phik

Happy New Year. I am highly jet lagged. I think I’m on Hawaiian time.

Still jet lagged, which is pretty rare. I wonder why.

All of my new computer arrived except the memory. Upon inquiring, they cheerfully informed me that it was backordered. Given that they waited until I asked them 12 days after placing the order, I’m never buying anything from Rich Pacific again. Also, their web site is a total disaster. Really, just stay away.

I spent all day looking for someplace that will sell memory to me, and finally found a place that didn’t charge more than double the market price. I still got raped.

I’d intended to get lots of work done today, but I ended up spending most of it fighting with my development environment and the kernel. Hopefully I’ll get a second wind after dinner and at least figure out what my to-do list is.

Peter arrives tomorrow. Hooray!

Much progress was made today; a server plus one client configuration more or less works, with some small bugs that I’ll look at in the morning. It is very, very fast.

I didn’t get to start the branching code today, though, which is disappointing. I know there will be bugs that will take time to sort through, so I want to get started soon.

I can’t believe that it’s noon on Thursday and I haven’t managed to start the branching code yet. This is going to be a long day.

Spent the first half of the day fixing someone else’s bugs. sigh.

Spent the rest of the day thinking about hard problems, and not writing that much code. Still committed a 2,000 line patch before I went to sleep at 07h00, so I must have done something.

I am so outrageously busy. I’m never going to make it. The demo on Monday is going to be a total sham.

4 hours of sleep is enough for anyone.

Best game review ever.

No time for chatter, must go write code.

This, too, is priceless.

I’m no longer as worried that the demo is doomed. I might just pull it off. Also, Peter told me that my targets were too ambitious.

Never in my life have I been able to run this well on so little sleep. I am really impressed.

Flew to SFO mid-morning and arrived a couple hours late. It is very important, airline schedule authors will tell you, that one has an aircraft available at the scheduled departure time. I slept almost the entire flight, and had a weird nightmarish dream about a nearby helicopter crashing into an ambulance. I finally woke myself up trying to run away, but only being able to jerk my head up from the slightly uncomfortable reclining position.

Enterprise lost my car reservation, but gave me whatever rate I wanted to make up. I should have made up a nicer car: this was the cheapest thing on four wheels. It didn’t even have a rear defroster.

We ate some yummy Mexican food at the restaurant that was closed when we’d tried to eat there last March. We went home and I got the first good night’s sleep in a week.

We took the lazy Sunday morning route, and didn’t make brunch until around noon. I hid upstairs to spend a couple hours finishing the demo; I ended up producing some code that I’m not really proud of, and that I don’t think I’ll check in…

Peter flew into SFO and met Chris, Patrice, and I for dinner and some light work. I forget where we ate, but the red cabbage was the best part. I have lots of clever new ideas for red cabbage now.

Ever have one of those nights when you’re so afraid of sleeping through your alarm clock that you wake up every 10 minutes all night? Yeah. Sigh.

Up early, drove around and had meetings all day, blah blah blah. Decent sushi for lunch, though. The demo went perfectly.

We watched Thirteen Days when I got home. Not bad. Another one of those movies that I didn’t even know had been made.

Spent the day in meetings at LLNL. Most of them were highly productive.

Dinner in Fremont with one of our partners, another long drive back to Oakland. I got to see Chris and Patrice for another 20 minutes before I collapsed into bed. Peter promises to make a less packed schedule next time.

Up at 06h00 for the 90 minute drive to San Jose. I hate California.

The meeting went exceptionally well, and we had to dash away at 11h00 so that Peter didn’t miss his flight. We realized once we reached the airport that neither of us had eaten, so we ate “lunch” (read: bananas and cookies) in the frequent flier lounge.

I slept for most of the flight, landed 30 minutes early, drove home, and slept for 11 more hours.

Today I caught up on my Economist and Guardian Weekly. I didn’t call my insurance agent, I didn’t call my accountant, I didn’t even call the cable company. Nothing which could be mistaken for productivity.

I did, I will admit, play a little bit of Civilization 3. Just a little, though.

I have a sore throat and I’m very cold, leave me alone.

I spent most of the day reading The Jungle. Slept a lot. Still sick.

Woo hoo! We finally got some snow! My throat is still really sore, though, so I’m not going to go frolic. Deep down I hope that we’ll get enough for me to break out the skis, but I don’t realistically believe that’s possible.

I miss the great white north.

While I was shopping I heard a woman tell her male companion to “put down those beans, I like canned ones better.” I’m pretty sure that her brain is full of cottage cheese.

I’m getting closer and closer to an intersync that solves the laptop/desktop problem. Maybe within a week I’ll trust it enough for my home directory.

Sickness is really affecting my productivity. That and I also started to run into hard problems that–miraculously–didn’t rear their heads before the demo last week.

I squished a couple, but I’m going to start making Lustre network-aware tomorrow, and leave InterSync hacking until next week. Hopefully after a couple of hours the portals hacking we did in Alberta will come back to me and it’ll be a relatively smooth ride. If I can still breathe in the morning.

Brunching’s guide to Canadian Snack Foods is spot on, with three caveats:

• Smarties are good, if you don’t think of them as chocolate. Think of them as something sweet that happens to also be brown. Just like how that chopped white stuff in a can isn’t actually tuna, it’s another food that happens to have the same name.
• The ketchup chips deserve at least an A.
• They overlooked–in a case of what can only be described as criminal negligence–Miss Vickie’s Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar chips.

It’s really hard to remember what you did a week ago, especially when it was probably pretty boring even at the time.

Someone did finally come to install a new garburetor, though, which makes me very happy. It was really, really annoying to have half of what I poured into the sink come splashing out underneath, hitting the bucket at least 40% of the time.

Drove to DC to have dinner with Peter, Robert Watson, and Lee Ward. A very nice little inn in Echo Grove, MD, but a bit far for any sort of regularity.

As a result we didn’t get back to New Jersey until about midnight, and of course we spent a few hours drinking wine and talking with Ric. I never get much sleep when Peter is in town…

More Lustre network hacking, and some minor errands before we left for New York. Mmmm, Mikado house of Japanese food.

The train ride was uneventful, even pleasant. My faith in Amtrak is slowly recovering.

I spent most of the day at the conference, finding people that I haven’t seen in a while. Peter gave his talk and then we left to find more sushi.

After many long days of painful hacking, we finally got Lustre to mount over the network. What’s really amazing is that the code that I wrote over the course of 3 or 4 days only took an hour or so to debug.

I slept really late, then grabbed some pizza at a little hole in the wall in Times Square.

I met up with Miguel and msw, and then listened to Miguel talk about Mono. Yay for Mono!

Peter and I did some more Lustre hacking and got some more operations working via portals.