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Long weekend

Posted on October 19, 2006 | Filed Under Day to day

Well its Thursday already and I am so looking forward to this, my birthday weekend. I have tomorrow off work to get everything organized and then off we go to Skookumchuk for a camping weekend at the hot springs! Woot! Forecast says sunny and clear, with a low of zero, but hey, at least NO RAIN. hopefully.

This week has gone by really fast and I’ve had a very productive time at work. With Jo as extra help for the last few weeks, I am plowing through the backlog of files. Its such a relief to get things off your desk that have been piling up since May or June.

 

There is still a little issue of a person in my office that is difficult to deal with. I am kind of known for being calm and not getting mad easily. But once in a while I feel myself building up and feeling SO angry. I actually muttered a swear under my breath today. (gasp!) I have expressed my concern on a few occasions but so far nothing has really changed.

 

Last weekend we went out for a dinner to celebrate my bday, since some of us are going away this weekend, and it was really nice to see everyone. Thank you all for coming!

 

I will update some flickr photos soon and hopefully have some fun camping pics after this weekend.

 

~L

Live From Austin

Posted on October 12, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out, Vacation, Drama

The flight down was long. I arrived at YVR an hour and a half early, only to have my flight delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms in Dallas. Fortunately, my connecting flight to Austin was also moved an hour, otherwise i would have missed it. I made the connection OK thanks to this light rail system they have at the airport. I’m more worried about my connecting flight home; I probably have 15 minutes or less to go between gates.

On the long flight, i wrote a C program to solve “medium” sudoku puzzles using heuristic scanning and counting — which made the flight seem a little shorter. “Hard” puzzles, according to Wikipedia, requires bifurcation/guess-and-check. I digress…

The Coastal and Rocky moutains were amazing from above; it’s the first time i’ve been over them. The air above was so clear it was shaded blackish-blue instead of whiteish-blue that we’re used to. Would have been able to see Great Salt Lake too if not for cloud cover. Approaching Dallas, there was this neat diffusion/defraction effect around the shadow of the airplane which looked like a circular rainbow. Laura was bugging me to take the camera, and now i wish i had for that stuff =).

Austin itself seems fairly “normal”. By that, i mean it looks a lot like Victoria but in a hot climate where lots of people speak Spanish. There’s lots of old “heritage” buildings, brick crosswalks and roads, and slummy-but-nice suburbs that remind me of Langford. It’s really, really, humid here. The temperature outside the hotel has been hovering around 25C. At night, you can see the moonlight towers clearly in the distance from my hotel room. They give off this lime-green-ish light, which makes them look very UFO like.

The most noticeable thing, IMHO, about Austin is that the water tastes and smells like mud (which i can taste in the food). It’s probably due to the Colorado river being the main source (either that, or it’s aquifer water; i’m not certain, but both could result in heavy mineralization).

The opening Keynote talk was this crazy physicist guy that showed the crowd how to measure the speed of light. If you can imagine a crazy scientist, this guy is that archetype. He has this strange quirk: he’d randomly pause to complain that he’d run out of chocolate milk (when he wasn’t busy running around the room). As for the content, it was really interesting — especially since it has absolutely no relevance to the conference itself.

As for the reason i’m here (my talk)… i’m not happy with how it went, especially since the events leading up to it were rough.

For dinner the night before, i had a “fancy” steak with a big glass of red wine. The steak was good, but the wine was a big mistake — it hit me like a brick, probably from being tired from the long trip. I spent the next few hours trying desperately to sober up without resorting to caffiene (which keeps me up all night, regardless of offsetting alcohol consumption). I was up until 3AM CDT going over the slides and had to wake up at 6:30AM. Ugh.

After getting up and registering, I had to run to a store a few blocks away to buy a cheap watch so i could time myself. I then spent an hour before lunch talking-out the slides in my room, which made my voice hoarse. Fortunately that cleared before i had to give the actual talk, but it just added to the overall stress.

45 minutes before the talk, the room was free so i started hooking up the laptop to the projector. No matter what I did, i couldn’t get Linux/Xorg to work with the dammed projector! It would show my desktop colors, but it was totally garbage and you couldn’t read anything. I had expected this, so i said to myself “no problem! i’ve got the PDF on my fancy new laser-pointer-USB-key here, i’ll just boot into windows!” Windows worked fine with the projector, but i had neglected to install Acrobat Reader. Furthermore, the wireless card refused to associate with the access point in the same room. Argh! I ended up having to borrow the chairperson’s macbook (chairperson = person from the ASF that introduces me and, i think, rates the talk). The PDF loaded fine,but then we notice there’s only a DVI port on the macbook! Fortunately, Gozer (ActiveState mod_perl guy) had a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and i was able to talk.

The talk went too fast; I wasn’t feeling nervous, but I didn’t manage the pace very well (skipped over too much detail when I didn’t need to). There was fairly low attendance; I counted about 25 people at the start, but only 2 people left during the talk (including one developer that I was hoping would ask questions at the end). Overall, i feel that i did a substandard job. All of the other talks that i’ve been to were definitely better content-wise, but there’s been at least one other speaker down at my level. Anyway, i’m not letting it get me down too much… i know now that i need more practice and need to dedicate more time to the process of creating a talk.

After the talk, i went to a few more sessions, had a few beer at this social event, then went to bed early =). I woke up today feeling good and i’ve been able to enjoy some really good talks.

Tomorrow is pretty “light” on stuff I want to see, so I may attempt to book an earlier flight home (or, at least, go to the airport early). I hope to get a bit of tourist-ing done tonight and/or tomorrow.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, i think. I hope you enjoyed reading =).

Robbed

Posted on October 5, 2006 | Filed Under Family, Rants, Drama

My parents’ house in suburban Victoria was robbed today. As they ransacked my parents’ bedroom they managed to find the small safe in the bottom of the closet and decided it was the paydirt. Somehow thieves carried the safe out of the front door of the house, pockets full of jewellery from my mom’s dresser and nobody noticed anything. Not the neighbor beside them who was home. Not the neighbor on the other side of them that was working in her front lawn. And not the neighbor across the street from them who was ALSO gardening in her front lawn.

How do you not notice people carrying a safe out someone’s house?

GRRRR!

My wedding band which matches my engagement ring was in the safe. Along with all my grandmother’s diamonds. Huge ones. And my great-grandmother’s ring too.

Sucks that the list my grandmother wrote up before she passed away with a decription and sizes of each diamond ring/piece of jewellery was in the safe as well.

My parents are OK and their kitten didnt run away, even with the front door being open all day. And for some reason, the camera, cell phone, jewellery in the bathroom and the TV and electronic equipment is all fine.

My mom tells me that the police didnt bother to fingerprint anything because “these people always wear gloves” That made me really mad. How can you just assume that without even LOOKING for fingerprints? That does not sound like good police work. I watch CSI!

Word of warning: The piece of wood in the window sill to lock the window DOES NOT WORK.

~L