(no subject)

[warthog9]

Wow. Is it worth even apologizing for the world ganging up on me for the past few months. The world has been going crazy on me since November, and I suppose I should cactch you all up on it. Particularly since I can now speak about all of it publicly.

Well up for starters, lets go back to December. I was grousing around how California didn't have any snow, how the weather was abysmally nice and that was about it. I was working on an open source project within Orion called OpenSSI. Basically a set of extensions and patches to the Linux kernel which allow an entire cluster to more or less function and act as a single multi-processor machine. It's got some very nice features and I was tasked with bringing it up on our clusters. To be honest I loved working on it and I was able to show at SC'05 a running demo of a full 96 node OpenSSI 1.9.x cluster. To the best of my knowledge, at the time, it was the largest running running OpenSSI cluster.

So because of some interest by a large and prestigeous University in Boston, and the opportunity to sit down with some of the OpenSSI developers in person I got a trip to Boston in December! For those of you who know me, I love Boston, and Boston in the winter is a good treat! So a couple of days before Christmas I jumped on a JetBlue flight from San Jose to Boston. For those of you who have an opportunity to fly on JetBlue, take my word, it's TOTALLY worth it! I had a redeye flight into Boston, I didn't sleep much on the plane but the fact that there was a TV in the headrest in front of me made it a lot easier to deal with. I got into Boston at 4 or 5am, made it over to my Hotel and crashed for a couple of hours.

After I had gotten a smattering of sleep, I headed out for the meating and was able to show off the 12 node cluster I had flown out with (Sidenote: we had a fantastic carrying case for the 12 nodes! Basically one of the hardcases with wheels and a nice pull handle, made flying with it a breeze) The demonstration went really well and the following discussions were good as well. After the meeting I walked back to the hotel (only about 6 or 10 blocks or so) and called up Sean, buddy of mine from Iowa who had the lucky fortune to move to Boston. We went and had dinner at Cheers (the tourist Cheers not the 'real' place) and had a good time. It was good seeing him, and the bum was enjoying Boston - I will have to move up there just to mock him at some point ;-)

Anyway I was able to convince Orion to let me stay over a couple of extra days in Boston so I went and stayed with Karl. That was absolutely awesome, I hadn't seen him in a while and it was good hanging out with him for several days. Was able to go to Legal Seafood with Karl, Sean a very cute munchkin Karl and I were watching for her parents and myself. Awesome food, as always, and the jokes about it being the Legal Seafood across from the Boston Aquarium were well placed. I love Boston!

Anyway got to spend several days hanging out with Karl and his friends who were all awesome! Wandered around Boston a bit, and generally got to have a good time 'back home'. So yeah flew back to San Jose on Christmas day. It was an awesome trip, and very productive.

Well I did new years with HPA, his wife and my boss Rob. We watched Happy Tree Friends, and shot off a whole pile of bang makers. It was a good evening and Happy Tree Friends are delightful little shorts full of death and mayham, we enjoyed them throughly.

Well all told Janurary was pretty quiet... well until Janurary 31st. Janurary 31st was a day that I will not quickly forget. ::sighs:: the long and the short of it is - Orion Multisystems closed up shop that day. I found out that afternoon while I was at an offsite meeting, a phone call from my boss was answered with 'is the news good or bad', the responce was 'bad'. Needless to say I excused myself form the meeting and rushed back to the office. It was strange cleaning out my cube and the office I had been working out of, Rob, HPA and I were wandering around joking and generally singing "It's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine!" We were all really sad though - we really liked working at Orion. But we had our walking papers, and everyone was pretty upset. Needless to say for the first time in more years than I can remember I was 100% unemployed. That was a new experience.

Well by the end of February I had found a new job, working with a company who's making a product I am pretty darned excited about. I'll talk about them a little later but suffice it to say they are doing something very cool, and their philospohy was a key selling point in my taking the job.

Anyway, life has been busy since than. Lot of stuff going on at work, flew back home for Ayyam'i'ha and spent a week hanging out with the family. The company I'm working for exhibited at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), Rob and Tristan were out here in February which was cool - I enjoyed having them out here and I'm hoping to get them back here again soon. March and April have been busy and crazy. Last week I bought a new Gary Fishter Advanced bike as my co-workers have been making me jealous of riding into work.

Well the world is still being crazy, things are starting to calm down - thank goodness. I've had enough excitement for a while. I'm signed up for OLS this year, and going to Gencon in August as well. I wish I had more antics in this posting, but the world has been throwing me more curveballs than normal, look at Orion for instance. Anyway it's late now, it's not even the 4th anymore ;-) I'll catch you all on the flip side and try and keep you all (probalby like 2 of you) informed of whats going on.