phik

Happy Canada Day.

I worked all day, trying to at least partially make up for the lack of productivity while in Ottawa. Mike joined me for some hackery, and one thing is clear: he’s good at finding bugs that we’d forgotten about.

The party on Parliament Hill was generally entertaining, although I share Mike’s feelings about the absurdity of the bilingual content. If it’s too politically incorrect to suggest that more people might enjoy a predominantly-Anglophone show, why not turn nearby Confederation Park into a second, predominantly-Francophone venue?

Also, David Usher’s live performances are good. Phil out.

Chris Beard’s dad is the project manager for the new and extremely large Ottawa airport expansion, so we got a micro tour before our planes left this morning. The next time we’re there we’ll allocate more time in advance, so that we can do the hard-hat tour, etc. It was neat. The flight back, a perfect 75 minutes, was uneventful.

Boston is no cooler than Ottawa, and my apartment isn’t air conditioned like the hotel that I’ve been in since the heat wave started. It’s not quite as bad as the apartment in Montréal last summer, but it reaches obscene levels once I turn the Athlon on. That’s staying off for a few days.

I’m only in town for a few days, which is too bad, but at least I cancelled my trip to Calgary, which would have prevented me from being home at all. Blah.

It is unbearably hot. I spray myself with water every few minutes, which helps, but is not really helping me get much work done. I should check into a hotel. Sometimes the laptop just turns off, probably because it’s overheating. I don’t like to think about that.

I did join a posse for a screening of MIB2, in no small part for the sweet, blissful air conditioning. I give it a 6 out of a possible 10 thumbs up, 7 if you consider that it’s a sequel.

Happy Independence Day.

I fired my assistant today, it just wasn’t working out. Unfortunately, she picked the worst time to start playing the role of incompetent, because I leave town on Saturday and I’ll probably be too busy to interview people until the week of the 15th. sigh.

I fixed a bug or two, but it was too hot to work, so I eventually let blizzard talk me into coming to Dave’s party in Marblehead. There was no electricity. We played hearts and waited, not entirely in vain, for the king crab to be cooked next door and on the grill. After the first batch, hunger forced us to forage elsewhere.

Chris, Shona, and I went downtown to watch the fireworks from the bridge. Clearly, Boston spent a lot more on fireworks than Ottawa did, many of which looked pretty technically challenging (like some that don’t just rise and fall, but looked more like a sine wave). A good time was had by all.

I’m going to Santa Fe for a few days of design meetings, which will lead to either excellence or serious injury. Pretty much everyone with a stake in the success of Lustre will have representatives there, which means that it will be far too large to actually engage in any design. I suspect that it will degenerate into meetings where we tell everyone how Lustre works today, and they tell us how they feel about that.

Albuquerque looks like any other tidy modern city from the air, except that it’s completely brown. Despite appearing to be completely desolate and barren, it’s cooler here than Boston, and I drove through a thunderstorm on the way to Santa Fe. What happened to searing, dry, and dusty?

Things went remarkably well, given that there were over 20 people involved. No shouting matches, no outrageous demands, and only one episode of pure, embarrassing intellectual wanking. That’s par for the course when you invite security folks, I think.

There have been thunderstorms for large chunks of every day since I’ve arrived. Don’t believe the stories about Santa Fe being in a so-called desert. They’re all lies and angel dust.

The dialup here is a disaster. I’m getting one packet every 25 seconds, and it took me 20 minutes to click my way through Expedia and get a ticket to Ohio. Forget it, good night.

I spent all day in airplanes, airplanes which were packed with little kids and, in at least one circumstance, little dogs.

It’s very nice to be home, this time for the mind bending stretch of 8 days, possibly the longest contiguous amount of time that I’ve spent in Boston since I moved here. I travel too much.

I’m exhausted, but Peter’s plane doesn’t arrive for 2 more hours. I guess I’ll tidy things at least to the point where I’m not completely embarrassed to allow visitors inside.

I need to install parallel make on these LANL itanium machines, because it’s the only way to build Lustre in finite time. And just so we’re clear, it’s not like the Lustre source base is a war pig–it’s under 35,000 lines of code. To put that in perspective, a given Mozilla build is around four million lines of code. I don’t even want to contemplate building that on Itanium.

Peter and I were talking the other day about his time spent in China, and the incredible fear of government spies under which some of his co-workers lived. They asked him to stop talking about controversial things, not because Peter would get in serious trouble–he’d just be deported–but because the person he’s talking to might be jailed and tortured.

As cynical as I am, I didn’t really see it happening here. I missed that bit about secret searches and surveillance devices the first time around, too.

Why don’t we have a Privacy Commissioner?

They finally announced MCR. Yay.

Another day of acceptance testing and bug fixing on the IA-64 brings us another day closer to Lustre Lite Alpha. And despite Mike’s protestations to the contrary, just for the record, our phone calls are the best time that I could hope to spend. By the time we get off the phone, we’re both independently productive.

Shona and I (ok, I confess, mostly Shona) made simple and delicious pasta with fresh herbs, asparagus, and shrimp. While I was there I noticed that they are going to have the same sort of tomato explosion that Mike and I expected last year–until that damn squirrel or bird or whatever savaged all of our plants while we were on a trip. I think we got a total of 12 cherry tomatoes during the whole of last summer, which can be blamed on the animals, the oppressive heat, and our semi-attention to watering during the aforementioned oppressive heat.

It’s 03h45 now, I’m still running tests, and I just rebooted one of the machines while Andreas was working on it. I think that’s a pretty clear sign that I should continue this after some sleep.

Confidential to Mike: I’m really jealous of the fact that you live in Toronto again. I’m growing more jealous each day.

