Woke up really early to catch my 08h00 flight to Boston via Denver. I didn’t get to climb a single route while I was in Canmore, because I don’t think it ever got above 8°C. I feel cheated.
Joe and Blizzard wanted me to come grill with them as soon as I got home. I just wanted to shower and sleep. I won.
I had lunch with an assistant candidate who seemed so competent and motivated that I hired her on the spot. Her to-do list is already 30 items long, which mostly just demonstrates how badly I need someone to help me keep my life from falling apart.
I unloaded the car and dropped it off at blizzard’s house. #5 on Beth’s list is to sell the car, so hopefully it won’t be around much longer. I can’t wait.
Tonight will be my last night on Joe and Jacob’s futon, which is the most uncomfortable thing that I’ve slept on in years. Most futons are ok, but this one is like sleeping on two separate mattresses, one of which is a half inch higher than the other. My back is killing me, but I still really appreciate their hospitality.
The movers arrived with my stuff this morning, and it started to pour as they were unloading. I’ve unpacked maybe a third of my things (Simon helped), and the only remark so far is “I really need a new desk. Immediately.” More bookshelves too.
Also the blinds are total shit. Many are about to fall off (one just did), some have no cord or no twisty-wand, some no longer go up and down.
I didn’t get all that much work done today, but I did get most of a DLM fix finished. The tree changed out from under me in a pretty substantial way, though, so I haven’t committed it yet.
Nat is jealous of my new home. I think that his place is nicer, but I also don’t have two roommates. He drove me and my luggage home from Joe’s in the fiat, which made me realize that the fiat really is pretty cool. I guess I support the fiat now.
Something really big and exciting happened today.
I wish I could mention it here.
Some day I will.
Kittens are cute.
Did some busdev work on the flight to Calgary, which was uneventful. Peter had dinner ready for me when I arrived, and we even managed to climb two routes in a ravine near his home before dark. It’s amazing up here, with the sun rising at 05h30 (which I cheerfully sleep through), and setting at 22h30.
Not a lot else happened today, really, given that I spent most of it in the air.
Peter and I fixed about a dozen bugs today; he is in complete control of the VFS and metadata server, and I’m in complete control of the lock manager, so when we’re together it goes amazingly quickly. I think we’re going to spend a lot of money on plane tickets from now on.
After that we did a number of 5.9-5.10a single-rope climbs, in a very beautiful valley near his home. I’m so spoiled by the wonderful rock faces here, it will be pure punishment to return to the awful Boston gym. I need to find people who will rent cars and drive to New Hampshire with me on a whim. I’m told that there are very good routes to be had within an hour or two of Boston.
Today was spent almost entirely in branch merge hell. First I had to merge what was essentially a private branch with huge metadata changes into the trunk, and then I had to merge the other, less-private branch with huge metadata changes into the trunk. Almost every file had a conflict, and these weren’t easy “two lines changed in this file but somebody added an extra space” conflicts. No. These were “these 40 functions have been rewritten in different ways on both branches; also the RPCs have changed to include new sub-buffers on each branch. you have six hours to merge the functionality and debug your results. for extra credit, stick sharpened, burning bamboo shafts into your eyes. show your work.” conflicts.
When my eyes uncrossed, we hiked to a very nice 5.10b wall in Grassi Lake. Although I cut my hands up a bit–the holds were abundant but sharp–my first ourdoor 10b went very well. It was a very satisfying route, with a great view from the top. I discovered at that point, of course, that my camera was at the bottom in my backpack.
Mike thinks I’m a grownup, which is either flattery or delusion. Keep in mind that until a couple of months ago, I still hadn’t filed my 2000 taxes. Beth is getting things accomplished, but it’s not clear yet whether I’ll keep her or find someone else–lord knows I received enough resumes. I’ll give it a couple of months, or until the first time that I show up at an airport or hotel and my reservation is incorrect.
Marcus, Andreas, Peter, and I attacked the newly-merged Lustre trunk today, and I fixed a wheelbarrow full of bugs. By the end of the weekend, the trunk should reach some vague approximation of stability–and with the new NAL, we should start moving a lot of data.
