This is probably my last posting before I go in for surgery and start my new life as a “patient”. I was talking with a friend, and we were laughing at how “patient” has the dual meaning of forebearance and under medical care. We didn’t pull out our phones and find out that it is also from the Latin, for “suffering”. Anyways, suffering is definitely part of life in CancerLand, and surely a reason why we are culturally so frightened of it, even when prognosis is good. Some measure of suffering will be extracted, on the way through, and that’s if you are lucky. A poster on the groups shared that ..read more

Cancer is a mind fuck. I mean, it’s a body fuck too, obviously, but the early experience for me has been of weird gyrations of mental health and mood with each passing day. The first thing I did was the first thing everyone does – look up all the different probabilities of five year survival, because that’s what is at the top of the Google search. With a stage two diagnosis (hard to know if that’s actually what I have, though) Google says I have a 10% chance of dying over the next five years. That feels like… a lot? A scary amount. But wait, here’s a fact – my odds of dying just in the ordina ..read more

A common refrain on my Facebook cancer support groups is that the first months after diagnosis can be among the most stressful. You know the least about the actual extent of your condition, but you simultaneously know for sure that your life is going to change a great deal, starting now. It is also the first time for grieving. In the worst case it is grieving actual mortality, the very real threat of the end. But even in a relatively low impact diagnosis like my (current) one, there is grief. It is the grief of lost futures, lost plans, lost self-image. I am a person who runs and climbs and ro ..read more

Before I joined the population of fellow cancer travellers, I had the same simple linear understanding of the “process” that most people do. You get diagnosed, you get treatment, it works or it doesn’t. What I didn’t appreciate (and this will vary from cancer to cancer, but my experience is with colorectal) is how little certainty there is, and how wide the grey areas are. Like, in my previous post, I said I was “diagnosed” with cancer. Which maybe made you think I have it. But that’s not how it works. I had a colonoscopy, and a large polyp was removed, and that polyp was cancerous, and a very ..read more

A little over a month ago, three days after my 53rd birthday, I received a diagnosis of rectal cancer. Happy birthday to me. Since then, I have been wrestling with how public to be about it. I have a sense that writing is good for me. But it also keeps like milk. I wrote most of this a couple weeks ago and my head space has already evolved. So writing like this is mostly a work of self-absorption (I’m sure you can forgive me) but hopefully it also helps to raise awareness amongst the cohort of people who might know me or read this. Colorectal cancer rates are going up, and the expected age of ..read more

The programme for pgconf.dev in Vancouver (May 28-31) has been selected, the speakers have been notified, and the whole thing should be posted on the web site relatively soon. I have been on programme committees a number of times, but for regional and international FOSS4G events, never for a PostgreSQL event, and the parameters were notably different. The parameter that was most important for selecting a programme this year was the over 180 submissions, versus the 33 available speaking slots. For FOSS4G conferences, it has been normal to have between two- and three-times as many submissions a ..read more

This year, the global gathering of PostgreSQL developers has a new name, and a new location (but more-or-less the same dates) … pgcon.org is now pgconf.dev! Some important points right up front: The call for papers is closing in one week! If you are planning to submit, now is the time! The hotel scene if Vancouver is competitive, so if you put off booking accomodations… don’t do that! Book a room right away. The venue capacity is 200. That’s it, so once we have 200 registrants, we are full for this year. Register now. There are also limited sponsorship slots. Is PostgreSQL important to your b ..read more

Preparing the keynote for FOSS4G North America this year felt particularly difficult. I certainly sweated over it. Audience was a problem. I wanted to talk about my usual thing, business models and economics, but the audience was going to be a mash of people new to the topic and people who has seen my spiel multiple times. Length was a problem. Out of an excess of faith in my abilities, the organizers gave me a full hour long slot! That is a very long time to keep people’s attention and try to provide something interesting. The way it all ended up was: Cadging some older content from keynot ..read more

Last month I got to record a couple podcast episodes with the MapScaping Podcast’s Daniel O’Donohue. One of them was on the benefits and many pitfalls of putting rasters into a relational database, and the other was about real-time events and pushing data change information out to web clients! PostgreSQL – Listen and Notify Clients In Real Time TL;DR: geospatial data tends to be more “visible” to end user clients, so communicating change to multiple clients in real time can be useful for “common operating” situations. I also recorded a presentation about pg_eventserv for PostGIS Day 2022. W ..read more

Last month I was invited to give a keynote talk at the CUGOS Spring Fling, a delightful gathering of “Cascadia Users of Open Source GIS” in Seattle. I have been speaking about open source economics at FOSS4G conferences more-or-less every two years, since 2009, and took this opportunity to somewhat revisit the topics of my 2019 FOSS4GNA keynote. If you liked the video and want to use the materials, the slides are available here under CC BY ..read more