My Week In Review
Okay, so I know it's a little cheeky to post nothing to my blog for the better part of two months, then casually imply that I post at least weekly, but regardless, here goes. As a matter of fact, the title comes from two different trains of thought which ended up colliding with each other and leaving a mess of wrecked railway cars all over the place inside my already disorganized mind. The first was that I've had a pretty interesting week, and have been coming up with all sorts of things to write about if only I had the time. Initially I was jotting these things down, but then my computer crashed on me, and that kind of turned out to be a wasted effort. The second thought was ... drumroll ... that I don't write enough on my blog, and I should try to do something at least once a week. Once a week, granted, isn't much. It's certainly not ambitious in any way, but it's better than nothing, and it's better than the perhaps once a month (if that) that I've been writing up to now. So, the mishmash or unrelated ideas and the vague goal of once-a-week blogging coalesced* in my aforementioned clutter of a brain into the trainwreck that is to be My Week In Review. And if I actually write at least three each month, I'll consider it somewhat of a success.
* unrelated: coalesce is approximately the word I want here, but the nuance is completely wrong. Is there a word for that? It's technically more of a synonym than an antonym, but still, it's got to be an anti- something...
A Very Long Day (for an old man)
Monday was a long day; it started around 7 AM, in Tucson (thus MST), like most days do for me during summertime, but it didn't end until about 7:30 AM, in Boston (thus EDT). Since you know that
The Geek Conference
Anyhow, I went to work, then came home and headed to the airport for a trip to Boston, where I attended the RedHat Linux summit, an event put on by none other than RedHat, along with Intel, IBM, and a host of lesser linux-bandwagon companies. The conference was great; I went to technical sessions on a host of topics, many of which I felt completely bewildered by (ATA over Ethernet, SELinux policies and domains, realtime debugging). The presenters, almost all of whom were RedHat/Fedora/Linux developers, were often less than eloquent when presenting but usually came into their own in the Q&A sessions that followed pretty much every presentation; this didn't come as a suprise to me; geeks, after all, tend to be awkward turtles in front of crowds, but give us a specific technical problem to work on and we come alive.
Design Patterns
Of course, the people they were talking to were sysadmins and developers, predominately -- in other words, gurus -- except that there, in front of these uber-gurus, we were users of the operating systems, tools, and technologies that were being presented. And so, as true users, we managed to ask an awful lot of absolutely stupid questions. To their credit, the gurus managed to do a superb job of keeping a straight face when asked completely ridiculous questions, but I started to see patterns emerge in their answers. It's as if some agile development people got together with marketing and PR people and wrote up a list of design patterns for deflecting idiots. Fortunately, I was there to translate (quietly to myself, mostly):
"That would be an interesting feature..." -- You are insane
"I don't know why you would do that, but..." -- You are an idiot
"That's an exaggeration, actually..." -- Our marketing bunnies lied to you
"That wouldn't be difficult at all..." -- So do it yourself
And my favorite:
"What I think you meant to ask was ... " -- That was such a blindingly stupid question that I'm going to give an unrelated answer in hopes that you'll have some time to realize your mistake and not embarrass yourself with an attempt at a "clarifying" followup
Speeches Galore
Prior to the technical sessions each day, we were subjected treated to several hours of keynotes. The conflicted choice of verbs in the previous sentence was intentional -- the quality varied greatly between the various sessions. The best, in my opinion, was Joel Cohen, who is a comedy writer, most prominently for The Simpsons. His talk was less focused on the general theme of the conference than many of the others, though he did have a few talking points that he dutifully brought up. Mostly, though, he cracked jokes about his work, The Simpsons, Fox, and pretty much everything else. Sadly, that talk turned out to be one of the few that was not posted on RedHat's website for public consumption. One of the other highlights, though, was a talk from the Dean of Technology at Harvard Medical School, who spoke about using open standards to increase interoperability in the medical information community; trust me when I say it was interesting, because it was way better than it sounds on paper.
