PureGin.org

My first stop upon arriving in Portland was Powell's, the legendary bookstore. I arrived at the main location, which consists of a city block's worth of old 3-storey commercial buildings fused together into one huge store. A street paper vendor directed me to the location of the technical bookstore, just three blocks away on the park. I bought a copy of the DocBook book (used) for $22, and the WordNet book. An unexpected moment of happiness to discover that Fup, the store cat, is still alive and well and just celebrated her 17th birthday.

Sat down in the 'cafe' and tried to connect to the portland public telco free wifi network, but the node seemed to be down. Engaged in conversation with Kragen, visiting for OSCON - he was hunkered down with a pile of language books, including several on Haskell. Chatted about pure functional programming and template programming languages (e.g. Self), whether monads are 'natural' (me claiming that they're an abstraction, no different in kind than the notion of 'function', only less familiar to most people).

I guess that typifies the kind of place Powell's is.