I have a random idea for a potentially interesting group vacation. Anyone interested in going to see some polar bears in the wild before they become extinct? I’m thinking this might be something that might be worth planning for next year, perhaps. Not a huge rush; it will be a few short decades before the ice cap permanently disappears, but it seems like it would be a nice thing to do while it’s still possible to see them in natural surroundings.

I just arrived in Austin, and headed to the Hertz car rental to pick up my car. My first hint that something was unusual was when I saw that the car keys were on the dash, instead of in the ignition, and the key looked… funny. Then I noticed the power button, and the lack of a standard instrument cluster, and it dawned on me. I was going to have a chance to drive a Toyota Prius as my rental car!

As write this entry, I’m sitting in First Class (seat 2A), on the absolutely, positively, very last non-stop American flight between San Jose and Boston. This is the red eye, and starting tomorrow, American has stopped all of the non-stops between BOS and SJC, and there will only be two non-stops in each direction between BOS and SJC. Given that I live in Boston, and Stacey lives in Santa Clara, this is very sad.

I understand the concept of scheduling an average of 199 takeoffs and landings every hour continuously between 10am and 3pm at Chicago, when the airport can only sustain 200-202 flight operations per hour, and then when even the tiniest thing goes wrong, the resulting commercial aviation gridlock paralyzing flights over all North America is the fault of the weather, and not the fault of the airlines for over-scheduling. Really. I get it.

Whee! I’m going to be flying off to San Jose this afternoon!! And I’m going to be there for a whole week, so I should have time to catch up with all of my Bay Area friends that I haven’t seen in far too long.

I’m thinking about going to the Napa Valley this coming weekend, and see if Stirling Winery has more of that really yummy wine that introduced me to.

I safely arrived in Tokyo yesterday afternoon, around 4:30pm local time. The purpose of the trip? To be a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Linux Rapporteur Group, which was commissioned by SC22 to study the question of whether or not ISO should start some Linux standardization work. I’m hoping the result will be the answer “no“, hence my attending this meeting. This trip will be a number of firsts for me; the first in Tokyo; the first time working with the ISO standards process; the first time to take a week-long “Atkins holiday”.

So I’ve just gotten back from my family reunion in Lagnua Beach, (hopefully, I’ll have time to write about that, but I’m being realistic, probably not) and I’m going to be in the Bay Area for a few days, until January 9th when I fly back to Boston. So if folks are interested in seeing me, I have a number of lunches and dinner free. 🙂

It is really cool that hotels have ironing boards. It would be even cooler if they had (a) the small, narrow ironing boards for ironing sleaves, and (b) squirt bottles with starch solution. This is clearly asking for too much, however. 🙂

(Am currently in Bay Area until Saturday morning, on a customer visit. And on Saturday, Stacey’s flying home with me to Boston for Thanksgiving!!)

So my friend Stacey received a job offer this week, and her employer is paying for to go the Geekcruise next week. It’ll definitely be nice to have her along on the cruise. And I’ve set things up so that she, Phil Karn and his wife, and I will be seated together at the dining room. Very Cool. Now, to convince more of my friends to partake of the Geekcruise next year….

The networking at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference seems to be up about half time, and down half the time. And when it’s up, it’s corrupting packets so frequently that ssh connections die after a few minutes, and imap-ssl download connections die after downloading 2-4 messages, thanks to checksum errors. LAME…