On the way to the airport, I got a phone call from United’s sweet, sweet EasyUpdate service telling me that my flight was being delayed by a couple of hours. We turned the car around, and after 10 extremely frank minutes talking with a very helpful service representative, I decided to take the tomorrow noon flight instead.
In hindsight, that was the perfect plan, because pretty much everything in and out of Chicago that night ended up being cancelled. Ahh, winter.
I was standing at the United counter, about to start talking to the nice agent, when my phone rang: United calling to tell me that my flights are delayed.
Since they’re about to declare bankruptcy, United has developed a real love for people like me who fly 70,000 miles a year on their airline. In return for my continued support, they put me in a limo, drove me to Cleveland, and put me on a direct flight to Boston on another airline.
In the end, I got home on time.
I booked my crazy BOS->YYZ->YYC->YYZ->LHR->EDI->LHR->YYZ->BOS holiday travel (although somewhat tame compared to the BOS->ORD->BWI->ORD->FRA->BOM->FRA->ORD->CAK->ORD->BOS of the last holiday) today. shaver is joining me for the EDI portion of the trip, although for reasons that are not entirely comical, we don’t share even a single segment of that 8,000 mile voyage. My itinerary is better, neener neener. *cough*
Today started lazy–some cleaning, some bill paying, some investigative reporting. Later I did a fair job of handing Joe and Jacob their collective asses at Halo, although when I lost, I lost badly. Even though I almost always lead in kills, I lose probably a third of the “King of the Hill” games.
Mike and I spent some time talking about some of his hard bugs, and then Peter and I talked about my current nemesis, bug 419. We agree on a good plan now, though, so maybe tomorrow will be my lucky day.
I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about regarding the email thing, by the way. I didn’t say a word.
I mean, I don’t have to. If I have a problem with his email responsiveness, I call him on the goddamn phone. He’s not shy about calling me, either.
I hope you’re having fun in Denver!
Another day with too many meetings. I’m desperate for some time to just get some of these bugs fixed. In the meantime, while testing a fix for another bug, I discovered an even more serious bug, and then I started to cry. [ and the fix didn't even work --ed.]
Joe, Jacob, and I saw a Bruins game tonight. Ottawa took them to school, because they weren’t able to do things like pass, skate, or shoot, things which are normally not very important in the game of ice hockey, but for some reason seemed relevant tonight.
Oh, about that: I’m telling destina to go jump in a lake. If they have a problem with my spending habits, they can bring it up with Visa.
After I got going today, I turned into a bug fixing machine, a bio-mechanical, artificially intelligent, defect repair device. I even found time to upgrade Bugzilla. It probably had something to do with the fact that I didn’t have any meetings today.
Shona reminded me on Wednesday that I leave town again in nine days. But I just got here!
Joe and Jacob didn’t believe me, but it’s true. I tell one or two stories about how the Canadian Parliament building got its first electric lights over the weekend, and now they don’t believe anything I say.
(It’s a heritage building, there was a lot of red tape involved in a major renovation like removing gas lights.)
I had a handful of dreams last night that all involved George. In various cities, I would see him walking down the street towards me, but it always turned out to be someone else.
Today I hired Coop, but really, I just played the manager role. Mike was the real recruiter in this transaction, and not for the first, or even second, time. We’re extremely happy to have him, and we’ll throw him straight into the deep end just like everyone else.
They love it, I swear. And it serves as a good reminder of the parts of our code or documentation which are still totally incomprehensible to the unsalted non-veteran.
I’m working on a project that reminds me a lot of the time that Zach and I assigned ourselves an arbitrary 2 week deadline to fix all of the bugs in chainsaw. Or when Mike and I decided that we wanted to fool around with a Brands e-cash client on the BlackBerry and each ended up putting in 100 hours a week for 2 weeks to get it finished in time for Financial Crypto 2001.
I get teary just thinking about it. God damn, was that ever our finest hour. Remind me to tell the whole story some time.
Today was pretty satisfying. I wrote and passed two tests, then wrote and failed (but debugged to the point of knowing what’s going on!) a third. In between, I had dinner with Nat, Taylor, Veanne (newly of Boston), and Alex (newly of unemployment). The food pretty much sucked, but the company was welcome. I hadn’t seen Taylor in way, way too long.
One of our junior developers did something to the CVS tree that I don’t fully understand. From the looks of things, he was going to merge some changes from HEAD to a branch, but got distracted by something shiny and forgot to actually commit the changes. He didn’t forget to move the base tags, though! Sigh. At least it wasn’t a deeply important branch, or even an important directory.
Oh, and Coop, to put you somewhat at ease, we inspire that reaction in everyone.