Sports
Ahh, yes, I was in Boston when the Celtics won the world series. Err, something like that. It actually was confusing on Friday night, because the Red Sox apparently hosted the Celtics at Fenway Park; even though I'd only had a kahlua and coffee earlier, it made me think maybe it was time to catch up on my sleep. There was also a big parade on Thursday, which went right past the conference center, but unfortunately I almost entirely missed it because I was trying desperately to find a reliable wifi signal, because I'd almost completely broken my laptop earlier that morning.
Doh!
So, since I was going to a linux conference, I figured I'd want a linux machine to play around with. My laptop, however, is running XP, and I like it that way. Since I definitely didn't want to take two systems, I figured I'd just set up a linux virtual machine and use that as a sandbox for the week. Unfortunately, the place I was staying didn't have reliable wireless access, and though I brought a Fedora 9 DVD, I din't bring VMware. So I thought "what the heck, I'll just dual boot it" and set up Fedora in some empty space on my hard drive. That part, actually, worked out fine. But dual booting wasn't really what I had in mind, and for some reason Fedora made my wireless issues even worse, so once I got settled in at the conference center, I downloaded VMware, and went about trying to get Fedora running inside it. Using the disk partition that I'd set up earlier to run on it's own. Before you scoff -- I've done this before.
It works. I. Have. Done. It. Before. And I thought it was pretty straightforward.
Apparently not.
Somehow I managed to disappear my partition table. Completely. Fortunately I figured this out before rebooting, so I downloaded and burned an XP CD as a precaution (thinking how foolish it was that I'd taken mine out of my bag before my trip), and went about trying to fix them problem, but before too long I confused my hard drive just a little too much and windows bluescreened. Sighing about the various minor bits of data I'd lost, I put the XP CD in and started rebuilding my system...but the CD didn't quite burn right. I was able to install something that looked like Windows, but it wasn't. I couldn't get any drivers to load, and software to install, or do much of anything, really, other than play freecell. Then I remembered my Fedora CD. So, I installed Fedora, managed to get it on a wireless network, and downloaded yet another copy of XP. This time it worked; after two more failed downloads, I should say. Finally I was able to get a working system again, but the whole process took the better part of one keynote, three technical sessions, and of course, the Celtics' parade.
Culture
Boston wasn't all geekery and reinstalling operating systems more geekery; I got to experience some culture as well. My personal views on the world of culture can pretty much be summed up in two words: sushi and books. Actually, naturally caffeinated beverages rank pretty high as well. Anyhow, I didn't even realize it until midway through the week, but every time I tallied up the places I'd been, I'd gone to about as many bookstores or libraries as all other places combined. Tuesday afternoon before the conference started I went to Cambridge, and my itinerary was roughly:
The conference ended early Friday afternoon, so I had some time to spend. I was somewhat tired, and had planned to sightsee on Saturday, so I cast around for something laid back to do. I was staying about a block from the Boston Symphony Hall, so I decided to see if there was a performance scheduled. To my delight, there was, and I got tickets to hear the Boston Pops and Angela Palmer perform. It was a little bit of an odd matchup -- I'd never heard of Palmer, but apparently she's a famous Boston indie artist; the programme descripbed her as one of the leading performers of "punk-cabaret" so I really had no idea what to expect. It was an odd performance. The Pops were great, as was Palmer, but they were very different, and trying to make them work together didn't work out very well. To my great amusement, however, I was seated at a small table with a couple of older ladies who were visiting from Milwaukie. If you've ever heard Julie Mitzel tell a story that had any lines spoken by an old lady, well, then you know exactly what they sounded like when they spoke. Anyhow, they were very excited to be there, and their enthusiam wasn't dampened at all by the fact that the "amazing deal" their concierge had gotten them for their tickets turned out to be significantly more than the box office price. It was dampened somewhat by the punk/goth/emo/whatever people surrounding them in the audience -- one turned to me after a few minutes of frenzied exclamations to her sister over a guy with about a footlong spiked mowhawk and said "we're veeery conservative in Milwaukie". They were very nice company though; they seemed to have a great time, and it was a testament to Palmer's performance that midway through it -- after coming onstage in a corset and tails, and dropping an F-bomb that garned gasps from more of the audience than just my tablemates -- one of the ladies turned to the other and said "oh, isn't she CUTE?", though I don't think that "cute" was exactly what she was going for.
