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We checked out of our hotel and went to the speaker’s lounge at the conference to try to get some work done. Maybe I’m just naïve, but these speakers are well-paid professionals, presumably respected members of their respective communities–so why do they smell like they spent the night under a bridge?

Especially some of these so-called security professionals; this was body odour that would kill a cow at a hundred paces.

Despite the smell and the fact that Eric Raymond kept slamming the back of his chair into my own, we managed to get readpage to go over the network as well, which is very nice. It was pretty easy to do, compared to our expectations, which means that our API must be pretty sane.

The train back to Philadelphia was equally uneventful; once I got home I wanted to turn my brain off, so I read Out of Sight. Good book.

I had a very strange dream where I visited Renee, and then somehow ended up in Italy. I forgot where I was going so I had to take two cabs to get from the airport to my destination, and the second cabbie stole the credit card of the previous passenger. Also, the meter counted in pounds sterling, lira, US dollars, French francs, and rubles. Very strange.

Jacob always thinks that Joe and I are making fun of him when we chat. I wonder what we talked about before we knew Jacob.

Today sucked.

I spent the morning talking–mostly listening, in fact–to lawyers who were way out of their depth. I’m sure that these lawyers were really excellent with respect to Chinese tax law, or contracts involving more than three Norwegians, or whatever the fuck they specialize in, but it sure isn’t intellectual property. Amazing.

After that, I discovered that the load of dishes that I ran before I left for New York did not exactly succeed. I opened it to find a large pool of extremely dirty water and dishes that were definitely no cleaner than when I put them in. The special olympian who installed my new garburetor didn’t punch out the plastic plug that blocks the dishwasher intake, so it couldn’t drain. Thank god my dishwasher was made by smart people who understand that if it isn’t draining, don’t add any more water. Otherwise I’d have had a kitchen with a quarter inch of mold on the floor instead of a bunch of smelly dishes. An hour with some screwdrivers and a hammer fixed that problem.

I spent the entire afternoon at home waiting for the cable guy to come complete the installation with their 1960s technology. I think it’s fair to expect, in the 21st century, that they be able to flip a switch at the central office and enable my cable service. Needless to say, this spectacular pig fucker never showed up, so I put off my errands grocery shopping all day for no particularly good reason.

I’m in a pretty foul mood. And I can’t get the Lustre modules to insert.

One of the aforementioned Chinese tax lawyers actually called and apologized, so there is a non-zero chance that we’ll actually get some work done at the next meeting.

The Portals tcp nal is being really stubborn and locking up my system. I do not really look forward to figuring out the source of this bug.

The socknal bug remains, and is proving to be hard to crack. It doesn’t help that the machine is probably deadlocking, so it never gets a chance to dump its printk buffer or display an oops.

I’ve gotten a flurry of Cassis email in the last couple of days for some reason. I haven’t had time to reply yet.

Today has been incredibly productive; a surprisingly useful conference call in the morning, and then I got Lustre Lite to mount over the network for the first time, and do a simple operation. If I hadn’t taken a two hour nap after the conference call, this might have been a truly outstandingly productive day.

Now I have all sorts of laundry and packing and bookkeeping to do before my flight in the morning. First, however, some real food.

Flew to Calgary, took the shuttle to Canmore, all largely uneventful.

Did a lot of useful InterMezzo cleanup with Peter. Some of the three year old configuration nonsense is finally dead.

Peter, Anne, and I went on a nice hike up one of the small mountains near their house. It was pretty warm, maybe 3C, at the house, but a little below zero up the mountain which was nice.

Took an early and quite full plane from Calgary to Montreal, then went to lunch with Mike. We hunted for suitable valentine-y gifts for Tyla and ended up eating at Three Amigos with Tyla and Steph.

It was really busy, and the margaritas were sub-par. Disappointing, on the whole.

We abandoned our Ottawa plans for a few reasons, but we will instead receive a wonderful surprise visit from Blizzard and Harold! It’s going to be a regular party.

The Prime Minister and all of the Premiers are in Russia on a trade mission, and they held a press conference to confirm their status as the Special Olympic Politician Team. During the press conference:

• the Premier of Alberta directly contradicted the Prime Minister while reading a previously unseen letter
• the Premier of Ontario tried to link the Kyoto emissions reduction protocol to ice hockey in one of the worst metaphors ever televised
• the PM and a Premier jostled for control of the microphone

and my personal favourite

• the Bloc Quebecois Premier restated his total commitment to the “Tokyo Protocol”

We were in tears.

In a not totally related note, it’s worth pointing out that every single female Canadian olympic athlete is a babe. It’s unreal.

