I was going to write something about today, but then I discovered that it was already perfectly written.
I’m nothing if not efficient. But holy fuck, do I ever want to pass this last test. This “vacation,” while extremely nice in many ways, has contained far, far too much of my laptop. Mike tries very hard not to express how mad he must be at me, but I understand. It’s my fault.
There was more than a little excitement and, if you must, jubilation after we passed the last of the acceptance tests. Even Chris got into it, probably because he was looking forward to doing something more fun than downloading music for us (though an excellent DJ he is). Of course, when it calls for a celebratory toast, the man pours us a couple three-ounce shots of Canadian whisky, which on our empty stomachs means we have roughly 20 minutes to find a traditional Scottish breakfast before we go from zero to drunk.
I had some more work to do, so I let the boys sleep for a couple of hours after breakfast (and what a breakfast it was, though at 09h on 02 January we struggled to find an open establishment). We’d planned to go visit some museums and such, and I guess I got the ball rolling on failure by deciding that I was going to sleep while they were out. When I woke up, around, I don’t know, 17h00, they had more or less just woken up themselves. sigh.
On the excruciatingly-bright side, however, we had a date with Stephen tonight which I was most looking forward to. We stuffed our Indian-food holes at another great restaurant near Chris’s place, then made an attempt at visiting the tasting room of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Alas. They didn’t update their phone message to say that they were closed 02 January.
So we instead traveled to Stephen’s home–a better deal by far, if you ask me–to sample his impressive whisky collection (couched in the extreme modesty that makes the British empire so cute). “I have a couple of bottles that you might enjoy,” as he’s pulling out enough bottles to get an entire elementary school drunk, which contained a sweet elixir that I will not soon forget.
A finer 02 January I have never had.
Since we’re still basically on Eastern time, I probably would have just stayed awake until our early flight, except that I learned two years ago the intense value of the short nap. Now the only thing I worry about is having enough failover mechanisms to wake me up in time for wherever I need to be. Like that time that my mom forgot to wake me up for an exam, and the person who said he’d give me a wake-up call didn’t. I got a D, which I think was pretty good considering that I was only there for 20% of the exam period.
For those of you–like myself–who believed that the irrational and uninformed obsession with so-called security was a purely American disease, let me assure you: it’s spreading.
If you were a check-in agent wanting to verify the future itinerary of a passenger asking to check bags on a connecting flight, but were not able to do so on your computer (hello? this is the year 2003 and BMI can’t access their partners‘ itineraries? The Star Alliance is a failure.), would you demand, of all things, a printout of an email? Would you defend this request, not with some kind of “I’m just doing my job” sentiment, but by trying laughably to convince me that you’re somehow protecting me?
Nothing pisses off a terrorist more than a printer, I think the logic goes, so requiring a meaningless and unverifiable piece of paper will protect hundreds of lives in the air and on the ground. Why do they even let you get in the taxi? You could explode that suitcase nuke right there at the checkin counter, when they won’t give you a boarding pass because you forgot to forge an email.
So anyways, Mike and I–wait a second: you’re saying that if I forge an email, I can get on an aircraft? No, of course not. Because there are already other systems in place to make sure that I only get on planes that I have a paid ticket on. Huh! I guess those systems suck or something.
The security cocksuckers can all go straight to fucking hell. I try not to channel Henry Rollins like that, I really do. But I do genuinely marvel at these policies, and the people who think that they’re helping anything.
Anyhoo, Mike and I had a couple airport versions of the scottish breakfast–not too bad, really, albeit coma-inducing–and waited patiently for the plane while a woman tried to sell me a British credit card.
When we got to Heathrow, it was more of the same old story. They wouldn’t give Mike a boarding pass in EDI, so we had to walk the six miles under the airport back to ticketing instead of being allowed to stay in the gate area. A very charming Air Canada woman fixed everything in my itinerary, including calling down to have my bags re-tagged, all without a forged email, so the EDI woman can go straight to hell. It was all for nothing. Nyah nyah.
I’m going to sleep.
Boston–or maybe Toronto, I wasn’t totally clear–was pretty snowed in, or had an air traffic control failure, or didn’t have any airplanes left or something like that, so I didn’t go home last night. I was pretty far beyond caring, once it was determined once and for all that I was not going to make it home. Mike and Tyla were, as always, charming and lovely hosts, despite the fact that neither Mike nor I have any idea what time it really is. Oh, we did somehow make it to a video game store, so we both have copies of Age of Mythology. I dunno yet.
Which is too bad, because I would have almost made the connection–including trips through two customs and immigration services–in Pearson in 45 minutes, something that I will never attempt again. If you’re arriving from an international destination and transiting to the United States, here’s a tip: ignore every sign you see. Because some contradict each other, and the rest just don’t make any sense, especially if you know how this shit works. They’ve apparently made the process different, depending on whether you arrive in an airplane from another country or in a taxi from downtown, even though you go through exactly the same door, with exactly the same belongings. If you just flew in, they add an extra step. So just pretend that you don’t know how the Lester B. Pearson International Airport works, and you’ll be fine.
