Author: cdwan

I’m in the airport in Detroit. I’m becoming comfortable, because I plan to be here for a while.

Flights to both DC and Boston have been cancelled. Somehow, the flight to Providence is still supposed to go. Ha. I say “ha ha.” The crowd noise changed perceptibly when they announced the cancellation. It went from “murmer murmer” to “whinewhinewhinewhine!”

At least the airport doesn’t suck anymore. Could be worse. Could be a lot worse. I could be stuck in New Delhi. That would be worse. If all else fails, I’ll summon my compatriots and their minions, and we will rage on the town. Or I’ll be stuck in a crappy off-airport hotel with a 6am flight. One or the other.

The conference “gala cruise” last night was wretched. I felt bad for the entertainment. They were four “Mo-Town Singers” doing classic hits. They were bad. They were loud. The crowd of shy, eccentric scientists were quiet and slightly disturbed. We rode up and down the river, looking at the contrast between Canada (clean, safe, neatly manicured parks) and Detroit (severe urban wasteland).

On the other hand, I spent this morning in deep and geeky mind-meld with the head of an open source project that I use (Taverna). I was entertained by the small but flattering succession of people who stopped by to say they had liked my talk.

put some pictures online from our trip to Martha’s Vinyard. Clicky clicky to see.

The raw suck stopped at about 2pm yesterday when I obtained a car from the Enterprise rental place in the basement of the hotel. The conversation with my business partner went something like this:

Me: I’m going to rent a car this afternoon. I’m going to leave the hotel. I’m going to drive to Ann Arbor, see my friends, and drink beer. This conference so far has been a comedy of errors, I am approaching meltdown, and I am leaving for the afternoon.

Him: Umm, is everything okay?

Me: It is, as long as the plan is exactly as described above. If the plan deviates from that, everything is not okay.

Him: Have a good time.

Drove to simianpower‘s apartment, and went to see Batman Begins at the theatre up the road. I say: Acceptable. Every Batman movie I’ve ever seen has been really, really bad. This one was fine. I was entertained. We wandered into the end of Star Wars (since we were already in the theatre) and watched Yoda kick some butt.

Also caught up with my old friend Mark (one of my groomsmen). Sadly, he had to work, so we didn’t have too long to hang. Next time.

Conference is improving, now that I have some backup at the booth. Maybe I’ll even get to go to some technical sessions.

Bitch gripe moan whine snivel whine moan.

Thank you. I’m going to go give my talk now. This is the one I knew about before I got here. They sanitized my slides (“mind if I remove all references to the fact that your software works on other platforms?”). At 1:30, I’ve got another 15 minute gig to talk about a script that my colleague wrote. Wheeeeeee.

For more enlightened complaints, consult

Oh yeah: Detroit still sucks.

I’ve finally just walked away from the demo booth. It’s screwed. Anyone within range of it when it detonates will be taken with. Ka-boom.

The conversation at the time that I left was between Apple and the hotel “engineers” over the fact that we need two independent 20 amp circuits to power our booth. Not two extension cords from the same outlet. Not an extension cord with a power strip. Two. Independent. Reality is that our booth draws about 18 amps at peak. One is plenty. We do this all the time. However, in Detroit, our booth pops the supposedly 20 amp circuit. Fine. I’m not arguing about whether it’s 15 or 20. Just bring me two of those 20s you have. We’ll manually load balance them. Thanks. Oh, and screw your union rules. This is my screwdriver.

The best part was when we were digging through the cables and found a hand made 20 to 15 amp adaptor. Like, a three prong wall outlet wrapped up in electrical tape with two wires coming out of it, and a three prong plug taped to it. Tape. Two wires. Ground? Bah. Ground is for the weak. My cluster, however, was weak. Thank god for the UPS.

I’ve been having fun blowing out the power on command. They get something that they claim will work, and then I run a big, 8-way processing job with lots of disk I/O. Blammo. One time, we smelled smoke. Wheeee.

The other cluster I was supposed to build? Ha. We turned on the machines to give the appearance of utility (blinkenlights), and he’s connected by remote to his home system. What a cluster-fuck. He got bitten by the fact that no machine in this hotel is allowed to connect directly to any other machine in this hotel. If I go out to the corporate servers in Cambridge, and tunnel back in, that’s fine. So, his demo machines couldn’t talk to his demo cluster. I told him that the other option was to rewire his whole demo network to all be on a private subnet. He decided to take his running demo and run with it. I don’t blame him.

Oh yeah, going to the technical sessions? Ha. Going to see my family in the area? Double ha.

The ren center, by the way, is the worst designed building EVER. To get from the first floor to the fifth floor, you must either (a) complete one entire trip around the building to use the escalators which are stylishly offset from each other (b) use TWO distinct elevators. One in the lobby and another on the third floor.

I think I’ll post this before the wireless dies again.

Gah.

Hello from the Renaissance center in Deeeeetroit. My demo is not working. I’m one full cluster build behind schedule, because my demo is not working. I’m having a hard time taking the fact that my demo does not work seriously, given that it does not need to work in order to (a) impress people (b) make sales. Plus, the hotel network is truly screwed up.

I was supposed to hang with this afternoon. Instead, I made my demo not work. Tomorrow, I was supposed to go to the technical sessions and keynotes and actually learn something. Instead, I’m guessing that I will slowly bring my demo to life…and that nobody will give a damn whether it really works or is canned. Gah. This is triply frustrating because I’m so unaccustomed to crap like this. In my day job, the only things that have to work are the things that really matter.