None of us got much work done today. We watched a heaping handful of sporting events, played some virtua tennis, and went to Atwater for dinner goods. Yum.

It’s shaver day, so we had a relateively meat-filled evening at Milsa to celebrate. The menu clearly states that they will bring us meat until we beg them to stop, but in fact we outlasted their ability to bring us meat once again. I should write a letter.

The Canadian curling teams kick so much ass. The rest of the teams should just go home now and save themselves the embarrassment.

Mike and I went to the airport early, and I managed to get on the 08h10 flight back to Philadelphia. This means that I stand a nonzero chance of actually getting some work done today.

After more than a year, I finally replaced my stolen camera, this time with a beautiful Canon S300. It’s small enough for me to carry everywhere, which is the only way that I’ll ever take any pictures. I decided long ago that having a super high-res camera is worthless if it’s so heavy or bulky that I always leave it at home.

My new laptop arrived, but I slept through the delivery attempt. After my nap I spent more time than I wanted on fixing the broken intermezzo tip. Three or four bugs later, it can replicate files again, now with fewer thorny single-system setup issues.

CD writer died, and that’s understandable, it’s really old. Bought a new one. 24x is really fast to be writing CDs.

Spent much of the afternoon fighting with X on the new laptop. The laptop is still winning, but I have an ace up my sleeve.

With Belarus upsetting Sweden, we’re basically guaranteed a medal now that we’ve dispatched Finland. Canada dominated the game in a way that the final score doesn’t really show. It’s a beautiful day in olympic hockey.

I got a lot of good Lustre and Portals hacking done after I had lunch with Ric. Fixed a handful of memory leaks, started to attack the debugging situation, and talked Daniel through some build issues. Not bad.

Spent more time fighting with X, and had some significant success with the Nvidia drivers. I still haven’t made 1600×1200 work, just 1400×1050, but I think I’m close. With luck I’ll be able to hack during the hockey and curling matches tomorrow.

Not nearly enough fuss is made over the new laptop smell.

Both Canadian curling rinks choked under pressure. How very sad.

Canadian hockey dominance is reassured, against the feeble attempts of the United States. In all truth, they put up a decent fight; what an excellent game. I shall break out the Canadian flags tomorrow, no doubt to the annoyance of my neighbours.

The Barnes & Noble had zero decent climbing books. They were all either histories of climbing/biographies of Sir Edmund Hillary or books so basic that by the final chapter you’re almost ready to actually step onto the rock. I’ll try another store tomorrow.

After hockey I spent a long time on the phone with Peter tracing down an incredibly subtle and in the end incredibly simple Portals bug that bit us every 50,000 or so packets. It’s good that we caught this now, though, when the system is still pretty manageable in its complexity.

If anyone knows where I can find the shot percentages per person per match for the 2002 Olympic curling matches, I would be very grateful. The Internet knows everything, I just don’t know where to look.

Chris provided a wonderful link to the curling results online. Some quick arithmetic backs up my assertion that the men’s rink choked in the final:

• Martin’s percentage over the round-robin and semi-final was a beautiful 84.5%. In the final it was 65%, with just a 43% draw percentage.
• Walchuk shot at 79.8% during the first 10 matches, and fell to 64% in the final.
• Rycroft shot 88% and 64% respectively.

The case for the women’s rink–who were not as consistently outstanding during the round-robin–is harder to make, but still doable:

• Law’s 71% combined and 63% on draws in the semifinal rivaled her worst performances of the Games, the loss to JPN aside.
• More surprisingly, a pretty consistent Julie Skinner shot just 64% (45% on draws) in the crucial semifinal game.
• An even more consistently good Georgina Wheatcroft shot a 76%, her second worst session of the Games.

The numbers don’t lie, Alice. As sad as it makes me, the Canadian curlers choked.

Possibly worst of all, I wasn’t even concerned when it came time for Martin to throw his final stone. I’d seen him make those shots before, it was child’s play for this national champion. And then the rock went sailing through the house… sigh.

I fixed about a half dozen bugs in the socknal and rpc code that all hid the existence of one another. A comedy of errors, our software. A stroke of luck that things worked at all.

All better now, though.

I really miss Olympic hockey.

More debugging, with slow but steady progress. I started sending bulk buffers over the wire today, which meant reorganizing the RPC code. Ho hum.

Other than that, today was pretty boring. I did make plans to spend 4 days on the ice fields when I’m in Canmore in March, though. That should be extremely fun. Also, I get to see Chris and Patrice while I’m out visiting LLNL. Hooray!

I should get some health insurance, like a grown up.