Abe's party
Abe and Eduardo threw a party at their place in the City last night. This party may qualify in that rare category of parties knows and the "too good" party. That's all I have to say.
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Abe and Eduardo threw a party at their place in the City last night. This party may qualify in that rare category of parties knows and the "too good" party. That's all I have to say.
ApacheCon is always a blast. And Germany is awesome. We've even gotten into a routine. Every evening, Fitz and I and whoever is around go strolling about Stuttgart looking for food, we eat up, then we head over to Lavazza, where we get Lattes and ice cream. The waitress there, I'm pretty sure, doesn't really like us, but we like lattes and ice cream.
I'm working on a WebDAV server in Python (based on Twisted) and having a week of sitting next to Greg and Roy every afternoon and bombarding him with questions has been insanely useful. I was not expecting to get much work done this week, but I was actually very productive.
Fitz and I ran the ApacheCon Lighting Lottery Talks, which was quite fun. The format of the lighting talks is that prospective speakers submit a topic at the beginning of the talk (or beforehand, such as when I run into anyone I know and ask them what topic they are going to speak about…) and we draw names at random during your session. Once you name is drawn, you get 30 seconds to give a talk that can last up to 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, we find ways to remove you from the stage. We needed a timer tool for this, so I wrote one in Cocoa. Roy, being all clever, foudn some JavaScript and had one running in a web browser in far less time, but web browsers are lame application platforms, so I kept hacking on my little app. It turned out rather nicely, with a nice big timer on screen. It perhaps worked too well, because we never got an opportunity to remove a speaker.
We did have some great talks, my favorite being on implementing a Subversion class loader for Java, such that it would find the class in a Subversion repository (using HTTP), compile it, and load it. It devolved into offline support, where it could read you email for the commit logs and piece together the needed Java code from the patches in the logs. I also enjoyed Rich Bowen's talk about why he hates Apache HTTPd.
Holy cow, it takes a long time to get to Stuttgart from Santa Clara. So I get up in the morning and Kristen drives me to San Fransisco airport, where we discover that my Delta filght to Atlanta is delayed by an hour, which means I won't make my connection to Frankfurt. OK, well that sucks. The next flight would be the following morning which really sucks, because I hate getting up early and it just wasted a day of my week in Germany. Better still, we're having ID problems because I didn't book my flight; a travel agency did it on behalf of ApacheCon, which is the why of this whole trip.
See, my last name is Sánchez Vega, but in the States having a last name with two parts really confuses people, so we Puerto Ricans often play games with our last names. Some folks hyphenate them (Sánchez-Vega), and others drop the latter half (Sánchez). Using only the first part of your last name is actually pretty normal in Puerto Rico; people understand that you are shorting your name, much as when I say I'm Wilfredo, most people, even stateside, recognize that there is more to my name, but one doesn't always say all of it. Anyway, I've never changed my last name officially; it's still Sánchez Vega, but when I got my drivers license and my passport (which is a whole story as well), I used the name Wilfredo Sánchez.
The plane tickets, however, were booked under Wilfredo Sánchez Vega, because the kind folks in Germany booked them for me. So the gate agent who is trying to get me on the next day's flight is unsure of this whole situation, like I'm Sánchez, not Sánchez Vega, so that's not really my ticket. I have to say that the whole business of strict authentication on using the ticket despite absolutely no authentication on buying the ticket is complete crap, and it's just a game the airlines play to price discriminate; any claim that this is a security thing is bunk, even if the government has been sucked into playing along.
Which isn't to say that the gate agent wasn't very nice; she was simply understandably confused by the bogus process she has to follow. It turns out that her friend at the next counter was Latin American and was familiar with the weird two-part last name thing and vouched for the OK-ness of that being my ticket, and explained that the folks in Europe are quite so ignorant; I'd be fine on the other side of the pond.
The good news is that this other agent also happens to have mad gate agent skillz, and we were getting along with her, so she decides to get us better hook-ups than this next day nonsense. After much wrangling with the computer she scores me a series of flights: San Francisco to Atlanta to Madrid on Delta, then Madrid to Frankfurt on Iberia. Longer travel time, but it'll happen that day, plus the flight from Atlanta to Madrid (the longest leg) was in Business Class. Now we're talking.
So I get on the next flight to Atlanta and Kristen goes on to San Francisco for the day. I scoot on over to my connection to Madrid, at which point I was sure I had lost my passport, possibly I left it at the counter in San Francisco. Nyeargh!!! Turns out it was in my shirt pocket. OK. Needless panic, it's over, get on the plane.
