And so it was. Seriously, it was nuts.

As with many such things, it begins as a grand adventure. I was at ApacheCon in Austin last week, so Kristen and I met up in Dallas on Friday for our connection to Guadalajara. My flight into Dallas was delayed, so I had to book it on over to the next gate, which, of course, was in a different terminal, and found my sweetie just in time to catch our flight.

Unfortunately, my roll-aboard, which I checked due to increasingly difficult to navigate rules for bringing things with you onto airplanes, didn't run as fast as I did, and missed the flight. So, when we arrived in Mexico, we picked up Kristen's bag, and checked in with the baggage person for American Airlines to find out where my bag was.

To my pleasant surprise, they actually knew. It was coming on a later flight, which should be arriving late that night. OK, cool. Sort of. Because I was going to Arandas. "No problem", she tells me, "we'll send it to you. Where are you staying?"

At this point, I again mention that this is Julio's wedding. Everyone loves Julio; you can't stand within 100 feet of him and not feel taken care of. In this case, however, he was much farther than 100 feet away. More importantly, I had no idea where we were staying. See, the wedding planners were taking care of that. Somewhat confoundingly, I hadn't been told where that was yet.

I had actually flown into central Mexico knowing nothing more than the name of the town I needed to be in. I hoped that I had a reservation in some hotel in that town; I hadn't gotten any confirmation here. And I hoped that someone in this town would be able to tell me which hotel that was. Julio is, I figure, a great adventurer. And if you want to keep up with him, you have to play the game. So here I was, in Mexico, wondering where I would be spending the night.

Which was all fine, except my luggage was somewhere between there and Dallas, and wouldn't be there until late (11:30 PM or so). It was 2:00 PM. So I gave the nice lady my cellular phone number and hoped that it would work, so she could call me and find out where to send the bag the next morning. (I also got a number to call them.)

We went through customs to the main entrance and had to come up with a plan. Option A: stay in Guadalajara until the bag arrives. This is appealing because I really need the bag. I'm not wearing suitable clothes for a Proper Catholic Wedding In A Church, for one thing, and, oh yeah, the suit I got married in myself was in that bag. I want that back. Option B: head over to Arandas and hope for the best. This is the option of the adventurer. We need to find out about our hotel. And we're missing out on some serious tequila action, I'm quite sure.

Speaking of which, Bill is already there. Aha! Let's call Bill. Or his wife Christine. Yes, this will lead to all sort of useful information! A brilliant plan, but a flawed one; neither of them had a working phone with them in Arandas. Kristen, being smarter than I, decided we needed food before making such decisions, so we had our first meal at Wings in the airport.

Fully fed, we decided that we are adventurers and boldly chose Option B. I explained to our cab driver that we need to go to some unknown hotel in Arandas, and he agreed to get us there and help us look for a hotel to stay in. The cab ride itself was actually kinda nice. The driver was friendly and let us chose which CDs to play and offered to stop for tequila or beer if we wanted. I decided I really needed to stay sober at this juncture and declined the offer.

About two thirds of the way into the trip, American Airlines calls up and tells me the bag arrived. I am a bit annoyed here, since it is 3:45 PM. If I'd know the bag would arrive in less than two hours, I'd have stayed at the airport. Anyway, I still don't know where I am staying, so they can't deliver it tonight; it'll have to wait until the morning as planned, because they close the baggage office at 4:00 and I wasn't going to know anything in 15 minutes.

Once we got to Arandas, I got pretty nervous. While it's no metropolis, it didn't look like a small enough town to walk around in search of every hotel for anyone associated with this wedding. We stopped at the Santa Barbara Hotel, where a fellow came out to tell us that they are quite full. I said we're here for Lily and Julio's wedding and just like that we were welcomed in. Unfortunately, I wasn't booked at this hotel, and they had no information about where I could go find out more. They did point out three other hotels which had groups of wedding attendees in them, so off we went.

Next stop: the Castillo de Cristal Hotel. This place was quite noticeable. Blue glass mirrors lined the outside of this "Crystal Castle". I hopped out of the cab, and saw an envelope with my name on it sitting on the front desk. Bingo! Adventure doesn't disappoint.

