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This and other conferences are listed in my calendar of upcoming events. Last Sunday my family and I spent a few hours at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire, just east of the Vermont-New Hamphire border. August Saint-Gaudens was a late nineteenth/early twentieth century American sculptor known for his heroic pieces such as the Shaw memorial on the Boston Commons as well as smaller bas relief works and coins. Restorers were doing work on the exterior of the main house and a classical concert was being held when we visited, but here are a few photos from around the grounds.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. Several weeks ago my daughter Katie needed to move into an apartment in Chicago and we needed to help her furnish said apartment with a couch, chair, tables, bed, and various other possessions. Unlike our trips carting her things back and forth from upstate New York to Chicago, we needed something bigger than an SUV. It was time to consider UHaul. Many years ago, probably about 25, I rented a UHaul trailer to get from somewhere to somewhere else. Therefore, having set a precedent, I reserved a UHaul trailer via the very handy online website. It’s good they have such a good website because, as I learned later, it’s almost impossible to get to central UHaul “traffic” control by phone.
The day before I was to pick up the trailer, I got a call from a UHaul franchise, but not the one I expected. While there is a UHaul place about 7 miles south and another 10 miles north, they decided I needed to pick up the trailer 25 miles west. After I expressed surprise about this, I casually asked if they had trailer hitches. In my previous towing experience in the distant past, they had given me some sort of temporary hitch that went on the bumper. The woman at the end of the phone sounded confused and I quickly realized why: bumpers today are not designed for such hitches. I had reserved a trailer with no way to tow it. Mea culpa. Now many UHaul franchises are just small efforts associated with self-storage or auto-repair businesses. I needed something more serious, and I needed it fast. The 800 number was never answered when I called. I live near Rochester, NY, and I quickly discovered by making a few local phone calls that the place to go was the UHaul Center on Jefferson Road in Henrietta. This probably means nothing to most of you, but the point is that I needed a place that did nothing but UHauls and did a lot of them. I called them and the amazingly helpful woman switched me from a trailer to a 10 foot truck. This was better, but it did make the trip more difficult. Instead of the four of us driving out in the SUV pulling the trailer, my son William and I would take the truck and my wife and daughter would drive our car. Other combinations were possible, but no one voted for them. We would drop the truck off at a UHaul in Chicago and then the family (minus my daughter) would drive the car home. Just because we had switched the trailer to a truck did not mean I was all set. I needed to wait for my official call from some UHaul franchise telling where to pick up the truck. I was hoping it was Henrietta, but I had no guarantee. While I waited, I kept an eye on the website and my 10 foot truck somehow morphed to a 14 foot truck. I wasn’t concerned because I knew that I would only have to pay for the size truck I reserved. When I finally got my call I was indeed pleased that it was from the Henrietta store. They also told me that I could get my 17 foot truck first thing in the morning. Now I’ve driven trucks before, including my brother-in-law Jay’s dump truck with a really bad clutch when I was a teenager, so I wasn’t too worried about it getting bigger by the minute. Nevertheless, I made them assure me that the truck would be in excellent condition and it wouldn’t stretch yet again into something 35 feet long, or multiple trailers, or anything like that. The next day I picked up the truck and all was fine. I paid for the maximum amount of insurance since, well, it seemed smart for such a long journey (almost 600 miles) in an unfamiliar vehicle. I also needed to buy a lock for the back of the truck. The truck was a 2009 model and had 13,000 miles on it. It was in good shape. I had no problem getting it home, though I did take back roads to get familiar with it. It did not accelerate quickly, but it would mostly stay at a speed, plus or minus a couple of mph, once I got it going. The controls were minimal, such as wind up windows and no cruise control. The radio was basic as well. It was a truck. It drove like one, but it met expectations. We set off Friday morning in our mini caravan to the Midwest. Initially my wife took the lead but eventually I did since it was easier for her to match my varying speed while trailing me. My son was a great companion and it was really a just-guys experience. We talked, he read, and he stayed awake for the entire trip. There were no issues as we headed west toward Buffalo, passed down through Erie, PA, and then set across Ohio. I know there are bigger states, but it seems to take forever to drive across Ohio on Route 80. As we approached the Indiana border, the sky got very dark. I was debating about whether to soldier on for another