(Confidential to Zach: you should add anchors to your scripts, so that I can link to a specific entry.)
I’m in Alberta, for the first time in about six months, owing to a travel schedule crazy enough to displace my other, regularly scheduled crazy travel schedule. We sha’nt let it lapse again, because we’re being wildly productive. I fixed a family-sized party pack of bugs today, and even a couple yesterday after we got home from the airport.
Peter tried to buy an iPod for me for Christmas, but Future Shop didn’t sell them. Mailorder, I guess. Nuts. Would have been nice for the dozens of hours in airplanes coming up.
Peter and I spent a lot of time on administrivia today, but I did manage to found an outrageous race condition before bed, which I guess makes me a modern-day Saint Phik. Identical hash cookies for different locks, which means pandemonium ensues, cats sleeping with dogs, plague of locusts, the whole shebang.
I was joking around with Anna, when it suddenly stopped being a joke (“Guess what Mark got me for Christmas?” “A wedding ring?” “Oh, so you already heard…”). Congratulations, you extremely crazy kids.
Most of today was consumed by flying to Toronto. I did a little bit of work on the plane, got some sleep, the usual. Tyla, perhaps aspiring to join the ranks of the consultants, greeted me in her pajamas at 18h30.
We ordered some food, and half-heartedly did some debugging. I don’t think we really got going until after 22h, and by that point we’d had some wine, and… well, we fixed a couple of bugs anyways.
Shaver has already gone on at length about the fact that the red-eye is the only way to travel east, so I’ll refrain from flogging that particular deceased equine.
I only ended up sleeping about 3 hours in total, though, after we wrote a terrific patch for extN (that didn’t end up fixing the bug, but is still good functionality to have –ed). I got a second wind after we landed in Heathrow, once we found Chris. The coffee didn’t hurt either, I’m sure.
All in all, I’d rather fly the extra distance and transfer in Frankfurt, whenever possible. I think I’ve said all that I need to say about that.
We did a little bit of walking around once we got to Edinburgh, which is an enormously beautiful old city. We ate curry for as long as we could hold our heads upright. Now it’s time to sleep.
Today was another in the nearing-great tradition of outstanding days of Lustre-hackery. Our bugs-fixed-per-lines-changed quotient is astoundingly high over the last week.
We were being so productive that we totally missed the fact that we were supposed to meet Chris soon until it was already midnight. We raced through his awesome British shower and grabbed a taxi in a perfect demonstration of hurry-up-and-wait.
This shower, by the way: where the fuck has it been all my life? There’s no stupid, wasteful hot water tank–instead, a super heating element built into the shower head, or perhaps the wall behind it, I’m not totally clear on where. Let me spell it out, in case the implications are not immediately obvious: the hot water never runs out, and it’s immediately hot when you turn it on. Chris’s particular shower is not calibrated to the most exacting standards possible–3.5 out of a possible 9 is blistering, so I don’t want to even think about 4–but I’m sure that can be overcome.
As Mike has pointed out several times, Scotland will kill us. We are going to be four-hundred pound heart attack patients when we fly back in 4 days. It’s incredible.
Is it a bad sign when you get into the shower and smell bacon?
As has become our trademark, we slept through the entire Edinburgh day, such as it is, and awoke refreshed and ready to “par-tay”. First we took another swing at the last two remaining bugs, of course, but we didn’t have time to really “get into it,” as the kids say.
I learned yesterday that one of our contractors grew up in Edinburgh, and he had various predictions about the fireworks that were, of course, wildly understated. If you can imagine some suitably large Canada Day or July 4th fireworks celebration, please do so. Now imagine that fireworks display being set off, in quintuplicate, from each of the five surrounding hilltops. Now imagine them not bothering trying to set it to music or any such 21st-century hippy nonsense, but just firing them off as quickly and simultaneously as their equipment will allow. You’re not quite there, unless you also imagine yourself standing close enough to get actual firework droppings on your coat, but you’ve more or less got the idea.
It would be easy to cop out and say that in other respects it was basically like Canada Day, but it really wasn’t. First of all, it was cold. But you don’t really notice, because Scotland has no open-container laws. It’s the only place that I haven’t really minded queueing up for half an hour to use the loo, because the conversation with and antics of the nearby folks more or less made up for it. And I am not routinely kissed by hordes of Scottish women at the stroke of midnight on 01 (or even 02) July.
After all of the ooh-la-la and la-dee-da, we went back to the apartment and–I guess because we weren’t tired, but were very tired of trying to pass Lustre tests–played some Age of Empires until it was more or less time to sleep. We sure had to fight with the wavelan, though. From now on, I’m bringing a hub when I visit Chris, because it always serves me well.
Happy new year.