I went straight from the General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport to my home and stumbled around in a daze for most of the afternoon, because oh my god is it ever cold in my apartment. It may take days or weeks for it to come up to a habitable temperature.
Some horrible British disease has infested my body, and grips my lungs in its wet, slobbering mouth. I’ve still been remarkably productive, all things considered, but that can’t last. I don’t think I’ve eaten today and I don’t think I care.
Jacob stopped by to give me Simon’s food dish. Mike told him not to call in advance, and he very reasonably just let himself in, so the noise woke me up and scared the hot holy fuck out of me. He’s lucky I recognized him before he got a hockey stick in the face.
I was supposed to go to Denver for a few hours tomorrow, but it got pushed. Which is good, because I’m barely able to raise my head.
I’m feeling a fair bit better, which is well-timed, because Mike arrived for his scheduled weekend of Halo and hockey. He brought a fabulous Christmas gift with him, which I will wear to the hockey game, and which will serve as a constant reminder about how bad a friend I am. I have a lot of Christmas gifts to buy, still.
Our Halo needs were just not being adequately satisfied via the internet, so we took the only logical step of loading Jacob’s TV into Chris’s car and bringing it to my place. This reminded Joe and I–with varying degrees of fondness, I think–of the times that we would haul what seemed like thousands of pounds of steel cases and large monitors across the Akron area to the other’s home. Good times, good times.
But seriously, we’ve never Halo’d so good.
Go Leafs go!
Sigh. It was a trouncing, really, a drubbing that Toronto won’t soon forget. Both teams played really sloppy hockey, but Boston was able to occasionally string more than one pass together. Oh well, at least Joe and Jacob got to cheer, which Boston fans have been so sorely lacking lately.
The barbecue that we had before the game feels like a softball in my gut; a medicine ball, if you will. It’s not making me feel youthful and healthy, but it is making me feel full and bloated.
We played even more Halo, if you can believe that. I still pretty much rule, but I have to say, they’re making me work for my victories. Also, I rarely win rocket koth on Wizard anymore. Mike and I got in a game of Age of Mythology right after we woke up. Today was not, on the whole, what I would consider extremely productive, in a doing-any-work kind of way.
On the whole, I think what I really wanted was for Age of Mythology to be Age of Empires III. So from that perspective, it’s pretty disappointing. I’ll give it a dozen or so games, maybe it’ll grow on me. Like I have time for a dozen games.
Joe and Jacob took their TV home this morning, by which I mean early this afternoon.
Shona served an exquisite meal, to which Mike and I contributed via the acts of roasting root vegetables and turning carrots into gold. It was nice to see Ryan, who seemed healthy and in good spirits.
The raw excitement of the last two days of Halo must have leaked into our conversation, because the next thing I knew, we were bringing the TV back to my place. We played a couple awesome games before Chris and Ryan arrived, then Jacob and I ruined it for everyone by “boycotting”, by which I mean “ruining“, a crazy mad game of rocket koth.
As Mike mentioned, the atomic bomb book is truly excellent in many ways. I haven’t been reading it much–I’ve been avoiding traveling with it after I was searched while carrying two books about the US and Indian nuclear weapons programmes–but I think I’ll start carrying it again. I’m not far from finished with it, and I want to move on to his next book, about the hydrogen bomb.
Speaking of which, I’ve discovered recently that when immigration asks what I do, the correct answer is always “My company contracts for the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration.” stamp, “have a nice day, Mr. Schwan.”
Today was mostly a blur. I prepped a bit for tomorrow’s meeting, packed one night’s worth of clothes, and hit the airport. I could have avoided tonight’s stay in Denver, except that the first flight of the morning doesn’t get me to Denver quite in time for the start of the meeting.
It was an annoyingly packed flight. I was going to whine about first class being full, but really, why bother. It will only elicit sarcastic and bitter comments about how very hard my life is. Believe me, I know.
I live for days like today: tense all-day meetings.
But now I’m home, and home is a nice place to be. Simon barely knew I was gone, because his brain is the size of a walnut.
Did you know that you can’t get to the gate with just a printed itinerary anymore, even on airline letterhead?
I’m sure it’s because terrorists never want to check-in at the ticket counter. Terrorists hate that. You can cross-reference this with my rant about terrorists hating printers, if you want, because now it’s even more insane.
I announced to the company that we want to try to release a first beta of Lustre Lite 1.0 in a couple of weeks. Then Peter and I discovered show-stopping bugs in the underpinnings of the metadata system. So we’ll redesign and reimplement parts of the most complicated and error-prone portion of the system two weeks before beta. Sure. No problem.