Last time ApacheCon was in Europe, I went there on Apple's dime via British Airways Business Class. It was swank. There's a nice lounge to wait in at SFO, the seats recline flat into little beds… oh, boy, that was nice. Delta wasn't quite so swank, but on this flight the service was excellent, and, more importantly, I took advantage of it. I got the apetizer this and the salad that, and oh, some Shiraz, and the main course (more Shiraz), and so on. It was like a long take-your-time dinner at a pretty OK restaurant. The main course was blah, but the rest was just fine, and four glasses of Shiraz, four glasses of port and a hot fudge sundae later, I was feeling OK with life as I took a nap in the roomy seat. And then there was breakfast. It was all good.
Then I'm in Madrid, and pretty well lost. I meander through the airport hoping to find Iberia, which is the national carrier of Spain, and on which I'm connecting to Frankfurt. Being a native (but very rusty) Spanish speaker, I'm, thinking I can talk the talk. So when I find someone looking like they could help me, the conversation would start with me asking a question in Spanish, them responding in much faster Spanish, my responding in confused Spanish and a little bit of English, and then they would apologize for assuming I knew Spanish and continue in English. Oh, well.
The flight to Frankfurt was OK. I bought a chicken curry sandwich on the flight and I was sure when I got it that it was egg salad instead, but it was, actually chicken curry.
Then in Frankfurt, I found my way to the train station. Fortunately, most signs have English in small text. Unlike Spain, in Germany, I can't even try to fake it. I know nothing German. After fumbling with the automatic ticket machines to get them to speak English, I was all set. I had missed the reserved train I had tickets for, but with a little help from the info desk, I was able to get on a train in Frankfurt, hop off in Manheim, and connect on to Stuttgart. German trains are nice. Really nice. It makes me wonder why my very rich country has no cool rain system going.
In Stuttgart I discover that Germans use bark, right off the tree, as toilet paper. Eek.
A bad ride later, I'm at the Maritim Hotel, starving and exhausted after about 26 hours of continunous travel. I find the Hackathon room, where I find several ASF folks, and decide I really need a taco. Unfortunately, that'll have to wait until I get back home.
The on-playa Ranger training was this past weekend.
Tool & Answergirl made their way to the playa in the Cessna, with a pit stop in Spanish Springs (N86), which is a pretty interesting airport. The reason we stopped there was because it has the cheapest fuel in the area. The field is a dirt strip which is certainly long enough for my plane. The interesting bit is the hillside right next to the field. To land on runway 16, you more or less fly at a cliff then hang a hard left and the runway is right under you. So you can't be too high (as I was) or you might miss the field entirely despite it's length. I did not (go, go, gadget slip-to-land) but I did land past midfield and had to taxi all the way back to the fuel pumps.
The weather was unbelievably perfect. It was overcast, which made me a little nervous, as rain would mean no landing on the playa and a return to the Reno area, but the result was a cool day all the way up to Black Rock and almost all day after we got there. The playa was very firm and there was no dust all weekend, despite the usual high winds. Yay!
The training itself was a blast and it was great to see everyone there. Usually training is kinda boring, 'cuz we've heard the spiel many times before. Camping makes it better. Answergirl and I arrived in the afternoon, so we'd missed all the intro stuff and caught the more interesting tail end. I also went to a shift leader training the next morning and that was actually very useful; we had a lot of good discussions that I found very valuable.
There was also a very pleasant trip to Frog Pond, which involved some GPS-assisted but mostly zen nagivation and skilled driving on Bustin's part. Hot springs rock. I'm quite jazzed up for Burning Man now. Lets go!
Kristen and I just got back from Northern Saskatchewan. If you've never been, see if you have a friend who's from there and get them to take you. I suppose you can go on your own, but towns in Saskatchewan are generally pretty small and far between. The towns often consist of a grain elevator near the one block of downtown and some houses. Mostly, it's all about the farms, and the towns are where you go for some writing paper and aspirin. Or you're retired from the farming scene and want to live where you'll have company the a good chat over every day. Anyway, it's not like there are tourist information centers and so on, so having someone take you who can introduce you to everyone they know is pretty nice.
I loved the TV show Northern Exposure, in a large part because I loved the idea of a little town where Ruth-Anne the shopkeeper can, on an off day, hop onto Chris the radio DJ's motorcycle and drive off, leaving Chris not furious that some old lady stole his bike, but instead simply wondering where Ruth-Anne's taking off to. I didn't quite get the feeling that one could take off on anyone else's bike or anything like that, but then I did get the feeling that everyone knows everyone else in that same sort of way.
For whatever reason, our rental car turned out to be a Mustang convertible, because the other cars were in demand, and we didn't exactly mind the idea of driving top-down. We took full advantage of the view. The scenery is vast, because Saskatchewan may very well be the flattest place on Earth. The best part was that in some places it smells like breakfast; probably the crops. There are farms everywhere, and scenery changes slowly—think Philip Glass.
I also saw some farm equipment that makes heavy contruction equipment look wimpy. It's insane how massive the meachinery is. I might have to return for the harvest, so I can drive one of these things.