I went running this morning, if you can call it that, on the Confederate Trail in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  The island is very picturesque and the trail is breathtaking in spots.  I’d been told that the fox population is quite high, but didn’t see any until this morning.

On the outbound trip I came close enough to pet a large red fox.  He stopped, dropped his head low, and watched me.  People must feed them.  We watched each other for a couple of minutes before he lifted his tail and jogged off into the tall grass on the side of the trail.

On the return trip I was stunned to watch a fox, perhaps the same fox, chasing a chipmonk.  I had the advantage of height watching the scene play out in a grassy spot lower than the trail.  I had to wonder for a moment whom I should root for before realizing that it didn’t matter to either of them what I thought.  They were both beautiful and the sun was still low and golden in the sky.  Flowers all around.  A perfect morning.

Actually, ‘today’ was in late October. I just noticed this draft and thought I’d push it out. It didn’t work out, obviously.

I usually don’t keep an eye out for upcoming conferences, but am trying to be better about it. Here are some upcoming conferences I’m thinking about.

• 3rd International Digital Curation Conference - December in Washington, DC
• Code4Lib 2008 - February in Portland, OR
• PyCon 2008 - March in Chicago, IL
• Best Practices Exchange 2008 - May in Helena, MT

I’ll probably try to present with a friend at PyCon and demonstrate some tools at BPE. I think there are some upcoming NDIIPP meetings, too. January in San Diego, I think. I was hoping for San Fransisco since SD is so played out, but no one asked my opinion. I mean, if I wanted to hang out at a real supercomputer center, I’d head back to Champaign. (Just kidding Robert and David)

I posted some photos of our weekend at a friend’s cabin on the New River near Galax, Virginia. We invited a couple of friends, Heather and Andrew, and their dog Ellie. It was pretty awesome. We did some hiking at Grayson Highlands State Park on part of the Appalachian Trail. See the photos.

I just spent a few days in Fort Worth visiting friends. I also discovered that having a salt water pool is pretty awesome. Here are some pictures.

I was just getting ready to head to Pasadena for DLF and realized I’ve listened to all of the podcasts on my mp3 player. I thought I’d post a few sources that I look to for podcasts. Most of them are interviews with Free Software and Open Source luminaries and library, especially digital library, figures. I also try to work in some science and the occasional book.

• NerdTV
• FLOSS Weekly
• Radio OpenSource
• LibriVox
• This American Life
• NPR Podcast Directory
• Science Friday
• Open Libraries
• Open Source Conversations
• Educause CNI
• Penn Jillette

I’ll try to clean this up, categorize these, and add notes soon. I’m always looking for other technology/library related podcasts. Suggest some.