Later, Peter and I attacked another 5.10b route in Grassi Lake, which was another very fun climb. This wall was a totally different kind of rock, and there were many fewer good holds.
Update: initial indications are that our getattr() round-trip time is down to 45 microseconds! We can push about 350Mbit/sec with a single thread, but it isn’t scaling well when we add more threads. More investigation is needed.
The secret is out, I can finally talk! My friends are getting married, and I’m superlatively happy for them. We are going to have an outrageous party when we get together in Ottawa. And then another one when we see Alice next. I miss those crazy guys.
It’s nice to be back in Boston. I always enjoy visiting Peter (this visit was particularly fun with all of the climbing and Marcus’s coinciding visit), but being away for a week is just about my limit. I need to come home, sleep in my own bed, and have some time to myself after a week of constant socializing.
I got up really early this morning–the second day in a row–to give a two hour Lustre talk in Nashua, NH. Nat, Blizzard, Shona, Joe, Alex, and I ate dinner at Mary’s, then we ran into Jacob and went to Pamplona. Joe, Chris, and I went back to Chris’s place and–against all better judgement–stayed up too late watching Novocaine. It was ok.
Extreme fatigue has set in.
I took Simon to the vet today for his annual booster and Massachusetts rabies tag. While I was there I heard the receptionist talking to a pharmacist on the phone:
No, no, it’s Mittens that gets the Paxil, and we’re increasing the dosage to 2.5mg. Fluffy gets the Prozac. You know these are cats, right, not people?
It was so sad. What has our society come to?
Enough is enough. The tangle of locking inside the DLM has gone on too long, so we’re putting the knife in. Peter threw together a couple of recursive lock primitives, we settled on a little plan, and we got to work. Pieces are all over the floor, but at least it builds again.
I cancelled my next trip to Canmore; there’s just too much travel in my life right now.
The DLM passes our smallest regression test again, which is cause for some hope. It’ll take another week or so of tweaking to reach stability, I think, but the fact that it was only well and truly broken for two days means that we had a really good plan of attack.
I finally unpacked most of my books, which means that I’m asymptotically approaching unpacked, at least in the living room. I think I’ll buy a third dining room table for use as a second desk, because it seems that I can easily fill one with my own crap, to say nothing of what happens when Beth, Peter, or others work here.
I did a bunch of domesticky things like laundry and dishes, then took the T to Logan and flew to Ottawa. I miss Ottawa and it’s nice to be back, if somewhat briefly.
Big Daddy’s. Manx. Collection. Oy!
There’s a juice bar in the Rideau Centre that wasn’t there before, and it’s ok. More importantly it was between our hotel and the Congress Centre, so we had “breakfast” there.
I gave the Lustre talk in the early afternoon; I was pretty unhappy with it, for a lot of reasons, but I received a lot of positive feedback. Next time will be better, largely because I won’t be using too many of someone else’s slides that I saw for the first time 18 hours before the talk.
(Large number) of us had dinner with Rob and Deb at Anna Thai, a fabulous little thai restaurant hidden near their home. They were overly aggressive with the spice, so Zach was disappointed with what arrived when he requested “a little spicy.” Aside from that, a real winner.
Today was a gorgeous day, so Mike and I moved our meeting to the wide, grassy strip that separates the canal from the parkway. I dumped my brain at Mike for a few hours and then we went for gelato. Perfect!
For dinner we met up with some of Mike’s high school friends that I hadn’t seen in years, much to my dismay. We ate at one of those unmarked vietnamese hole-in-the-wall restaurants–very cheap and very good. It was nice to see some of the Ottawa folks again after so long.
We made it back to Arc and tried to get our get internet traffic to route to our laptops in the business centre. We could have easily paid CDN$10 and had it from our room, but trying to decipher their fucked up network was way more fun. Mike, Zach, and I are not exactly networking hayseeds, and we saw things that we simply can’t explain. The hotel network admins are either really smart or really dumb, and we’re not sure which.