I gave the drive a nice tip, we checked in, and got settled into our crazy room. All of the rooms in this place were unique. Some were tiny and square, and ours was an oval shaped room on the top floor with two double beds. We had a primo tower setup. We then came downstairs to check out the neighborhood.

The church was immediately across the street. Behind it were several small vendor setups and in front was a square with some shops and bars surrounding it. We walked down the street past lots of shops. Kristen, being tall, white, and blonde, got a lot of interested looks from the locals. When we returned, a bus was parked in front of the hotel, and Bill was in the lobby. Predictably, he had a bottle of tequila in his hand.

And so we have arrived.

In short order, we met the first match of many fellow members of the Tommy’s Blue Agave Club. (I have a Masters Degree in Tequila, Bill has a Ph.D.) Most of the group had arrived early in the morning on a charter flight from San Francisco, were bussed in from Guadalajara, and had spent the day on tours of the Centinela distillery, which was apparently a load of fun. So they were loaded up with bottled of fine tequila, and we spent a while in the lobby having drinks.

And then American Airlines calls again. Impressive, since they presumably closed hours before. I gave them the name of the hotel and the street address, and they told me I'd get my bag that night! This is exciting news. Back to drinking.

We then walked over to the Paradiso bar, down the street, where tequila is on the house, as long as it's an El Tesoro product (El Tesoro and Tapatio). You see, Lily's grandfather, Don Felipe, founded El Tesoro de Don Felipe. Julio, the Embassador of Tequila to the United States, was marrying into a tequila empire. Tequila was flowing like water. We had a impossibly great time. I vaguely remember dinner at a restaurant next door, and don't really know how we made it home.

This was, as usual, an interesting year. There are lots of things to see at Burning Man.

The interesting this is that I didn't see most of them. Not because there isn't enough time to see them all. (There isn't.) I just didn't try very hard, because I spent all of my free time at my camp. I liked the people in my camp. I liked napping in the big dome we set up. I liked sitting in the Vanagon with my wife and chatting. I liked being at home. And a fine home it was.

That's not to say I didn't see some insanely cool things. Uchronia was impossible not to see if you ever took a walk in the inner playa. And it happened to be quite a bad-ass piece of work, which, when lit at the end of the week, made the biggest, most inspiring fire I've ever seen.

The Flower and Venus Fly Trap were simply stunning. They moved about the playa, towering over everyone and occasionally bending down to interact with the people surrounding them.

I mentioned free time: I have a job at Burning Man, which I do as a volunteer, and it's pretty much a full-time gig. What Kristen and I realized was that, while it's certainly still new and stimulating, we've in a way seen all of this before. We both work because it enables a whole new crop to experience it for the first time. And Burning Man is a good idea that new people should keep coming to. The rest of the time, familiar things are really nice. And home is the most familiar place of all.

Most important, they have a $29.99/night "Internet Special," which sounds like a pretty good deal.  What's fascinating about this Internet Special is that, while one might expect that you have to go online to get this great deal, in fact, you can't book it online.  Note the text in the image.  Live and learn.

Kristen and I drove down from Canada in our lovely Volkswagon Vanagon Camper. We love Whisker. She's a great van; a home-away-from-home, and a fantastic home at Burning Man. But it was a hard weekend on everyone.

First, I should mention that it was bloody hot, right from the start, and we started in Victoria. The ferry ride to Vancouver was pleasant, but in Vancouver, it was a scorcher.

Once in Vancouver, after a stop for some Indian food, we had gasoline raining out the back of the van. That being a rather serious problem, we stopped immediately (the leak stopped as well, with the engine off), and got towed to Canadian Tire, which, while open at 9:00 P.M. on a Friday, basically refused to work on our van because they don't do Westy's. I now dislike Canadian Tire. Our tow guy then took us to Nic's Garage.