Oh yeah, and between buying my Pops tickets and actually going to the show, I had a few hours still to spend, so I went to see a matinee of Get Smart. As a huge fan of Steve Carrell, I highly recommend it.
M.I.T.
Saturday I actually did some sightseeing -- I went to Boston Commons, back to the Sushi place, pretty much all over downtown, then I went back out to Cambridge and wandered around M.I.T. This time I was looking for the library, but couldn't find the one I wanted -- you know, the one with the computer books, of course -- as there were about a dozen, and none of them actually seemed to be related to computer science. So I headed for the most promising one, and discovered that the little cluster of core buildings in M.I.T. -- where the library was supposed to be -- leaves a lot to be desired on the usability front. Typical engineers. Anyhow, I decided that if I couldn't find the freaking computer book library on campus, it's probably a good thing that I didn't get accepted there back in 2002.
Big Sigh. I'll get over it. Someday.
Maybe.
Falling back to plan B, I went to the campus bookstore.
Home
Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I headed to the airport to come home. My flight from Logan to Las Vegas was delayed, which was ominous since the last time I had a delayed flight into Vegas, I missed the Tucson connection and had to stay overnight, but fortunately I made my flight with a few minutes to spare, and managed to get home at about 2 AM, MST. Miraculously, Ben's fish were still alive, Missy's tomato plant hadn't died, and my scooter was right where I'd left it, in the middle of the living room. Since it was late and I hadn't turned the light on, I ran into it with one birkenstock-clad foot, and nearly took a toenail off.
But I was home. And it felt great.
Next week: Jailbreak!
* unrelated: coalesce is approximately the word I want here, but the nuance is completely wrong. Is there a word for that? It's technically more of a synonym than an antonym, but still, it's got to be an anti- something...
A Very Long Day (for an old man)
Monday was a long day; it started around 7 AM, in Tucson (thus MST), like most days do for me during summertime, but it didn't end until about 7:30 AM, in Boston (thus EDT). Since you know that
- It was a long day
- 7:30AM EDT is actually earlier than 7 AM MST, and
- Time travel will be released about the same time as DNF
The Geek Conference
Anyhow, I went to work, then came home and headed to the airport for a trip to Boston, where I attended the RedHat Linux summit, an event put on by none other than RedHat, along with Intel, IBM, and a host of lesser linux-bandwagon companies. The conference was great; I went to technical sessions on a host of topics, many of which I felt completely bewildered by (ATA over Ethernet, SELinux policies and domains, realtime debugging). The presenters, almost all of whom were RedHat/Fedora/Linux developers, were often less than eloquent when presenting but usually came into their own in the Q&A sessions that followed pretty much every presentation; this didn't come as a suprise to me; geeks, after all, tend to be awkward turtles in front of crowds, but give us a specific technical problem to work on and we come alive.
