Author: cdwan

Okay, the inn where we’re staying is pretty posh.

Fun week. I had hoped to perform a massive cleanup of the mansion this week, but that just sort of fell by the wayside. Today the plan is to hop in a car at around 6pm and drive down to Emmaus, PA in preparation for a combined double-birthday-party / New Years Eve festival / Holiday visit with the parents. Should be a good time … except for the 16 hours of driving over a weekend.

At least the weather is nice.

Since capital_l is on vacation and can’t be troubled, here’s a translation for the climactic confrontation in order of the stick.

Cut, to protect the innocent

I have now purchased three albums based on the mix tape that sacredangle gave me over Christmas:

Tabla Beat Science: “Tala Matrix”. The “tabla” is a traditional drum of northern India. This band combines traditional tabla rhythms with electronica and a smattering of other instruments to build long, complex, ballads. It’s my new workout music of choice. Hard to tell any song from any other song … but it’s also the sort of music that makes me wish there was a hookah nearby.

Axiom of Choice: “Unfolding”. Persian music, pushed forward with strong drums. Traditional Iranian instruments: diwan (lute) and duduk (oboe) primary among them. This will be my default hangout, party music for a while.

Slavic Soul Party: “Bigger”. If jazz was more like this, I would love jazz. A tuba, clarinet, concertina, trombone, trumpet, and a drummer … doing some mad fusion of gypsy, mexican, traditional jewish, and polka music. If you’ve been to a Cirque du Soleil show, this is the clown music that is on while the acrobats are flipping madly through the air. It’s clever, sarcastic, and joyful. The high point, for me, is that every now and then, one of the players leans into a microphone and mumbles some random phrases like “man, when you’re in this place with, like, a glass of something in your hand, that’s it man. That’s it …” then the horns show up for another mad flight in parallel sixths, the drummer switches to a new riff, the concertina and clarinet lead off into a new key, and away it goes … giggling madly to itself.

God Bless iTunes.

Pictures from Christmas are up here.

I also took the liberty of putting some video clips of Albert playing the Lute online. They’re bigger files, but I think they’re pretty cool. video 1, video 2, and video 3.

Oh yeah, had some sweet dreams over the weekend. The best moment was when I was hanging out with Santa and asked “okay, seriously just for a sec … how am I doing? Naughty? Nice?”. He looked at me and said “are you kidding? Naughty. Six years running.” Yeah, about that.

Further updates as I think of them: Brother gave me a mix CD of world music. I have to say, “Slavic Soul Party” is pretty funky-cool.

Back from the Christmas trip to my parent’s place in VA. We flew down on Friday, encountering long delays which added up to arrival at the airport around 1 in the morning. My mother had driven in to pick us up, and drove us back, getting to the farm house around 3am. Good times.

The weekend was wonderful. The new hot tub lived up to expectations, easily seating six, and encased in an Amish designed gazebo. Presents were exchanged, homemade wine was drunk, and everyone ate and slept a lot. We observed the nightly ritual of the 40+ geese who hang out on the pond self-organizing into two flocks at sunset and departing for the evening. Geese are kinda funny.

Particularly cool: My brother played Christmas carols on the lute he had borrowed from school.

Now we’re back in RI for a quick week, followed by a weekend in Emmaus, PA with redmed‘s parents.

Once more, I find myself at the airport. Except that this time, is here with me, and we’re heading off to VA to hang with the fam. The trip is evolving into a decent explanation of negative numbers. See, we used to have a 2 hour layover at Dulles. Our flight to Dulles is nearly 2 hours late, but they’re going to try to “make up the time” in the air. So, if my layover is, for example, negative 30 minutes … that’s not so great.

I plan to spend as much as possible of the weekend (a) in the hot tub, (b) asleep.

I had to share this bit from Deke Sharon on Basses:

if you’re not a singing-type-person, you probably won’t get this at all

God willing, yesterday concludes the final business trip of the year. My rough estimate is 78 days on travel this year. No wonder my suitcase has some wear-marks. The Acela train from Providence to New York is very nice. There is even a “quiet car,” where “library” levels of noise are enforced. Turn off the cell phones, keep your voices low. I loved it.

Discovered a new difficulty level in presentations: When I arrived at the venue, the sponsor asked to see my slides. He proceeded to insist that I delete the first half of them. “Oh, someone else is covering that, you don’t have to.” Infuriating. It was beyond his imagination that I might want to, for example, light people’s minds up to some topics by using the same words several times through a talk, but in slightly different contexts … or that there might be some benefit to lining up with what earlier speakers had said, in order to reinforce or build on an idea. I tend to see my presentations as a story, not an isolated series of bullet points … and removing the first half of my story made it a little tricky to justify the second half. No no, I just didn’t get it and I needed to relax.

Just as I got my head around that bit, someone else tried to convince me that it would be bad form to use my (Apple) laptop to present, since one of the partners at this particular event was Dell. That just didn’t happen. One random, unexpected, unnecessary and irritating change per customer.

As usual, it went okay once I got hold of the microphone. Sheesh.

On the other hand, they put me up at a sweet little boutique hotel in Manhattan, and I got to see several old friends for dinner. Sometimes, you just gotta roll with it.

I’ve got a friend with a System Administration position available in Basel, Switzerland. He says it’s:

In the future, the goal is to contract out as much as possible, allowing the person to focus on helping scientists. However, they will have to do about 50% windows (dealing with it), 40% UNIX (mostly RH), and 10% networking. However, in the long term I want the person dealing with HPC, and doing some programming (strategy/architecture).

Basel is a fun town, and the employer is a big company. Send me an email if interested and qualified, and I’ll put you in touch.