Zed Shaw is up next. He is pacing. He told me he’s especially looking forward to angering the musicians in the audience. And he has a harmonica. Lord help us.

A major theme, concept, or understanding here at “Ruby Fringe”http://www.rubyfringe.com amongst folks seems to be owning what you do. Not that it’s expressed this way – but I think a lot of what we’re discussing here comes down to owning your work, owning how you spend your time, owning your mistakes and growing from there. From Fail Camp to discussion on sales and business relationships to networking and how you spend your time, to the slogan on the back of the conference tags, “Ask me about my startup!”, this is about owning what you do and consciously running with it.

Quite frankly, it’s exhilarating. This is not a normal programming conference.

Zed Shaw literally just rocked the house by playing into his own sequencing software and winging some lyrics, guitar and harmonica.

So far the overwhelming blowout talk here was Nick Sieger’s of Sun Microsystems. He’s got the whole thing over here on his blog, with a complete discography of the great music he played.

While listening to this great primer on the history of Jazz and discussion of core concepts, some ideas collided in the back of my brain. I’m pretty familiar with a lot of it, but it’s been a while and I’ve been stuck in some of the same genre/idea ruts. I started thinking about some things I’ve been working on for my band, things I want to try, some of the concepts Nick was discussing and illustrating by playing us music and I suddenly had an explosion in my head and a near-complete song idea! I actually drew out a few bass clef staves and wrote some sheet music notes real quick to try when I get back home (or in a music shop on Queen St. on the way to the after party.).

Nick, in half an hour you just made up every single JavaOne conference I attended ;-)

First two talks were great (Jay Philips on Adhearsion, Dan Grigsby on hacking the market, basically). While on different topics altogether, both were plugging a common theme here: keep coming up with new ideas, set out on your own, and if you look for the niches and cracks you can fill in the market, you can exploit/hack those efficiencies to your advantage and really make it as an indie with a few friends and not work for the man, so to speak.

Which we already knew (or at least hope) is the case, but it’s awesome having these folks sharing their experiences, ideas, and methods of doing it themselves. It’s basically a lot of people who have that kind of “hack everything” mentality that is the focus of the HOPE/2600 folks and apply it to the question, “how can I set out for myself as a hacker and make a living?”

Also: the memcached talk was a totally excellent geek-out on caching.

Next talk is called “Living on the Edge,” and it’s about what’s going on in Merb edge development, but you see how it fits the broader theme by title.

There’s a great community here in Toronto, looking forward to meeting some New Yorkers and seeing if we have this kind of community back in NYC and Jerz.

More to come.