Design Patterns
Of course, the people they were talking to were sysadmins and developers, predominately -- in other words, gurus -- except that there, in front of these uber-gurus, we were users of the operating systems, tools, and technologies that were being presented. And so, as true users, we managed to ask an awful lot of absolutely stupid questions. To their credit, the gurus managed to do a superb job of keeping a straight face when asked completely ridiculous questions, but I started to see patterns emerge in their answers. It's as if some agile development people got together with marketing and PR people and wrote up a list of design patterns for deflecting idiots. Fortunately, I was there to translate (quietly to myself, mostly):
"That would be an interesting feature..." -- You are insane
"I don't know why you would do that, but..." -- You are an idiot
"That's an exaggeration, actually..." -- Our marketing bunnies lied to you
"That wouldn't be difficult at all..." -- So do it yourself
And my favorite:
"What I think you meant to ask was ... " -- That was such a blindingly stupid question that I'm going to give an unrelated answer in hopes that you'll have some time to realize your mistake and not embarrass yourself with an attempt at a "clarifying" followup
Speeches Galore
Prior to the technical sessions each day, we were subjected treated to several hours of keynotes. The conflicted choice of verbs in the previous sentence was intentional -- the quality varied greatly between the various sessions. The best, in my opinion, was Joel Cohen, who is a comedy writer, most prominently for The Simpsons. His talk was less focused on the general theme of the conference than many of the others, though he did have a few talking points that he dutifully brought up. Mostly, though, he cracked jokes about his work, The Simpsons, Fox, and pretty much everything else. Sadly, that talk turned out to be one of the few that was not posted on RedHat's website for public consumption. One of the other highlights, though, was a talk from the Dean of Technology at Harvard Medical School, who spoke about using open standards to increase interoperability in the medical information community; trust me when I say it was interesting, because it was way better than it sounds on paper.
Sports
Ahh, yes, I was in Boston when the Celtics won the world series. Err, something like that. It actually was confusing on Friday night, because the Red Sox apparently hosted the Celtics at Fenway Park; even though I'd only had a kahlua and coffee earlier, it made me think maybe it was time to catch up on my sleep. There was also a big parade on Thursday, which went right past the conference center, but unfortunately I almost entirely missed it because I was trying desperately to find a reliable wifi signal, because I'd almost completely broken my laptop earlier that morning.
Doh!
So, since I was going to a linux conference, I figured I'd want a linux machine to play around with. My laptop, however, is running XP, and I like it that way. Since I definitely didn't want to take two systems, I figured I'd just set up a linux virtual machine and use that as a sandbox for the week. Unfortunately, the place I was staying didn't have reliable wireless access, and though I brought a Fedora 9 DVD, I din't bring VMware. So I thought "what the heck, I'll just dual boot it" and set up Fedora in some empty space on my hard drive. That part, actually, worked out fine. But dual booting wasn't really what I had in mind, and for some reason Fedora made my wireless issues even worse, so once I got settled in at the conference center, I downloaded VMware, and went about trying to get Fedora running inside it. Using the disk partition that I'd set up earlier to run on it's own. Before you scoff -- I've done this before.
It works. I. Have. Done. It. Before. And I thought it was pretty straightforward.
Apparently not.
Somehow I managed to disappear my partition table. Completely. Fortunately I figured this out before rebooting, so I downloaded and burned an XP CD as a precaution (thinking how foolish it was that I'd taken mine out of my bag before my trip), and went about trying to fix them problem, but before too long I confused my hard drive just a little too much and windows bluescreened. Sighing about the various minor bits of data I'd lost, I put the XP CD in and started rebuilding my system...but the CD didn't quite burn right. I was able to install something that looked like Windows, but it wasn't. I couldn't get any drivers to load, and software to install, or do much of anything, really, other than play freecell. Then I remembered my Fedora CD. So, I installed Fedora, managed to get it on a wireless network, and downloaded yet another copy of XP. This time it worked; after two more failed downloads, I should say. Finally I was able to get a working system again, but the whole process took the better part of one keynote, three technical sessions, and of course, the Celtics' parade.