hour, but then all hell broke loose weather-wise with lightning and heavy winds and rain. We quickly bailed off the highway near Fremont, Indiana. The next morning the sun was shining and though things seemed a bit wet, nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. We made our way to Chicago in about 3 hours. One odd thing was that right as we got to Chicago we saw that some of the traffic lights were out. Not all of them, and not even consecutive ones, but some were dark. In case you don’t know, you treat an intersection with a dead traffic light as a four-way stop. I observed that this was not common knowledge. I was anticipating problems unloading the truck, but I double parked it on the street in front of the apartment, put on the blinkers and we unloaded everything in 30 minutes. (Let me again thank my daughter’s friend Peter whose young back and legs really made the job go faster and better.) William and I then drove the truck to a UHaul place about a mile and a half away, eventually found the guy who ran it, and finalized the paperwork. (Let me again thank my son for stopping me from backing up and running over the UHaul guy while he was inspecting the truck.) We walked back the apartment sans truck and happier for it. Something was odd. My daughter’s apartment was not quite without electricity, but was probably at about 25% voltage. This was enough to feebly light a few fixtures but not enough to power the refrigerator. We hurried to do everything necessary before it got dark. After dinner we left our daughter to her friends and we set off to drive a few of the dozen hours it would take us to get home. My plan was to get to Elkhart, Indiana, RV capital of the world and home of the RV/MH Hall of Fame and Museum. We weren’t planning to go to the museum, but there are a lot of hotels and restaurants near the interstate. Oddly enough, though, there weren’t any rooms. Evidently the storms of the previous evening had caused widespread power outages not just in Chicago, but across northern Indiana. The hotels were filled with people who had no electricity at home. I filled the tank with gas, as that seemed like a good precaution, and we hit the road again. Eventually we tried another exit and there the signs were even worse: perhaps 10 electrical repair trucks were backed up to pay the toll on the exit ramp. More repair trucks were visible in the hotel parking lots. We got back on the highway and drove into Ohio, eventually settling in to a Holiday Inn Express around 1:15 AM. The rest of the trip was easy. As a side effect of this trip, I got a towing hitch installed on our SUV yesterday, so I’ll be ready if I ever need to pull something in the future. It might be a rented trailer or, who knows, maybe a boat. Have hitch, will haul. I’m spending a few days this week in Boston attending the Red Hat Summit in Boston, a large and very professionally done conference about their Linux, virtualization, and middleware offerings. Earlier today, IBM’s Jean Staten Healy and I gave a talk called “Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet.” I also attended a talk about Fedora, which was unusual. Fedora, of course, is not unusual, it was that I found the time to go to a talk at a conference. While I usually do manage to get to some of the keynotes, the individual sessions are sometimes hard to get to because I spend my days in meetings with folks. It could be the host of the conference, in this case Red Hat, or partners, or customers. Conferences provide a great way to get people together and, well, talk. In some cases these are people to whom I speak on a regular on a regular basis, but in others it’s much more of a “hey, you should chat with these guys” and then you do. So between the scheduled meetings, the talks that I give, the impromptu meetings and the hallway discussions, there isn’t much time to attend the sessions. That’s ok, because the intensity of the days together with my industry colleagues is really invigorating. It’s an opportunity to update each other on our strategies, make business plans, and find out what friends are up to. I’m about to head down to the exhibit area and although it’s a happy hour, I don’t plan to drink. I have a business dinner later this evening. I may nosh a bit if I can find some suitably low carb and relatively healthy food, though conference food usually plays havoc with my diet (though it’s not the only culprit). Speaking of exhibits, now that my children are older I make less of an effort collecting giveaways at the booths. Note that I am still a sucker for cool looking pens and squeezable penguins, but if I’m really not going to do business with you or use your software, I’ll let you save your logoed items for people who might. There are exceptions, of course, but I don’t want to waste your time or money.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. After I had finished my meetings in Munich last week but before I started my 48 hour adventure to get home from Germany around the volcanic ash cloud, I had a chance to walk around the city a bit and take some photos. This is hardly comprehensive of the breadth and beauty of the city, but rather just some things I observed along the way. In theory I was walking back to my hotel. Actually, I walked much too far and had to eventually find a taxi.
