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GaymerCon is happening. It's a weekend of video games, board games, music, dancing, costumes, art and geek culture with an LGBTQ twist.

When I first heard about GaymerCon, I thought it was a great idea. Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is my favorite gaming event of year and happens to be quite well attended by the queer community. I have never experienced any form of harassment at PAX, and I chalk it up to the basement dwellers staying in their basements (after all, a convention is a very social setting.)

So why is GaymerCon needed? I attended a talk about gay gamers at last year's PAX. It was a fascinating talk, that touched upon acceptance, bullying, queer content, and working in the gaming industry as an out individual. A single panel was no where near enough time to cover all the facets of the topic at hand and left a lot of questions unanswered. Every question from the audience could have benefited from having its own panel.

This year, there are 5 panels on LGBTQ issues at PAX and I still see gaps in the agenda. 5 queer panels is a lot, and I'm not even counting the panels that don't specifically contain any queer terminology in the title but will inevitably touch upon issues experienced by the queer gaming community (i.e. harassment and bullying in online games.) All in all, there are about 10 officially scheduled events at PAX that will be of interest to queer gamers.

ZOMG. The gays are taking over PAX with their gay agenda.

We've opened a can of worms and outgrew PAX. It's clear that an event like GaymerCon will inevitably happen because there is a great need to talk through, hash out solutions to and provide support for so many issues experienced by the queer gaming community. So a symposium of great minds will take place. Next summer. In San Francisco.

I believe in this cause so much that I am volunteering to help organize GaymerCon.

You can get discounted badges for GaymerCon on Kickstarter until August 31, 2012. After this, the price goes up, so buy early and save. Also, the project is $8000 shy of inviting a special guest boss of honor and every little bit helps us get closer to that goal.

Python doesn't have special syntax for block comments, but if your IDE supports it, there may be a shortcut command to achieve roughly the same.

I'm using PyDev for Eclipse on a Mac, and the shortcut happens to be command+/ (command, forward slash.) Just select the block of code that you want to comment out, and use the shortcut key. A "#" will be inserted in front of each line that you highlighted.

With exactly the same lines selected, you can hit the shortcut key again to toggle the comments off. If you happen to select an extra line that was not commented out before, using the comment shortcut will add an additional "#" in front of each line.

The keyboard shortcut is easier to remember when you're using a language that uses slashes in the commenting syntax.

On a PC it's control+/

In a language that has special syntax for multi-line comments, you can use command+shift+/ (on a Mac) or control+shift+/ (on a PC.)

I was running through part 2 of the Django tutorial when I had to copy some files the Django source code directory. I'm on a Mac (Snow Leopard) and it happens to be at:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django

I have a confession to make. I am a terrible, insensitive web developer.

I was working on a brand new, snazzy HTML 5 design for my personal web site, but could not get it to look half decent in Internet Explorer 6 (a 10 year old browser at the time of this writing) and Internet Explorer 7 (a 5 year old browser) without bogging down my web page with hacks and work arounds.

After wrestling with the markup and CSS for weeks, I finally threw in the towel and decided that people using IE6 and IE7 do not deserve to see my new web site.

I added the following configurations to Apache in httpd.conf (.htaccess works too)

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 6"
RewriteRule . upgrade.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 7"
RewriteRule . upgradeagain.php [L]

Which serves up the following 2 pages depending on the browser being used by the visitor.

Internet Explorer 6 users are treated to Tandy Kitteh:

While Internet Explorer 7 users are treated to baby IE7 Kitteh:

I was tagged as a "coworker" on Facebook today.

I keep a spartan profile with only my name and profile photo displayed, so I was outraged to find that by tagging me as a coworker, my employment information was added to my profile. By someone else, against my will no less. I could only remove the tag after the fact, and even then, it only removed the information from my own profile, and not my coworker's. Severing ties with that coworker (unfriending) didn't help either.

I also tried to find a way to prevent myself from being tagged in this fashion. Users have the option to prevent tagged photos of themselves from being shown. Users also have the option to prevent others from checking you into places. However, there is no option to prevent others from tagging you as a coworker and adding that information to your own profile as well.

This sucks.