Key in the cognition - July 26th, 2006

Jul. 26th, 2006

07:53 am - Wedding report

On my way to Ottawa on Friday for Andrew and Shannon's wedding, I had a 2.5 hour layover in YYZ so I decided to have dinner while I was there. Figuring that nobody in the secure area of the airport would steal my baggage, I left it at the departure gate and went to get dinner. On the way back I ran into migod, who was on his way to a castle in Germany, and stopped to chat about extremely geeky things for a while. When I eventually returned to the departure gate, my stuff was no longer there. It turned out that airport security had come by with a doggie and taken it away to check for explosives. Fortunately, I was able to rescue it from them in time to board my flight.

As I disembarked from the aeroplane in Ottawa I received a call from my friend Aaron Chree who had managed to get lost immediately upon his arrival in Ottawa and decided to call me because, you know, I'm the foremost authority on navigation in Ottawa! Fortunately, my friends Lisa and Charbel, who were picking me up from the airport, were able to help him out. I hadn't seen Charbel in 2 years but he has recently become obsessed with operating systems so we had some excellent geeky conversations about that topic. I also got some valuable usability feedback on VMware Server from him.

In the morning Sarah picked McKennedy and me up for brekki before running an errand for Drew. Apparently Ottawa is a terrible city in which to drive. I'd never realized this, having only ever biked and bussed around it. Sarah is also easily frustrated so driving with her is like walking on eggshells. By the time she dropped me off at Lisa's place, where I was staying, Laura had arrived as well so we had lunch there before getting changed for the wedding. I've been to a few other weddings in the past couple of years but this one had significantly more emotional weight because I've known both Drew and Shannon for 6 years now and have spent a lot of time with them, especially Drew. This might also be the only wedding where both fathers played a duet during the service!

The reception was held at a boathouse along the river. Although they'd somewhat hedged their bets by having it partially open-air and partially covered, it turned out to be a lovely night. Laura and I were seated at the same table as Steph, whom I hadn't seen in over a year, so we caught up on each other's lives there. Several people wanted to know why andukar wasn't there but I couldn't recall him ever telling me so I told them to just ask him. [Update: he was supposed to be taking possession of his new digs over the weekend.] Drew's childhood friend Debraj, whom I'd met briefly a few years ago, was an amazing MC, peppering his announcements with witty banter. Shannon's dad gave a spectacularly eloquent speech too. And just before we left a bunch of Scots in kilts danced to a traditional Scottish song that was most entertaining. Lex and Sarah dropped us off at Charbel's house after we managed to lose our way twice despite navigating via Google Maps!

In the morning Ange showed up to pick us up for brunch. All I'd given her was the street address and told her it was near the Hunt Club! She's like a human GPS. When I eventually boarded the plane, the woman in front of me had managed to get on the wrong one! She was headed to LAX and they somehow let her onto our SFO-bound vessel! So much for airline security. All they're good for is stealing my luggage.

Tags: life

Current Mood:

drained

Current Music: Rocky Road To Dublin - The Irish Descendants

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09:29 pm - Baseball and new flat-panel displays

On Monday night I went with a few friends from Hammarskjold to see the Oakland A's play the Boston Red Sox. Although baseball games are generally a lot cheaper than hockey, they really stick it to you with the parking fee and horribly overpriced food. The sun was in my face for the 1st couple of innings, which sucked, but after that the game was pretty good. The Sox established an early lead and, although the A's made a valiant effort to catch up - at one point they were in tying position with the bases loaded - but they never quite managed to pull it off.

Yesterday VMware gave all the engineers 2nd flat-panel displays. It took me an unduly long time to get both my monitors working with my dual-headed NVidia Quadro graphics card, mostly because of a couple of subtle Ubuntu packaging issues. The worst of these was that the package for the binary-only kernel module hadn't been updated to match the kernel itself. I eventually worked around the problem by booting off the kernel from an older package.