Eyjafjoell, let me go home. I’ve been in Europe this past week on business and was scheduled to return home to the United States yesterday. I’m still here though I hope to get out later today. My Saturday morning flight from Munich went without any problems. Because I have elite status on the airline on which I was to travel home, I got to sit in the lounge before my cross-Atlantic flight from Frankfurt to Chicago. I was warned when I got there that my flight was 2 hours late and when I got online, I learned that the incoming flight was four hours late, having been held up in Chicago because of some mechanical problem. As the afternoon went on though, murmurs about more ash from the Icelandic volcano began to spread. The current cloud is evidently fairly narrow, but is extending very far south and up as high as 35,000 feet. Therefore cross-Atlantic flights have to go way north or way south to avoid the cloud completely. This adds several hundred miles to the flight with associated additional time required. Then my flight got canceled. When they announced it, I rushed to the front desk in order to get rebooked and maybe get a hotel room. I didn’t get the former immediately because they just weren’t sure about which flight they could put me on. I did get a voucher for the hotel at the airport. They had made me check my luggage in Munich, so they were going to take all the luggage from the now canceled flight and put it in baggage claim. However, I knew that could take a while. I instead rushed right over to my hotel to get the room. Just as I was walking away with room key in hand, I heard a supervisor say to the reception staff that they were accepting no more room vouchers. So I was lucky and I got a free room. The hotel was not full, but the airline decided that it did not need to pay for delays because of the ash. I was lucky because I was early. In any case, I would have paid for the room. While it was important for last night, it would have been especially important if the delay extended for days. I then went back across the street, figured out how to get into baggage claim, and retrieved my one piece of luggage. I made several more ventures out, primarily to get more Euros from the ATM in case the delay extended to several days and some food for the evening. Though I had been given a dinner voucher, the hotel staff told me that it was no longer valid since the airline stopped paying passengers for their inconvenience. I didn’t have a problem with this, especially because I had a room. I didn’t want to eat in the hotel, so I just walked back to the airport and found a restaurant where I could get some “take-away” food. The airline lounge opened at 7 AM this morning and I must admit I was there ten minutes early. Though they had originally planned to move me to a slightly earlier flight on another airline, I wanted to stay on this one. Essentially, I did not want to get lost in the system of the other airline if there were further problems. So I’m now scheduled to fly out in a couple of hours, though my making the connection in Chicago is not likely. I’ll worry about that if it is an issue. Though it is a long way, I do drive between home and Chicago several times a year. What is mor probable, if I miss tonight’s plane I will hop on a very early one in the morning. In any case, I know I can drive home from Chicago. I cannot do that from Frankfurt. Update for Sunday, 14:00 CET: Flight just got delayed 3 hours because of ash drifting into some of the available tracks across the Atlantic. Will need to go back through passport control and security. Update for Sunday, 16:20 CET: We got a track an hour earlier than we thought, so we’re going now. Update for Sunday, 18:50 CDT: Landed in Chicago. Update for Monday, 01:00 EDT: Just got home, 47 1/2 hours after I originally left the hotel in Munich. Two outlets, both unused.
