Thanks, Skippy, Matsu, RoUS, and all the other dear friends who came to our celebration. Having you there made it all the more joyous an occasion. Thank you.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
USA/French friendship
As you know if you paid attention in your high school history class, the USA and France have had a close friendship since before the USA was formed. While in Paris, we saw a number of statues celebrating this friendship. These included statues of George Washington and Ben Franklin, and a wonderful statue in Place des États Unis commemorating the American soldiers who died for France in WWII.
Here’s some of the photos I took of these monuments while in Paris.
It was for this reason, among others, that the foolishness about “freedom fries” irritated me so much. It’s perfectly fine, apparently, that the USA disagrees with the actions of the United Nations on a regular basis, but when France disagreed, and we happened, in a strange aberration, to agree, we resorted to the juvenile playground tactic of ridiculing them. It was embarrassing, to say the least.
Paris
The wedding was beautiful. At least I think so.
And now we’re in Paris. We got here early this morning, and have been busy most of the day. Our flight out of Lexington was delayed (of course) but we made the flight out of Newark without any problem, and got in to Paris on time. However, the bus drivers are on strike, so it took us about an hour to get to the gate. From there, though, the ride to the hotel was quick and painless.
We’re staying at a delightful little place just off of Place de Clichy. The room is only slightly larger than the bed, but that’s plenty large enough. There’s a wonderful view of the courtyard out the window, and breakfast will be in the courtyard in the morning, if it’s not raining.
It rained most of today, but not hard enough to dissuade us from traipsing around Paris. We walked up to Sacre Cour, and then after dinner at Bistro Melrose, we took the metro down to Champs Elysees, and from there walked to the Eiffel Tower. Not keeping track of time, we managed to miss the last train back, and just arrived back by cab, tired and ready to get some sleep.
Tomorrow, we’re going to the Louvre, and perhaps to Musee D’Orsay. Nothing else firmly planned. We figure it’s better to enjoy a few things, and perhaps have time for other things, than to be overbooked and stressed out about schedules.
I’ve posted some photos on Flickr, and will post more there as they get put on the computer. I haven’t taken quite as many as I expected, simply because the batteries aren’t holding up very well. But we’re here for a few more days, so I imagine there will be one or two good ones in that time.
Relient K and the Sloop John B
Last night we went to the Relient K concert at Ichthus, and it was fantastic. I love their sound, I love their clever lyrics, and I love the fact that they are so obviously having so much fun on stage.
Unfortunately, I know the lyrics to just one of their songs, so all the twenty-years-younger-than-I people around me belted them out while I tried to catch a word here and there.
Then, in the middle, a bright shining moment, they did “Sloop John B”, and while all the kids around looked on puzzled, I sang as loud as I could, and had more fun than I’ve had at a concert in years, feeling like I was 16 again at that Beach Boys concert in Cincinnati, way up in the nosebleed seats at Riverfront, belting out Sloop John B with Brian Wilson and the Boys.
We left before the News Boys concert – it was getting a little late for us old folks. But I’ve been humming Sloop John B ever since, and I have an even greater fondness for Relient K than I did before.
Anchored
I thought I had posted this quite some time back. Apparently not. These are some observations while floating down the canals in Amsterdam, getting brief glimpses into the lives of people with their homes tied up to the banks, and them getting brief glimpses into mine.
Windows (or ‘Anchored’)
May 4, 2007
Amsterdam
We drift slowly past
a thousand lives
tied up to the river bank.
A peek in the window,
nothing more,
and then the boat moves on.
They sit at dinner
and argue about the bills.
She yells at him, then
looks out at me,
and I move on.
He sits before the bookcase,
books to the ceiling
All his friends there on the shelves
Dickens and Balzac and Tolstoy
to keep him company
on lonely nights.
She stares out the window
and the strangers in her front yard,
wishing she could go
where they have been
see what they have seen
longing to be far away
while I long only to be home.
She waves, timidly, sadly,
and we float past.
