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My fingers were so unbelievably tired after climbing that I put off writing this until the next day. I made it to the top of the last wall, but could only hold myself vertical for around 5 seconds before I fell off, totally exhausted. I think that’s a sign that my technique needs some work.

Aside from some laundry and getting my hairs cut, I couldn’t really get motivated to do any of my annoying errands. Or much work, for that matter.

I just heard a sound bite on BBC world service from an Iraqui ambassador that called for foreign countries to show proof of the development of “weapons of mass production.”

I pulled out an old calculus textbook to look something up for Alice, and I realized that I remember a surprising amount given how abruptly I stopped being a mathematics major almost 3 years ago. I resisted the urge to spend the entire afternoon doing sample problems to refresh my memory, but one of these days I will not have such strength.

At long last, I got the Object Storage Client talking to the Object Storage Target via Portals and did some file I/O over the network. Even a small iozone completed, but we didn’t try anything more strenuous before agreeing that it was quite late and time for bed.

Peter: this is read, right?
Phil: right.
Peter: oh, it’s write?
Phil: no, read.

Doing our very best Three Stooges impression.

Don’t even think about buying a Lexmark X63 printer/scanner/copier/fax. In fact, if you love me you won’t ever buy anything made by Lexmark ever again. Those motherfucking retards have managed to make a printer that just eats any bits sent down the wire at it. It doesn’t even print the text mode test page. It’s such a winprinter that it doesn’t even support 98 and NT, and they probably had to go out of their way to make that happen. If I ever meet the people responsible for putting this piece of maggot-infested shit on the market, I will beat them until identification requires dental records.

I wasted hours on this crap, and now I get to drive back to the store and patiently explain to them why they are going to immediately give my money back.

Deep breaths.

On the bright side, NVidia took just 123 minutes to get back to me about my problem with X on my new Inspiron, and their two line source patch worked like a charm. Go buy some NVidia stock.

My mom was kind enough not to say anything about it, but I bet she really enjoys when I swear like a sailor at printer vendors in my activity log.

I bought a new phone yesterday, which has improved my life about an order of magnitude, given that I spend at least half of every day on the telephone. Wireless headset phones? Highly recommended.

More climbing today. I am improving, but I really need to get some real shoes. When I borrowed Peter’s shoes, which were not made during the Carter administration, I was able to climb much harder routes. These rented shoes are for the birds.

I had a really weird dream where I lived in a place that looked just like my high school dormitory. Also, Matt Good lived there. And we’d just gotten back from a trip in an airplane that towed its luggage behind it in a little trailer behind the tail. Very weird.

Did a lot of DLM and Lustre hacking today. We did an iozone -s 100m today, but found the read-corruption bug during the -s 500m. We will try to crush the directory read bug tomorrow, which may be the same bug.

Cluster File Systems hired someone (who started this week) to take over much of the InterMezzo load. He’s already getting really familiar with things, and he’s found a lot of great bugs. It’s a pleasure to have someone so excited about things take over some of the crushing workload.

One of my wisdom teeth is coming in. I can see it through the gums. It fucking hurts and there’s no room in my mouth for it. I need to see a dentist and have them removed immediately, if not sooner. As soon as I get back from Alberta.

Also: congratulations, he who who perhaps does not want to be mentioned here directly, on the birth of your new son. Pretty exciting. I am going to spoil little Kevin to within an inch of his father’s definition of completely rotten. Hopefully the flowers will arrive before he reads this here, because that would be kinda anti-climactic.

I’m fine if people want to get all patriotic about spending billions of dollars on bombs to really wreck some poor country’s shit. But I have to draw the line at not being able to find a single jar of pickles that didn’t have a big American flag on the lid. I am totally uninterested in supporting a company that slaps the flag on everything to try to squeeze a few more sales.

These are not Patriot Pickles, Citizen Cucumbers, or even really good snacks supported by your legislative and executive branches. They’re fucking salt- and vinegar-treated vegetables.

My love for SpamAssassin is cooling rapidly, given how many emails it mauls. Do the spamassassin authors not care, or do they never see the complaints because their software fucking destroys them?

