As everyone knows, I’ve been swamped with a project at work for the last six months. I’ve been having a lot of fun, but I’ve been extremely busy, and I’ve had little energy for anything else. For the last month (saving last week’s attendance at the Tcl conference) I’ve been in a sprint, leading up to next week when we’re having our “Proof-of-Principle”, a live demo where real people get to bang on my software and see if it really does anything useful. It’s a limited demo, in that the full capability isn’t being delivered until this May…nevertheless, it shows that the software is architecturally complete, and can do all of the kinds of things it’s supposed to be able to do.

Now, my software doesn’t run in a vacuum; it cooperates with several other software packages. And today, for the first time, we actually got all of them up and talking to each other with everything working the way it’s supposed to. There are a few more small bugs to squish before next week, but honestly everything’s looking pretty good.

Now maybe I’ll be able to relax a little.

A few weeks ago, Kevin Holtsberry of Collected Miscellany recommended a script for marking old MovableType posts closed for comments and trackbacks. I’ve just run it; life should become rather simpler.

So thank you!

I’m on my way home. Portland Airport has wi-fi pretty much throughout, so I’m sitting in a quiet corner at the very end of Concourse C. A few last impressions:

After the conference ended I grabbed a quick lunch at Red Robin, where the service remains outstanding. I had chili, as it happens; in fact, I ate a lot of chili at Red Robin this week. It’s not extra-good amazingly-wonderful to-die-for chili; rather, it’s an unpretentious little chili that tastes OK, satisfies your hunger, and doesn’t call attention to itself, either when you’re eating it or, um, later.

After lunch, I picked up my suitcase at the hotel and headed for the airport. The hotel is right next to one of Portland’s light-rail lines, and it so happens that the line runs to the airport, so that’s what I did. I don’t know why the fellow with the big black dog who got on the train just prior to mine was playing a digeridu in the train station, but it was an interesting touch. And then, on the way to the airport I saw a number of buildings that were leaning so far over I couldn’t understand why they weren’t falling down. Turns out, it wasn’t the buildings; the train was moving very fast through a gentle curve, and the designers banked the track so well that I didn’t even feel it.

Portland has a nice airport. If you have to spend a couple of hours waiting for a plane, you could do much worse. There are lots of shops and places to eat, the aforementioned wi-fi, and interesting sculpture to look at (including a representation of the Columbia River in brass on the floor. And the section of six or eight unused gates at the end of Concourse C makes a really nice, quiet place to sit.

But it’s about time to close up my laptop and go find my gate.

I gave my paper presentation this morning. It was very well received, from what I can tell; several people whose opinions I respect came up and told me that it had gotten them thinking, which is precisely what I was after. And by happy coincidence, the paper the followed mine meshed almost perfectly; my discussion motivated their application in a way that was most gratifying. Quite a few other interesting things went on around and about the conference today as well; it’s been a fascinating time.

Re: the service at the Red Robin across the street from the hotel–Wednesday, about twenty or thirty people from the conference trooped over there for lunch, because it was close. Today, without any discussion at all, so far as I could see, approximately the same group trooped over there again. Usually most folks at these conferences try to hit as many restaurants as they can.

This evening is going to interesting…because Jimmy Buffet is performing at a sports arena called the Rose Garden tonight, and this hotel is pretty much the nearest place to stay. There are people all over the hotel wearing leis, and multi-colored grass skirts, and I saw one guy wearing a papier-mache parrot hat on his head. Sure, it’s quite enough now…but I’m worried what it’s going to be like after midnight.

After I checked in to my hotel yesterday, almost the first thing I did was hie myself off to
Powell’s City of Books, a truly outstanding new-and-used bookstore. My hotel is next to the convention center, which is on the wrong side of the Willamette River, and I have no rental car, but not to worry–the “Max” light-rail line runs by the hotel, and took me across the river to within a few blocks of Powell’s. I didn’t stay long, as it was getting late and I wanted to get back to the hotel before dark; so this morning I took “Max” across the river but got off sooner and took a rather longer walk to both the main Powell’s and also to Powell’s Technical Books. I came away with a number of impressions.

The urban population is rather more diverse than I am used to. I’m seeing lots of young folks with metal sticking out of their faces, and there are more smokers than I usually see. And I’m seeing a surprising number of people in wheelchairs on the train. Possibly, of course, the train makes it easy enough to get around that folks with wheelchairs tend to live near and its route; I dunno. And of course there are the inevitable homeless folks.