Culture
Boston wasn't all geekery and reinstalling operating systems more geekery; I got to experience some culture as well. My personal views on the world of culture can pretty much be summed up in two words: sushi and books. Actually, naturally caffeinated beverages rank pretty high as well. Anyhow, I didn't even realize it until midway through the week, but every time I tallied up the places I'd been, I'd gone to about as many bookstores or libraries as all other places combined. Tuesday afternoon before the conference started I went to Cambridge, and my itinerary was roughly:
- Grab coffee and a scone outside Harvard
- Stop in at used bookstore outside Harvard
- Wander into Map/Travel bookstore outside Harvard
- Hurry wistfully past a Borders outside Harvard, consider getting latte and browsing their books
- Browse the selection at a children's bookstore outside Harvard
- Pick up a pocket map of Boston at Staples
- Find my way back to Harvard Station and head back into Boston
The conference ended early Friday afternoon, so I had some time to spend. I was somewhat tired, and had planned to sightsee on Saturday, so I cast around for something laid back to do. I was staying about a block from the Boston Symphony Hall, so I decided to see if there was a performance scheduled. To my delight, there was, and I got tickets to hear the Boston Pops and Angela Palmer perform. It was a little bit of an odd matchup -- I'd never heard of Palmer, but apparently she's a famous Boston indie artist; the programme descripbed her as one of the leading performers of "punk-cabaret" so I really had no idea what to expect. It was an odd performance. The Pops were great, as was Palmer, but they were very different, and trying to make them work together didn't work out very well. To my great amusement, however, I was seated at a small table with a couple of older ladies who were visiting from Milwaukie. If you've ever heard Julie Mitzel tell a story that had any lines spoken by an old lady, well, then you know exactly what they sounded like when they spoke. Anyhow, they were very excited to be there, and their enthusiam wasn't dampened at all by the fact that the "amazing deal" their concierge had gotten them for their tickets turned out to be significantly more than the box office price. It was dampened somewhat by the punk/goth/emo/whatever people surrounding them in the audience -- one turned to me after a few minutes of frenzied exclamations to her sister over a guy with about a footlong spiked mowhawk and said "we're veeery conservative in Milwaukie". They were very nice company though; they seemed to have a great time, and it was a testament to Palmer's performance that midway through it -- after coming onstage in a corset and tails, and dropping an F-bomb that garned gasps from more of the audience than just my tablemates -- one of the ladies turned to the other and said "oh, isn't she CUTE?", though I don't think that "cute" was exactly what she was going for.
Oh yeah, and between buying my Pops tickets and actually going to the show, I had a few hours still to spend, so I went to see a matinee of Get Smart. As a huge fan of Steve Carrell, I highly recommend it.
M.I.T.
Saturday I actually did some sightseeing -- I went to Boston Commons, back to the Sushi place, pretty much all over downtown, then I went back out to Cambridge and wandered around M.I.T. This time I was looking for the library, but couldn't find the one I wanted -- you know, the one with the computer books, of course -- as there were about a dozen, and none of them actually seemed to be related to computer science. So I headed for the most promising one, and discovered that the little cluster of core buildings in M.I.T. -- where the library was supposed to be -- leaves a lot to be desired on the usability front. Typical engineers. Anyhow, I decided that if I couldn't find the freaking computer book library on campus, it's probably a good thing that I didn't get accepted there back in 2002.
Big Sigh. I'll get over it. Someday.
Maybe.
Falling back to plan B, I went to the campus bookstore.
Home
Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I headed to the airport to come home. My flight from Logan to Las Vegas was delayed, which was ominous since the last time I had a delayed flight into Vegas, I missed the Tucson connection and had to stay overnight, but fortunately I made my flight with a few minutes to spare, and managed to get home at about 2 AM, MST. Miraculously, Ben's fish were still alive, Missy's tomato plant hadn't died, and my scooter was right where I'd left it, in the middle of the living room. Since it was late and I hadn't turned the light on, I ran into it with one birkenstock-clad foot, and nearly took a toenail off.
But I was home. And it felt great.
Next week: Jailbreak!
posted by Me at
8:39 PM
1 Comments:
Reading that was, like, the longest conversation I've ever had with you. Your commentary on the phone was about a tenth of that, but nevertheless I'm glad to read about your trip and get good details. :) I liked the part about the old ladies. I can TOTALLY see Julie playing the part..."we're pretty conservative down in Milwaukee..." *snort*
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