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rest of connectathon, weekend with Sara

For the rest of connectathon, as is often the case, we didn't accomplish what we set out to, but made some useful progress anyway; for example, we didn't manage to get our locking patches working on GFS, but we at least made some progress towards getting a GFS cluster set up. The intended ACL interoperability testing was a bit more of a loss. People found some good bugs in my integrity and privacy code. One nice thing is that there are now people from Redhat, SGI, and others who are use code that's just modified versions of mainline linux code, so their testing helps a lot.

I took off the Sunday in the middle and visited the art museum in San Jose, which has pretty interesting stuff. My favorite was a piece called "listening post", built out of software-controlled LEDs and speakers which presented a multi-movement "piece" based on words culled from conversations in some internet forum. They didn't say with. If they had I suppose people like me might have been tempted to seed it with our own stuff just to see what happened, so maybe it's best they didn't.

The Thursday at the end of connectathon I worked most of the day, and then Sara arrived that night. Friday we went to the art museum again, and the quilt museum (also interesting), and made a brief stop into a little comic book store which turned out to be just a little corner of a warehouse-like building full of boxes, with a office off to the side and people working and drawing--so apparently it was actually a complete publishing house. We probably should have asked for a tour or something.

We'd contacted some friends and family to set up visits with them while we were around, but we almost set up more than we could handle. Saturday we took the caltrain to San Francisco, walked to union square, looked at a few interesting stores (including a four-story fabric store next to union square), then met Sara's high school friend and wife for lunch in the basement of Macy's. Then at four my juggling friend Marc met us at the Berkeley Bart stop and took us on a whirlwind tour of Berkeley--the city, the campus, and his lab up on the hill. The city wasn't quite so interesting thanks to rain, but the lab was fascinating, and had great views of the bay.

Then we got in his car and drove down to Alameda to have dinner at "Pasta Pelican" with my high school friend Tim, his wife Ingrid, and their daughter Isabel. The dinner was good, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Isabel could understandably have been extremely bored by the whole thing, but she was very patient with us.

We went back to Marc's for the night, and stayed up late talking and playing with his toys. "Ricochet Robots", should you ever have a geek in need of a fun game, is a very nice little puzzle-like game.

Sunday night Marc fed us a quick breakfast and then we headed back to San Francisco to meet Sara's aunt, uncle, and cousin--who by coincidence we met on the Bart there. Together we walked around the arboretum in Golden Gate Park, as we had a few years ago with them, then had a lunch at a nearby Thai place, and returned afterwards to their place to watch some of Bruce's stuff. Sara's uncle has always had some health problems and seems to tire out around noon. We watched a short of his--he speculated that it would be his last movie, part of a documentary project that ran into rights-clearing problems (among other problems) before it could be finished--and watched one episode of Buck Rogers. Buck Rogers reminds me of a silent film--I think it's the overacting, and something I can't pin down about how they put the scenes together.

Then finally we took the train back to San Jose just in time to meet a college friend (Cary) and some of his friends for a production of "Camelot". The trip back didn't go quite as smoothly as it could have because we just missed the Bart-Caltrain connection at Bayshore. I think the only way to make that connection is to buy tickets ahead of time so you don't have to stop at the ticket machine. Given that, though, it would have been quite doable.

I enjoyed Camelot, but can't say I loved it. It's sort of odd and interesting to have a musical devoted to an abstract principal other than love. Instead of ending with a big kiss or something, it ends with Arthur proclaiming the importance of the rule of law. We intended to have some food together afterwards, since we were right next to San Jose's big restaurant and entertainment district. But that late on a Sunday night it was pretty deserted. We managed to find osmething anyway, and had a fun talk about Harry Potter, while sitting on a bench outside next to the light rail tracks.