Most airports have pathetic coverage for power outlets, and it’s especially frustrating after they remodel terminals. I understand that they might be trying to drive people into the airline lounges, but some, like Boston Logan, are particularly bad. This shot was taken in the Rochester, NY, airport. Last week my family and I went to Chicago to visit my daughter Katie who is in college there. Our primary planned activity was seeing chef and author Anthony Bourdain at the Chicago Theatre, but we took some time on Saturday afternoon to visit the Shedd Aquarium, part of the huge museum complex that juts out into Lake Michigan. It’s a terrific aquarium and though it was a broad collection from around the world, its emphasis and displays on the Great Lakes is excellent. We arrived after lunch on Saturday and were shocked that we had to wait in line outside over half an hour before we could buy our tickets. Below are some photos of the experience and the fish and other animals. I was curious how my little Canon PowerShot SD780 would do with the fish since I would obviously be photographing them through glass and water. Overall, the verdict is “pretty well.” It would have been better if the fish had stop moving for me, but most of them were singularly uncooperative in that regard. Here’s the best of the batch.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. This afternoon the temperature made it up almost to 50 F here in northwest New York State. This is certainly above normal, which only starts to make up for the very cold but relatively snowless winter this year. I had several hours to kill this afternoon so I took a walk along the Erie Canal. Specifically, I took a visit to Lock 32 near Pittsford, New York. There are hundreds of miles of trails along New York State’s canals. At the point where this photo of a sign was taken three generations of canals forked. The first two turned north near here and went through Rochester, while the current Barge Canal stayed more south and went below the city on its trip westward toward Buffalo.
While quite wide in places, the canal is not neatly framed with concrete along its length, though there are certainly some areas where it is contained that way. Here, looking west, the canal spreads out and bends in the distance.
The northern side of the canal has these iron tie-ups every hundred feet or so. The water level in the canal is dropped in winter starting in November, and it is raised before the canal reopens in May for boat traffic.
Here’s the western side of Lock 32. The lock gates are open slightly on both ends and some water can flow through it during the winter, though most goes through the sluiceway on the southern side.
On the eastern side you get a better idea of the crushed rock along the banks used to prevent erosion and maintain the shape of the canal. The building in the distance is a boathouse. I was one of the few people walking along the canal who did not have at least one dog with me.
This gives you a better idea of how much lower the water level is now than it will be come summer. It wasn’t difficult to get down to this point, though it got quite muddy below the crushed rock.
This sign gives more of the local history of the canal and the boat building history of Pittsford.
Someday I hope to rent a boat and lazily travel the length of the canal, though only my son among my immediate family members shows any interest of joining me. I’ve been trying to convince them for years, so I may need to extend my invitee list! Also See:
OSS 2010, the 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems, will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, USA, from May 30 to June 2. From the conference website:
Evidently I am on the Program Committee. The GoOpen conference will take place in Oslo, Norway, on April 19 and 20 this year. From the website:
More conferences are listed in my Upcoming Linux, Open Source, and Virtual Worlds Events page.
This year’s FutureWeb conference will take place in Raleigh, NC, from April 28 to 30. I’m scheduled to be on a panel called “The Future of Open Source and the Web” organized by Tom Rabon and Michael Tiemann of Red Hat at 2:30 pm on the 30th. Here’s the next round of photos from Lotusphere 2010.
Here’s Peter Woodward of Canonical/Ubuntu and me. Light could have been better, but you take what you can get in a meeting room.
Next is our friendly penguin friend sporting an “IBM Client for Smart Work” label. Get yours starting tomorrow at the Lotus Knows challenge immediately upon entering the exhibit hall at the bottom of the escalator. Here are a couple of photographs taken very early at Lotusphere 2010 at Disney World in Florida this week and they are, perhaps, a bit different.
This was a lonely hammock by the beach looking toward the Grand Floridian Resort. The weather was very overcast and it threatened to rain for seeral hours before it finally did around 9 PM. There were some people walking around because, well, it is Florida, though not too many were swimming in the pool.
This pen, a give-away in the exhibit area for the IBM Client for Smart Work on Linux, is made from corn starch and is biodegradable. Get yours before they go in the compost pile. |
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Copyright © 2010 Bob Sutor - All Rights Reserved |
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