<shaver> is peter in boston now?
<shaver> whenever they’re together, I lose my understanding of some piece of Lustre
Peter and I are heading to New York for a few days, for LinuxWorld. We were going to cancel our attendance entirely, but we figured that if we could work together for a few days, it would be just as productive, and we wouldn’t piss off the show organizers.
We were going to go tomorrow, but then I learned from Peter that his tutorial starts at 13h, and Peter learned from me that it takes 3-4 hours to reach New York. So we’re going tonight.
Renting a car for the day (including insurance), driving to New York, then parking via the incredibly expensive hotel valet is still half of the price of us both taking the train. A shame, really.
Can you believe that it’s the year 2003, and the Grand Hyatt in New York doesn’t have any sort of broadband or wireless internet access? I sure can’t. My hotel in India had in-room broadband.
Reading in bed before I went to sleep, I reached the part of the book that described the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. The descriptions are vivid, both from survivors and aftermath-observers, and were probably not the best thing to read right before bed.
Since I was tricked into giving this 09h talk, I had to wake up at stupid o’clock while Peter slept blissfully into the morning. That sacrifice wasn’t enough, I guess, because it went pretty badly. The A/V people couldn’t get my laptop to talk to the projector, in Linux or Windows, so I gave the talk without the audience being able to see the slides. Given that these concepts were at the high end of most of this audience’s technical spectrum, lack of slides really didn’t help.
I flipped through the feedback forms that the conference asks all of the attendees to fill out, and they were unfortunately rather content-free. I was looking forward to learning things about my speaking technique, but instead I learned that:
Oh well. Maybe if they invite me back next year, I’ll learn more. Given that a lot of people didn’t like my talk, they probably won’t.
Peter and I had dinner at Asia de Cuba, which I can recommend with highest honours. I ate perhaps the best salad of my entire life, which I mean without a trace of sarcasm, so you should not miss it. The scallops we had were themselves very tasty, but the accompanying sauce was much too heavy and strongly flavoured. On the whole, though, truly excellent food, and a much nicer atmosphere than Mantra. On par with Buddakan. They have sister restauarants in many cities, but unfortunately none in Boston.
Do some places have brother restaurants, or is this a uniquely female concept? I’m serious.
<phik> joe: i need some wood
<joe> phik: we went to the stop and shop and loaded up a cart with it
<joe> 5 cords, i think
<dria> um
<phik> 5 cords will fill my living room
<phik> just to put things in perspective
<joe> oh, ok
<phik> I mean fill, floor to ceiling
<phik> wall to wall
<joe> maybe just one, then. :)
<phik> a cord of wood is about the volume of a car
<joe> ok
<joe> half a cord
<joe> i’m not going any lower
I bought, but have not yet played SimCity 4. I have spent countless hours (but dozens and dozens, to be sure) in the past three versions of this peerless series, although I’m not sure when I’ll feel comfortable enough about the state of our impending beta to steal time away for play.
Joe and Jacob and I used my christmas gift to play a few excellent rounds of Sega Sports Tennis (aka Tennis 2k1, aka Virtua Tennis 2–oh, now you recognize it?). Some things–the AI, the models, some of the moves–are much improved. Other things–the now-ineffective lobbing, even more shimmering (if you can believe that), and even worse replays (if you can believe that)–are no doubt making you seasoned Virtua Tennis players gape in open disbelief at what I have just written. But it’s all true.
The fact that players will jump to reach high ones is cool, but the fact that it is now impossible to hit a ball high enough to go over their heads and into the corner is unacceptable. That was the killer weapon, the only one to use against a patient net player. It’s gone from my arsenal.
I’m on my way back to Boston now, and it’s only been a month, so I figured it was time to update les mots justes. I was busy. You understand.
Today was largely another day of hiding out in the speakers lounge with the internet connection at the conference. I spent a goodly chunk of the day on the phone, as happens from time to time, but also managed to stick my entire foot through the DLM policy code. There is no end in sight, because my brain is not currently able to reason a clean solution out of this mess.
It feels like I’ve been traveling forever, so I am incredibly eager to get home. I just want to do absolutely nothing for the next three days, but I don’t have anything even approximating that luxury.
The best ad of the Super Bowl.
“YOU KNOW YOU NEED A COVER SHEET ON YOUR TPS REPORTS, RICHARD!”
Airborne Express never showed up for their scheduled pickup today. I mean, that’s ok, because I only use Airborne Express when I don’t care how long it takes to reach its destination, right? It’s a good thing that I’m such a calm and mellow fellow these days.
Jacob–the wind beneath my wings–scored some tickets to the next Leafs game in Boston. I have to say that I’m a little worried now that the Bruins have Hackett, but he’ll probably fall into some horrible slump, break his hand, and they’ll have to play the whole game with an empty net or something. Or put Shields in, I guess.
