The shower curtain won another round this morning. I thought that
maybe I had it licked. It’s one of those setups with two curtains, a
plastic inner curtain and a separate outer curtain for looks. I
thought that if I adjusted the outer curtain so that it no longer dangled
into the shower that maybe the inner curtain wouldn’t billow quite so
much. And I was right. The billowing was definitely less pronounced.

But because the outer curtain didn’t hang fully in the shower, I wasn’t
able to close the inner curtain quite all of the way. And so when I
pulled the curtain aside, I found a wet bath mat and a puddle extending
half way across the bathroom floor. I had to pull down one of the unused
bath towels to mop it all up. And then, of course, as the towel had been
used to wipe the floor and moreover was sopping wet, there was no way I
was going to hang it up on the towel bar and use it again tomorrow so I
had to leave it on the floor like a slob, well aware that the hotel staff
were going to have to waste water washing it.

Other than that, it’s been a good day. There was another Tcl/XML
tutorial in the morning and a Tcl/database tutorial in the afternoon, and
I spent a good bit of time chatting with other attendees in the hall and
wandering about the immediate vicinity of the hotel.

After the tutorials
were over, Michael Cleverly and I wandered over to the nearest decent
bookstore (The Granville Bookstore, at 850 Granville–about three blocks
from the hotel) where I found a
Sharyn
McCrumb
novel I’d not
read, and a biography of Sir Richard Burton. That’s Sir Richard Burton
the Victorian explorer and adventurer, not Sir Richard Burton the actor.
More about him when I’ve read the book.

On the way back we were accosted by a short, seedy, bearded fellow who
clearly wanted some money from us but seemed to think it was necessary to
give us value for money by explaining why he was down on his luck.
During the brief time we spoke to him, we discovered that he was a singer
and comedian, a criminal, and had boxed professionally for many
years–had trained under a famous heavyweight boxer. And he told us
about the time he visited Los Angeles, went “down town” (which could mean
any number of places), and found himself in a bar in a heavily black part
of town, where he stayed until midnight when (fortunately for him) one of
the locals escorted him to the bus stop.

At that point we gave him our change and left him to his own devices.

Tonight is the conference reception at ActiveState. ActiveState is the
company that’s currently sponsoring Tcl open source development (and this
conference); it’s about two and a half blocks from here, across the
street from the local McDonalds. Should be fun.