Nic's Garage is awesome. If you break down in Vancouver, go there. Seriously. They were open Saturday AM, and got us back on the road that day. In the meantime, we had a nice day in Vancouver with our friends Marcus and Thomas and Stephanie, and had a lovely (but hot) day around town. Turns out we had a hose go funny on the way to the fuel pump, hence the impressive leakage. We gave them a bottle of wine for the fast turnaround, and continued up past Squamish, for a brief stay at Burn in the Forest. This was quite a nice drive, and the Squamish area is gorgeous.

Then it was time to drive to California. Again with the nice drive through British Columbia, and again with the crazy heat when nearing Vancouver. By the time we got to the U.S. border (we took the truck route, not the Peace Arch), it was brutal, and the wait at the border was killer. Note the van has no air conditioning…

Anyway, beyond the border, we were moving pretty well, and the air flow kept the heat bearable, until we broke down North of Eugene. The engine overheated and we pulled over to the shoulder. The alternator belt had busted off and it caused the V-belt, which powers the coolant system to derail.

So we make a call to AAA and expect a truck in an hour. We get called from the driver, who can't find us, despite our being right at the 231 mile marker on I-5 South. While they are hunting for us, someone stops to help us out. We manage to get a replacement belt (had one in the back) onto the alternator and got the V-belt back in place. At this point AAA calls back and we figure out that my cell phone was talking to a tower in Washington, not Oregon, so they were hunting for us in the wrong state. But we fixed the problem, it seems, so I cancel the service call. (AAA was very apologetic about the confusion.)

OK, so we're back on the road. For about two miles, when the engine overheats again. Apparently, the belts weren't the real problem. So we pull over again, get AAA back on the phone, and wait for a haul to… Well, the Volkswagen dealership sounds like the best bet; likely to have parts and all that. But it's now past midnight, so we find a motel.

Our VW dealer and every shop in town is too busy to look at it that day, so we stay another day. (And spending some time at the very cool Airsteam dealership in Eugene. No offense, Whisker.) We call the next morning and find out that the looked at it (briefly) and think it's a major problem, new engine and all that. A follow-up call to our folks at Van Café convinced us that this dealership in Eugene wasn't the place to get this fixed. But what to do?

Coincidentally, at this point, Kragen drops me a line on IM, to tell me (in Spanish) that he's in Quito, and I mention we're stuck in Eugene. Apparently, he and his wife also have a Vanagon, which overheated in Minnesota, and they brought it home on a U-Haul truck and trailer. Suddenly, we can take our baby home and to the Van Spa in Santa Cruz, where professional hippie vehicle repair folks can give her proper love and attention. We call U-Haul, and $370 gets up a truck and a trailer for 4 days. What a deal! Toss in a bunch more cash for gasoline and we're home at 1:30 A.M. that night.

Anyway, I now have a 17' truck (empty) with a Vanagon in tow in the parking lot here at Apple, to be towed to Santa Cruz tomorrow.

But I had a mocha, so it's time to get to work.

Being the diligent sort, I open all of these and shred the applications therein. It's a routine I'd be happy to live without. Enter this web site:

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

This is apparently run by the major credit reporting agencies and give you a change to opt out of getting such offers. No doubt they are doing this as a result of some legislative mandate. Hopefully, it'll work…

Update:

Some related resources:

 
• National Do Not Call Registry
 
• Online Data Vendors - How to opt out
 
• Annual Credit Report
 
• ChoiceTrust - Review your file

The above list courtesy of The Week.

Bill took some excellent pictures of the graduation ceremony.

As they say at Tommy's: "My tequila bar kicks your Tequila bar's ass!" It's true.

The Burning Man festival ended last week. We had gotten some scattered news about New Orleans. All I knew was that a hurricane hit, that New Orleans was in trouble, and that help was on the way. Or perhaps I just assumed that last bit. I, for one, expected to come home to hear about the recovery, and how every resource available to Louisianna and the Unites States had been dispatched to save our brothers and sisters in one of America's greatest cities.

Instead we came home to a whole lot of "where's the help?" and the like. Am I in some bizzaro universe? What the hell is going on?

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.

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.

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!