Wow. I ran iozone overnight in Lustre and it was still going when I woke up, without Oopses. By my rough napkin calculations, it did about 1.2TB of I/O. Big progress.

Per my usual practice, I got about 90 minutes of sleep before I had to wake up at 04h00 to catch my 07h00 flight to SFO. I slept most of the way there.

Chris and I had lunch with Robert Read when I arrived, then we gathered Patrice and went to the truly amazing Berkeley Bowl. More produce than I’ve ever seen in one place.

We went hiking today in a park five minutes from the house. The trail stopped after a while, so we hopped from rock to rock and made our way up the creek until we finally climbed a hill and walked home via the surface roads. Very enjoyable.

We went to the Chabot Space and Science Center. It was okay. A little expensive for a place with so few exhibits, though.

Patrice and Chris made really, really yummy pork tenderloin, walnut-filled polenta, and asparagus. We ate it all, because we’re basically pigs.

We watched Evolution. It was pretty funny.

I spent the day at Livermore talking about Lustre and Portals stuff. It was nice.

I merged a few of my outstanding patches and tried to find the newest of the dozen networking bugs. No luck yet.

After a not-as-brief-as-I’d-intended nap, we picked Mike up at the airport and at Bandera. Run, do not walk.

We went to bad early. I plan to skip my flight tomorrow.

A bit of a lazy day. I chased the latest Lustre bug for a while, then played some games with Chris and made sushi before I left for the airport. It was good, if not extremely pretty. They need a sharper knife.

The late flight was delayed just enough to ensure that I missed the last shuttle to Canmore, so I stayed in the Delta at the airport. Oh well.

It’s Peter’s birthday! To celebrate we went climbing, ate very good sushi, drank scotch, and fixed a Lustre bug. For an encore we managed to complete the first 5GB file size iozone test. A wonderful milestone.

I’ve done all of the 5.10a, most of the 5.10b, and a couple of the 5.10c routes at the Banff climbing gym, but I need to work on my technique before I can finish some of them. Peter had some good suggestions that I’ll try next time.

Peter, Anne, and I packed the car quickly and started the ~90 minute drive north into the bigger mountains. We left one of the cars near the projected endpoint of our journey and drove another 8km or so to the starting point, near Bow Lake. This time of year the lake is of course totally frozen over, and our tour began there.

The next 8km were through some mildly-avalanche-prone valleys, a thin forest, and then a good steep climb above the treeline to get to the Bow hut. It took about 4 hours and involved about 450m of altitude gain. Complete exhaustion is the phrase of the day.

We woke up, ate a small breakfast, and set out towards the Peyto hut up the tongue of the glacier. Almost all of the vertical gain is right out of the Bow hut, so we skied for an hour or so, gaining 250-300m of altitude, before deciding that the weather was in fact too bad to proceed; very high winds, a fair amount of snow, and very low clouds. Apparently the Peyto hut is in a snow field away from landmarks, and cannot be found in whiteout conditions.

As a result, we turned around and skied back to the road, which took another 4 hours or so. I am not an accomplished downhill skier by any stretch of the imagination, but the initial kilometre was fairly good powder and the learning relatively quick. The steeper bits in the trees were more hazardous, and I spent a lot of time side-stepping down the trail.

I have never so fully exerted myself in my life. My body will not forgive me for many days. I don’t even think it’s speaking to me right now.

Got up early, flew back to Philadelphia. Air Canada still loves me, so they put me on a different flight and saved 6 hours of my life.

My apartment is a small disaster. Did I really leave it in this much of a mess? Did Simon throw a little cat party while I was away?

Inspired by Zach and by boredom, I produced my own graph of the last 2+ years of travel. I came to realize, as I realize once every six months or so, that I fly too much.

Today was a very lazy Sunday. I never really got myself in gear.

I finished Insanely Great. It was ok. A little bit fanboyish for my tastes, but what do you expect for a book about the Macintosh?

I think spring is here–this is what I found in my back yard.