my friends.

It is worth noting that they did an episode live at dragon*con. This is notable for multiple reasons:

1. All four of these men are my friends.
2. They make me look positively un-nerdy.
3. They're telling stories of what it's like to work on tech staff, and I can vouch that these stories, no matter how outrageous, are true.
4. I'm heckling in the audience.
5. I also get shot down by the panelists. (You'll hear the exchange in the podcast.)
6. I even took play-by-play photos, which are available on my flickr account and Brian's flickr account.

My actions were characteristic of me, this post less so.

We neither of us are really sure of how, exactly, the friendship got started, but it did center around music and graduated to code and phone calls. That was years ago, and my clearest memory of them was walking outside on a lazy summer night, sitting outside in the driveway, bare feet on concrete, eyes to sky, and watching the stars circle as we talked.

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

Hard to believe it's that time of year already. I've had my head in other things for almost a year now, and it shows. From reading the boards, I'm one of the last people to get into "con mode." Everyone else on tech seems to be frothing at the bit to get back to work, and me, I'm a bit hesitant.

There is nothing left to do, and little left to say. Three years' worth of work culminates in this, a five-day span in which I will work harder at something than most people would ever dream of calling 'fun.'This database has grown beyond what any of our predictive abilities believed it might become. We expected a flat, two-dimensional set of data: names, addresses, phone numbers. What it became, though, was a central point around which everything else revolved. A repository.

There.As of a few minutes ago, the 2006 shift signup grid was just distributed to tech. Thus ends phase 1 of the Busy Season, and begins the mad rush of Phase 2. Today—the shift grid release day—is the day that I work for months toward, knowing that the moment these grids are released, I am not likely to have time to work on anything else.