Oh, yeah, I meant to mention, I now have a copy of the book, signed by both authors. Very very cool. It’s such a relief, pleasure, etc, to actually have the physical results of our work in my hot little hands.
I’ll try to get some other copies signed by both authors. The last time I had this chance, I got an *entire box* signed by both authors, and it got lost in the mail. 🙁
I gave my announcements at ApacheCon this morning, and now we have 56 people on IRC, rather than the 8 that we had earlier this morning. That’s kinda cool.
Stefano gave a *great* talk this morning about how the ASF works. I expect his presentation will be up on the wiki RSN.
RIght now, John Fowler from Sun is talking about “Looking Ahead: Challenges for Open Software”. This is way better than the Sun keynote last year. He’s actually talking about useful things, rather than it being a product pitch for products I’m not interested in.
I did my Intro to Apache talk this morning, and it went pretty well, I think. Although I ran out of time, as usual. I had a fantastic attendance, with several people signing up at the conference registration table.
Lunch was very good, as it usually is on tutorial day.
And then I was in meetings after that – starting with the Apachecon planners meeting, and now the ASF members meeting.
There’s nothing particularly exciting to tell about today. It’s been extremely full and fulfilling, but nothing really remarkable. If that makes sense.
Went hiking at Red Rock Canyon yesterday. Not much time to write about it, but here are the photos
I just got done reading One More For The Road, by Ray Bradbury. I expect I’ve mentioned that Dandelion Wine is my favorite book, and that I read it almost every summer. “One More” is a brilliant companion to DW, although it’s a very different kind of book. DW is a collection of short stories, but is also a novel. They are all set in the same time and place and with the same characters. They tell the story of one boy’s summer. One More is a collection of unrelated stories, but they have a common theme running through them.
While DW is a story about being a kid, and discovering the world, and growing up, “One More” is largely about the other end of ones life. There’s an interesting afterword in which Bradbury discusses the unintentional metaphors in his writing. If that is to be taken at face value, it’s possible that no such theme was intended. But what I see is a book about looking back on a very full life, and wondering if it could have been better, could have been more significant, and whether he can persuade other folks to take advantage of the opportunities that come to them.
I expect I’ll be reading this one again, if perhaps not as often as DW.
After the first time through, I think that the best story is “the nineteenth” in which he encounters an old man picking up golf balls on a golf course. I think I mentioned this story in an earlier posting, but I’m not sure. Perhaps we just discussed it on IRC.
“First Day” is also a fantastic story, and makes me very glad for the friends I have, and very sad for folks that look back on a long life and have no friends that have been with them all that time. That must be very lonely.
So, if you have to pick between the two, pick Dandelion Wine. It’s much happier. “One More for The Road” made me rather sad a number of times. But it’s worth reading, particularly if you’re a Bradbury fan.
Oh, and “Beasts” … I have absolutely no idea what that story is about.
No complaints on the flight out here. I watched two John Wayne movies (“Blue Steel” and “Dawn Rider”), finished Ray Bradbury’s “One More For The Road”, and resumed reading “July’s People.”
I managed to not get much in the way of breakfast, and miss lunch, so by the time I got here, I was famished. And I didn’t have any real idea what time it was. So after I got my stuff stashed at the hotel, I went out looking for food.
Ok, a word about the hotel. That word would be “wow.” This hotel suite is bigger than my appartment. Downstairs, I’ve got a sitting room, toilet, kitchen table, and bar. Upstairs is the bedroom and full bathroom. And halfway up the stairs, there’s a hottub/whirlpool. It’s quite a bit bigger than the suite I had last year, and closer to the main hotel buildings. Very very nice. The only problem with it, so far, is that the internet connection in here doesn’t work. But, when they offered to move me to a room where it does work, I declined. I’ll have quite enough network at the conference, and I can wait half a day for that.
So, anyways … I went out to find some food. I found a Subway store which was also a convenience store and a pizza place, right across the road from the Hard Rock. And after being in there for just a few minutes, Mads Toftum came in to get some food. So we chatted a while and had lunch/dinner/something together.
Afterwards, I came back to the hotel with the intention of going out to do some geocaching. I ended up only doing one, and it was just a little lame.
In Kentucky, virtual caches don’t get approved unless you actually have to go there and do a little work to find the answers. Here, apparently, it’s a little easier. There’s a lot to see here, and evidently there’s a virtual cache associated with all of it. This was, quite literally, a “drive by” cache, which you could do without even getting out of the car, or, to be honest, slowing down. I expect that you could do it from the comfort of your home by looking up some stuff on the WWW. I won’t tell you which one it is, or we’ll have a bunch of people logging the cache who have never been here.
So, although it was pretty neat to see, I somehow don’t think it warranted an actual cache. I’m almost reluctant to even log it.
I’m in the Bluegrass Airport (LEX) waiting for the plane to ApacheCon. Hopefully this set of flights will go more smoothly than the last one.
I was to fly back from Chicago on Thursday evening. Well, as I mentioned, that didn’t happen. I spent much of the night at the O’Hare airport. Then, some friends of my brother called me and told me they were coming to get me. So I got about 4 hours of sleep in a real bed. Friends like this are just awesome.
I had been scheduled to fly through Charlotte, but when I got to the airport, they rescheduled me to fly directly to Lexington. Of course, true to form, that flight started boarding about 20 minutes after it was supposed to leave, due to mechanical problems. Most of the time, I’d like for them to take their time when there are mechanical problems to be fixed. But, being about 14 hours behind schedule, I was feeling moderately less charitable.
We finally got to Lexington at about 10:30, but it took about 45 minutes to get our luggage off of the plane. Why? Well, nobody knows. There was nobody around to ask what was going on.
And, so, I finally got home, leaving me about 20 hours to unpack, do laundry, and repack to leave for vegas. And here I sit in the airport, ready to leave.
It seems that spam volume is down. I wonder why.
Well, I’m still in Chicago. And I’m not very happy about this.
Ok, time for one of my biggest annoyances about airports. An airport is primarily driven by time and schedule. Why, then, can you NEVER find a clock in an airport? They should be *everywhere*! Here are thousands of people, many of whom are not sure what time zone they are in, trying to make it on time to their planes. We need clocks, folks. This is so obvious, and yet every airport I go to, I search in vain for a clock. This does not seem like a hard reques. Clocks are cheap, and adding the current time to all of these dozens of digital displays that are everywhere would seem to be a simple thing to do.
Last night, dozens of flights were cancelled. Apparently because of weather, although nobody ever really told me for sure. So, rather than arriving home at 8 last night, I was standing in line at Customer Service. And around 11pm, one of my brother’s friends picked me up and took me home so I could sleep for a few hours. Then, I was up at 4:45, in a taxi by 5, and now I’m back sitting at the airport waiting for the flight to Lexington.
Since I leave tomorrow morning for Las Vegas, I’m somewhat concerned about my luggage. But I’ve been assured that it will be on this flight, or that it will be there waiting for me. We’ll see. If not, I’ll have to borrow a suitcase and just do without whatever it is that got left in my other suitcase.
I should have enough time to do some laundry and pack for the next trip.
I’m seeing a lot of the same people that were here last night. They all look tired and grumpy, just like me. Maybe we can all get home today. And, with any luck, I won’t get sick before heading out to Vegas.