The fact that nobody but me really knows if it’s working or not (I verified this by asking if they could tell, or if it was just me) doesn’t help.

Still, I have a truly glorious view of the city from my room on the 63rd floor. I’m looking along the river. Canada is to my left. I can see the Windsor Casino, just barely, out of the leftmost corner of my window. I am partially clothed, and far too high above the city for anyone to tell. Behold my belly, Detroit. Behold and weep. My proud belly drags the ground.

Why have a blog at all, except to post narcissistic and self indulgent thoughts?

Things you enjoy, even when no one around you wants to go out and play. What lowers your stress/blood pressure/anxiety level? Make a list of 5, post it to your journal.

1. Playing with my plants, trimming the tops of the cilantro, guiding the peas back to the trellis, pushing the tomatoes back into their cages.
2. Blowing people up on Halo 2
3. Exercise, to failure.
4. Brewing / Bottling / Giving away beer. Oh yeah, drinking it too.
5. Livejournal

Back home for a day.

Trip number one (last week) went well. I logged about 1400 miles on the car, and got in visits with , my family, Mo and baby Margaret, a friend from work, and amnesiadust. It felt like the kick-butt academic tour. CMU, Annandale, Princeton, Yale, then home. Further thoughts on high school graduations if I get a free sec to write them down.

Trip number two (tomorrow through Wed) takes me to Detroit. All bets are off for socializing tomorrow, since our partner companies are “almost” able to get their demo working. We’ve got three technologies coming together which have never *really* been on the same computer at the same time. Two of them are in beta. Demo goes live tomorrow evening. Should be fun*.

The grass is high, and the garden is producing cilantro, peas, parsley, beets, and basil. There are flowers on the tomatoes, and the BFMs are growing nicely, though no blossoms yet. I think they may need more sunlight. Also, our 10 rose plants are all in bloom. Hooray for roses! redmed has been productive, replacing doors and painting walls.

That’s it for the moment. Back to my stack-o-email.

* suck

Well, my brother Albert is now officially a graduate of Annandale High School. Congratulations to him. For the record, he’s off to Europe this summer, and then headed to Peabody conservatory in the Fall to enter a dual degree program in Guitar performance and recording engineering. So yeah, he’s doing okay.

Hanging with the parents has been good. I ditched out to Tysons Corner this morning to sit in the high speed wireless and get some work done, and then came back for the graduation. Lots of thoughts surrounding the 500-odd 18 year olds who marched dutifully across the stage for their diplomae, but that’s for another time with more space between me and profound, blissful sleep.

I’ll save the update about real rock climbing (outdoors, even!) with , Aimee Mann(sp?) and her free outdoor concert in Pittsburgh, and world domination for another time too.

Oh yeah, and a beer exploded in the back of my car while I was driving to Pittsburgh. I thought at first that I had a flat, but then I experienced no distinctive pull to the side or vibration. Plus, my car started to smell like a brewery. Yeesh.

Went to the resident graduation for Jen’s program tonight. It made me think of the first such graduation I attended, where the brewmaster of the Mighty Hammer Brewery and I met and agreed that we would need to stick together to survive the process. Overall very pleasant. I like Brown better than UMN. The director of all OB-Gyn, for example, knew all the residents by name and anecdote. That simply wouldn’t have happened in Minnesota.

Completed the individual portion of my annual reviews today. Shockingly, none of the partners could find a single area for improvement. They just said “keep doing what you’re doing.” It was a nice series of talks though. Good to sit down and deliberately talk about the business, the employment relationship, and that sort of thing.

The garden is growing well. The pumpkin plants are healthy, and the first pea pods are on the peas. The tomato plants have blossoms, and the beets are getting that mature-beet look that they get when the fruit starts to grow. Happiness.

Tomorrow, I drive to Pittsburgh to deliver my election-bet beer to . We will recall that I favored Bush to win the 2004 election by a 10% margin. This, I thought, gave me a win-win situation. Either I got a close election, or else I got free beer. Sadly, we got the worst case scenario. A narrow margin of victory, but for the catastrophically wrong leader. Oh well. Clark gets an assortment of homebrew.

On Monday, I continue south to attend my brother’s high school graduation.

On Wed, I drive north to Princeton, and on Thursday drive back to Providence. If the moons are in alignment, I might stop off in New Haven to see amnesiadust, who will be spending a month there playing with their telescope, or something.

From today’s New York Times column by Thomas Friedman:

“Geo-greens seek to combine into a single political movement environmentalists who want to reduce fossil fuels that cause climate change, evangelicals who want to protect God’s green earth and all his creations, and geo-strategists who want to reduce our dependence on crude oil because it fuels some of the worst regimes in the world.

The Bush team has been M.I.A. on energy since 9/11. Indeed, the utter indifference of the Bush team to developing a geo-green strategy – which would reduce our trade deficit, make America the world leader in combating climate change and stimulate U.S. companies to take the lead in producing the green technologies that the world will desperately need as China and India industrialize is so irresponsible that it takes your breath away. This is especially true when you realize that the solutions to our problems are already here.“

I will repeat my position: Any plan for the future of our species which relies on digging X out of the ground and burning it, forever, is a bad plan. I don’t care what X is.