Last week I had the opportunity to participate in my first "sprint". In a sprint, a bunch of people get together and work on an open source project for a few days. In my two days (and one night :p) of sprinting, I learned a lot, met some awesome people, and contributed to the start of a project. I highly recommend sprinting to anyone who gets a chance to do it.

However, one thing I noticed when sprinting was the difficulty of getting to a point where you can make progress on a project. For example, before you could work on my project, you had to download and install particular versions of six different tools. And then you had configure your system properly (set environment variables and run scripts and such).

Thanks to former VISTA Leader, Saul Baizman, who reads the Boston Globe most days....from the Opinion section:

Comment from Saul Baizman on January 5, 2007 - 1:40pm

Ha! Just caught this blog post. After reading Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," I hardly read the Globe -- or any news -- anymore. Caveat Read-or.