I’m going back to Ohio to see the family for a few days. Four days is just about the perfect amount of time to spend back in Ohio. I get to enjoy its suburban charm, visit the cottage by our lake that I never appreciated as a youth, and see everyone in the family; without getting sick of anyone, feeling outrageously bored, or reaching a total state of work-related panic.

United lost my bag in Chicago. It was the only bag on the plane that had an orange priority tag on it, but no, somehow it didn’t make it on my flight to CAK. On the other hand, this is the first time in like 20 flights that they’ve screwed up with a bag, and it’s the best possible time to lose it. If it had been any other trip, I’d be fucked.

I joined the usual Saturday breakfast with my paternal grandparents and my aunt and oldest cousin from that side of the family. Afterwards I napped (for way too long) and awoke to find my luggage sitting outside. They never thought to ring the doorbell while delivering it hours later than promised, I guess.

I had dinner with my mom, stepfather, and other set of grandparents. Then, because there simply wasn’t enough excitement, the starter on the car died and we took a taxi back to borrow my grandfather’s car. Never a dull moment.

My sisters arrived from their second annual trip to South Dakota (don’t ask me, but they seem to love it there), so we picked them up at the airport in Cleveland. They never stop growing.

I went to watch one of my sisters play in a softball playoff game this evening. Incredibly enough, she was wonderful. (I don’t know why that seems so incredible to me; I guess I didn’t remember Nicole as being a particularly strong hitter.)

Despite that, it was an infuriating game to watch. The coach is so completely inept, and apparently it’s like that all throughout the local high school softball system. They do crazy shit, like have the batter swing left-handed (no matter what their natural handedness is, on the theory that they’re one step closer to first base), trying to hit these fake half bunts that the infield is not at all surprised by. Once there’s two strikes, after which a foul bunt is an out, they’re allowed to swing normally. What kind of absurdity is this? Who does this help? Who learns from this?

Instead of teaching them the fundamentals of how to bat, field, and think about the game, they teach them to rely on these mindless tricks that don’t fool anyone. The coach instructs them to perform these actions that are difficult for a trained player, let alone a first-year student. Is anyone surprised when they lose? Do the kids know enough to be upset, or is this the only way that they’ve ever known the game?

Unfortunately, there’s no alternative at the high school level. You play for your local high school or you don’t play at all, unless you’re good enough to play for one of the elite local teams.

This shouldn’t make me so upset, but I hate to see my sisters get discouraged and short-changed, and I hate for them to waste their time playing all of their games with a strategy book that’s nearly guaranteed to fail. *seethe* *gnash* *snarl*

I slept entirely too late, then had a nice steak lunch with my mom. I asked the waitress to bring me the steak “as rare as you can make it by law” which meant that I got it just shy of medium-rare. Why do they never believe me?

I spent the rest of my day in conference calls and on planes back to Boston. It’s nice to be back, but only for 111 hours… sigh.

Like deb (yay for not smoking!), I don’t think that I really like keeping a journal either. Not because my life isn’t any of your business (although it’s not), but because the journal’s public nature serves only to shame me into writing more frequently. Which is strange, because unlike many of these would-be web journal hipsters–which as far as I can tell just talk to hear themselves talk–I don’t really think that I have anything worth saying.

shaver’s coming to town this weekend. Zach’s coming to town the day after I leave (T-84 hours). Who’s the better friend?

phik out.

21:57 <shaver> what does "MCR" stand for?
21:58 <terry> MCR = multiprogrammatic and institutional computing resource (TM) I think
22:05 <terry> correction: MCR = multiprogrammatic and institutional CAPABILITY resource
22:18 <terry> well, I just can't get this right.  Third try: MCR = multiprogrammatic and institutional computing capability resource

This isn’t unprecedented, of course. When President Clinton gave the order that led to the founding of ASCI, it stood for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. Today, it’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Platform. Whatever. I agree that ASCP doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Mike and I did some work while Tyla shopped the town bare. She brought me a very nice framed old-school advertisement from a bookstore in Cambridge that salvages neat bits of otherwise-decaying old books. It sounded like they had a lot of nice things, and I have a lot of really ugly wall space to cover up in my living room, so I’ll have to give the place a visit.

Tonight is Peach’s poetry reading and the black-tie party at the cave. Word.

Last night’s black tie shenanigans were pretty successful, and everyone was well-behaved. The Good Life had some live jazz, and we wanted to have them congratulate Nat for winning the Gay Entrepreneur of the Year award, but their set ended before we got anyone’s attention.

It was a pretty late night, however, so I was extremely rushed to get out of the apartment and catch my flight to Denver. Mike helped me out by booking my hotel and taking out the garbage, for which I am deeply grateful. I hope he and Tyla aren’t too disgusted by the squalor in which I live. Now that I’m gone, they can at least express their disdain openly.

I help someone setup a Lustre cluster in a test lab today. Some day, if they manage to put out a press release before the heat death of the universe, I can reveal whose cluster it is.

My hotel room has plastic cups in the bathroom. Plastic cups, individually wrapped in plastic. Humans are so stupid.

There is absolutely nothing to do here, and certainly nothing worth writing about.

Meetings all day. Meetings at dinner. Meetings after dinner. Phone calls until midnight.

My life.

It’s 35°C in Denver today, but at least it’s dry. That didn’t stop me from sweating through my shirt while I refuelled the car, mind you.

We finished our meetings this morning, and I’m en route to Canmore, probably over southern Alberta now. They want to land the plane now, though, and I have to turn my laptop off because the FAA found one plane made during the Hoover administration that might have had problems with laptops interfering with navigation systems. sigh.

I think I like the television show Frasier because Niles is so well-dressed.

Update: It’s 5°C in Canmore. It snowed this morning. I am completely unprepared for this weather. How could this happen? I am going to cry.