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A while back I ran a design contest for Strange Loop t-shirt designs and got some great results. I've been waiting (and waiting and waiting) to get a couple screen print runs done to sell at the conference. At this point, I'm still waiting although I'm hopeful I will have these to sell at the conf.

Strange Loop is two weeks away!

I've had several groups register this week and there are only 4 spots left. If you're interested in registering, now is the time. I think it's almost certain that the conference will sell out, so there will not be any on-site registration at the conference.

Thanks everyone for making it such a great turnout!

At this point things are coming together and I'll be posting some final schedule info and other details soon.

No conference is immune from logistical issues. We've had one speaker cancellation recently - Guillaume Laforge from SpringSource will be unable to make it to talk about the future of Groovy. I was really disappointed to hear this but stuff happens.

Ok, the Strange Passions talks are set based on your votes:

Thursday night at Blueberry Hill:

• Nonlinear integration in dendrites: neurons may be smarter than we think - Kevin Archie
• How Objects Which Don't Exist Fooled Astronomers - Jeff Schmitz
• The Marshmallow Test - Alex Miller

The Strange Passion call for talks is just about at an end (I'll give it till Thursday morning), so now is the time to vote on the talks to decide which talks will be actually scheduled at the conference.

To vote, login with your attendee ID and go to the list of talks.

Stu Hood (@stuhood) is the Technical Lead for the Search team in the Email & Apps division of Rackspace. He also is a contributor to the Apache Cassandra project, which is a new distributed database project. Cassandra has gained some notoriety lately due to its prominent use at Facebook, no stranger to problems of scale.

This weekend I posted two lunchtime panel discussions:

Programmers Turned Entrepreneurs - Jim Brasunas, local IT startup connector and guru from ITEN, will be moderating this panel with some local entrepreneurs - Dave Karandish (Announce Media), Bob Lozano (Appistry), and Tom Niermann (CarOwner.com).

I've posted a few times about the Strange Passion talks but so far there have only been a few submitted talks.

I've decided to push the deadline for talk submission out to September 30th and the voting deadline out to October 2nd to leave more time for these to come in.

Today is the last day for $110 registration. If you know someone planning on registering for Strange Loop today is a fabulous day.

If you have a group of 5 or more from your company and the company is paying for it, you can get a special group rate (regardless of the deadline) - please contact me at strange.loop.stl@gmail.com for more info.

Matt Taylor (@rhyolight) is a St. Louis area developer with a diverse array of experiences. He enjoys a main course of dynamic languages like Groovy and Javascript with a side of agile, washed down by the quenching taste of the web. Matt is a frequent presenter on these topics and more and will be presenting a talk at Strange Loop called "jQuery: The JavaScript Library of the Future".