Portland is a nice city to walk in; apparently they’ve really made an effort to work on that. The stores (and there are lots of big stores in Portland) have inviting entrances on the street corners. And for what it’s worth, I walked about ten blocks along Everett from China Town to Powell’s Technical Books and didn’t hit a single “Don’t Walk” signal.

Everyone I’ve dealt with since I’ve arrived has been extremely friendly, from the cab driver who drove me in from the airport to the sales people at Powell’s. And I have to say, the service at the Red Robin restaurant across the street from my hotel is as good as I’ve ever gotten in any restaurant anywhere. When I went there for dinner last night, the person who seated me saw that I was alone and offered to find me a paper to read. I didn’t need one (having just been to Powell’s), but it was a nice gesture. And as I’m trying to keep to my diet as best I can on this trip, I had a number of special requests, and the waitress couldn’t have been more helpful or more attentive. It’s not a fluke, either; I went back there for lunch today, and was just as pleased.

Tonight I let myself go, a bit; I went out for pizza and beer with a group of folks from the conference. I thought we were going to some local joint; in fact, we ended up at BJ’s Pizzeria and Brewery. It was a nice dinner, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but at this rate I’m not going to be able to indulge in any of the Red Robin’s mud pie.

Upon my arrival at the hotel here in Portland, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that they didn’t have broadband connections in the rooms; I was going to have to use dial-up. It turns out that the hotel’s guide to services is out-of-date; in fact, the hotel has free wi-fi. So I’m sitting in my room, in a reasonably nice reading chair in a well-lighted corner, posting this entry while watching the US Figure Skating Championships on ESPN. Life is good.

Update: Whoops! ‘Twasn’t the Nationals, as I thought; it was Skate America. A Japanese
fellow just one the men’s competition.

For the next five days I’m going to be in Portland, Oregon at this

year’s Tcl/Tk conference. I might be posting blog entries; I will most

likely not be responding to personal e-mail until I get back.

Jane took the kids to the library the other day, and came home with one of those rubbery plastic bracelets that are all the rage these days. It says,

County of Los Angeles Public Library * Read * Leer

“Leer”? Um….

I’ve just discovered that my Snit and Notebook mailing lists are down; in fact, they seem to have disappeared without a trace (the server currently has no memory of them). I’ve got a support request in; we’ll see what happens.

This is the second in Weber’s extended “Honorverse” series; being solely
authored by Weber himself, it follows the pattern set by his previous
few solo outings, to wit: a {ship, squadron, …} of the
Manticoran Space Navy is sent to a {system, cluster, star-nation, …} to
deal with some {mystery, crisis, situation, …}. The main plot follows
the {ship, squadron, …} as they go about their business, one facet of
which is usually to determine just what’s going on. Meanwhile, we
witness lots of meetings between other players on both sides where Weber
explains to us just what’s going on, so we know what kind of trials our
gallant sailors will encounter. The volume naturally ends with some kind
of naval engagement in which our heroes come out on top, bloody but
unbowed.

That said, I enjoyed The Shadow of Saganami rather more than
the most recent Honor Harrington novel, though (as it lacked Eric
Flint’s, um…, colorful imagination) not so much as
Crown of Slaves.

Chronologically, The Shadow of Saganami is the latest view
of the greater series, following shortly after
Crown of Slaves. HMS Hexapuma, a new Saganami-class
heavy cruiser, is sent to the Talbott Cluster, a vast expense of
poor-to-destitute planets at the terminus of the most recently discovered
member of Manticore’s wormhole junction. The cluster as a whole has
requested annexation by the Star-Kingdom of Manticore, and the details
are currently being hammered out; Hexapuma has been sent to show
the flag and to patrol what may soon be Manticoran territory.

The Talbott Cluster is on the far side of the Solarian League from
Manticore, in a region where Manticoran ships would never go if it
weren’t for the new wormhole. And there are a number of folks who aren’t
happy about the possibility of increased Manticoran presence, notably
the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security (which enslaves entire
planets under the guise of protecting them) and genetic slaver’s Manpower
United.

As with Crown of Slaves, The Shadow of Saganami
looks like old home week. Helen Zilwicki, daughter of Anton Zilwicki and
sister of Berry, is on board Hexapuma on her middie cruise. Also
present are a couple of Engineering officers from
Honor Among Enemies, and the provisional governor of the
Talbott Cluster is Estelle Matsuko, whom we first met
On Basilisk Station.

All in all, I liked the book; but Weber needs to stifle a few of the
talking heads and give us a little more action. A few less words would
be nice, too.