Here sits only a cat
always at home
for all places are alike to him.
A hundred faces from
and hundred windows
on their way to Nasau
and sun and sand.
Are they going to, or from?
A thousand lives
tied up to the river bank
and we,
we float past
wishing, perhaps, to be
anchored.
Scalable Internet Architectures
I’ve been reading Theo’s new book Scalable Internet Architectures, which isn’t actually particularly new any more. I have had very little time to read so far this year.
Anyways, I’ve finally read enough of it to give a review. Sorry it’s taken so long, Theo.
The book consists of three kinds of content. There’s the “Yeah, I knew that” stuff, which is by far the minority of the content. There’s the “That’s cool, but applies to a MUCH larger infrastructure than I’ll ever be condemned to manage”, which is also in a minority. Then there’s the vast majority of the book, which is “Wow, that’s immediately applicable, and immediately beneficial” stuff.
Theo talks about situations encountered at customers, and, although the situations themselves are different from what I will ever encounter, the solutions that he implemented have insight in them that do apply to situations that I encounter all the time, from deploying new code, to working with a team, to backup and recovery.
Having attended Theo’s talks at various conferences, and heard many of these stories, I wasn’t sure what I’d get from the book, but the book is rich with content that was only hinted at in his talks.
This book goes on my “highly recommended” list if you are at all involved in deploying and/or maintaining code or hardware, in any environment from a small business on up. Theo’s experience is extensive, with real-world customers, trying to solve real problems, not theoretical ones, and what he has learned isn’t the standard text-book solution, but things that actually work when the scenario doesn’t behave like the text-book ones.
So, go get it right away and then come to ApacheCon so that he can sign it for you.
Two funerals in two days
On Tuesday, I attended the funeral of Dr. Cornelius R. Hager, who was the founder of the University of Kentucky Community College system, and the president of Asbury College on three separate occasions, among many other things during his life. Dr. Hager stepped in at several times in the history of the college when there were times of instability, division, strife, and chaos, and provided a rudder to keep us going in the right direction during those times. I didn’t really know him, but owe much to his hard work, not least of which is my fine college education and my current job.
Yesterday, I attended a memorial service for my grandmother, who died two years ago. In the past two years, she has been in active service at the University of Kentucky college of medicine. When she died, her body was given to the college of medicine to participate in the training of young medical students, giving them hands-on training in human anatomy, and providing, in a very real sense, their first patient. Due to her gift, another generation of doctors will be able to heal more effectively. You can find more about the UK Body Bequeathal program here: http://www.mc.uky.edu/neurobiology/bb_about.asp.
The memorial service was a very simple and beautiful multi-faith memorial of the lives of these people and the gift that they gave, extending their service to mankind even beyond death. It was attended by families of those who were being commemorated – about 50 names were read out – and many of the students who had benefited from their gift.
RBLs
This morning I discovered that most of the email that I’ve been sending from the conference has been /dev/null-ed because I’m coming from t-mobile, which is apparently blacklisted. Great.
httpd power tools
I just got done with my “httpd power tools”, aka “20 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Apache”. I think it was well received – at least, folks were frantically taking notes through the whole thing, which is usually a good with. It felt rushed without being panicked. There were a lot more questions than I’m used to, so I was actually more rushed than usual. But still, I had a good time, which is generally my measure of a good talk.
Maintainable PHP Code
16-May-2007 11:27:12
It’s good to be at a conference where, when things go wrong, I don’t feel at all responsible for fixing them. They’re trying to get the hotel to close the airgap walls between the speaking rooms, to divide the keynote room into three session rooms, and it doesn’t seem that the hotel was aware of this need.
And yet, I still *do* feel responsible, and rather uncomfortable. What’s that about? Apparently I’ve been in conference planning so long that I can’t just sit back and enjoy a conference without feeling the urge to help out.
Anyways, I’m attending (or attempting to) a talk on “Writing Maintainable PHP Code”, (Jeff Moore) and I imagine it’ll start any minute now. Right about … now.