bfields's blog

Last night I had dinner at a nearby Chinese place and then picked up a few comics at the friendly local comic book store.

Back at the hotel, I read a little then fell asleep, exhausted. I ended up waking up in the middle of the night and reading another hour or so before I could get back to sleep, but I felt reasonably well rested by the morning.

This morning I got a pain au chocolat at a nearby bakery then made the long walk up the Rivoli and the Champs Élysée to the Palais du Congress, where I registered for the IETF meeting and hooked up to the network.

The street across the Louvre was wall-to-wall tourist traps. I saw a clump of wild-haired japanese teenagers there exclaiming "kawaiiii!" over each others' purchases.

The sheer quantity of people walking up and down the Champs Élysée is impressive. The sheer quantity of everything is impressive, actually.

I didn't really manage to sleep at all on my 6:30pm to 6:30am flight to Heathrow, or on the subsequent flight to Paris, so by the time I got to the hotel, around 2pm, I was feeling more than a little strung out.

It's kind of amazing the degree to which Paris looks exactly like Paris....

Today I did a half-day at work, had a sandwich at Amers, then attempted a few errands, mostly failures. In particular I bought some new shoes, but when I got them home decided they didn't really fit right. Oh well.

Yesterday's flight home almost had to be diverted due to weather around Detroit, but in the end we landed in Detroit an hour late.

I got to work in time for donut hour this morning, and spent most of the day trying to catch up on email and investigate various small problems.

I leave for Paris day after tommorow and haven't quite figured out what needs to be done before then....

I walked across the Pont Alexandra to Gatineau. Everybody had told me to go to the Museum of Civilization, but I figured I'd walk around a bit first. Sara and I always make a point of stopping at local public libraries, so when I passed one on the Rue Laurier, I went in. Though the government building it was housed in was impressive, the library itself was quite small. But they had a surprisingly good collection of French comics, so I sat a while and a read a Lapinot ("Pichenettes") and a Monsieur Jean ("Femmes et enfants d'abord", which I thought was great).

I walked as far as Gatineau Park and realized I was getting pretty tired and it was time to be getting back. In the end a lot of the walk wasn't that interesting, and the sun was merciless. So I probably should have planned a little better.

Oh well. I ended the day with a pleasant dinner at the Byward Market and a bit more reading.

I checked out of the B&B after having a nice coversation over breakfast, with the owner and a Québécois lady and her nieces. Her recommendation for Paris was to go on top of everything: the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Tour Montparnasse, etc. And she said to look at the Louvre basement and the musée Cluny. He recommended the Printemps cafeteria, and said a Québécois accent, which he thought they found cute, was an advantage. Oh well.

From the B&B I went to the Lava Java and had a drink and checked email while I waited for my laundry.

Then I checked into the hostel and dropped off a few things, then went to the local juggling club meeting. It turned out to be a ways outside town. The bus there broke down so there was a delay waiting for another. It dropped me off near a huge shopping mall and a big freeway interchange. After navigating the resulting spaghetti, and losing another 20 or 30 minutes to a missed turn, I finally found the right park with a half hour of the meeting left. At least I got to do some club passing, and some of the local jugglers, friendly as ever, treated me to pizza at their house across the street.

I got a lift back to downtown, where I sat in Chapters and read a comic or two before going to bed.

Bryce wanted to discuss some stuff we hadn't gotten to in the BOF, so he, Tony, Chuck, Trond, Olaf, and I met at 10am to talk over NFSv4 testing. It was a fairly useful discussion.

The keynote was reasonably funny, but nothing terribly new.

Afterwards Trond and another Netapp guy and I went to a nice restaurant alongside the canal and had a very pleasant dinner.

I'd been looking forward to the final party at the Black Thorn, but by the time I got there I was pretty tired. It was very noisy and crowded. So I left to go sleep after a couple hours.

Whoever thought a 10am to 10pm schedule, with half hour breaks for lunch and dinner, was a good idea? By the end of the day I was pretty exhausted. I perked up when I saw a couple people juggling, though, and juggled with them while Trond and Chuck accosted Olaf after his game talk and whisked him off to some local establishment. I caught up with them later, but didn't have the energy to stay long.

One part of the program that did interest me was the AIO BOF. Possibly just because I didn't really know anything about it before. It would be interesting, in any case, to find ways to use it in nfsd.

I started the day with Greg K-H's USB driver workshop, where he stepped us through developing a device driver for a simple USB thermometer. The thermometers were donated by the company that made them, so I still have mine--what can I find to do with it?

The Mexican place where Trond treated Chuck and I to dinner was pretty good, but the service was a little slow, and we barely made it to the 7pm NFSv4 BOF on time. Most of the BOF ended up being taken up by complaints about krb5 being too hard to set up. Boring.

None of the talks were that exciting to me today. Martin Bligh talked about surviving out of memory situations--NFS and iSCSI, for example, both may need to allocate memory in order to handle writes, so if the reason we're writing is in order to free memory, we can easily deadlock. It seems to a hard problem that no one's really worked on enough yet, but I suppose it's at least good to know that people are aware of it....

This is the third year I've attended OLS. Every time they've had an opening night reception. They always attempt to have a couple of speakers, too. But this is in a big evenly lit room containing a bunch of people who haven't seen each other recently, with plenty of drinks and snacks. The result--people snacking and talking throughout the speeches--is completely predictable. Will the organizers ever learn anything from this?

Afterwards Trond, Olaf and I met Beepy at a nearby bar. The only other people there were the bartender and her mom and dad. They all had Russian accents, and there was a bunch of Russian memorabilia on the walls that I didn't look at closely. Beepy showed us some of his photographs after the mom helped him hook up to the wireless network.