Giles is up there doing the Archeopteryx Ruby MIDI generator talk. Best quote so far: “most people don’t use the freedom they have.”

I can’t describe to you how rapid, funny, inspiring and informative his talk is. Maybe I can: we’re all starving for dim sum lunch and are willingly sticking it out to the end of his talk. It’s that awesome.

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 ;-)