Just for the record, I got back home last night on schedule, and my three kids greeted me at the entrance to the baggage claim at LAX:

“There he is! Daddy!”

“Daddy!”

“Daddy! Daddy!”

It’s good to be Dad.

Over the last few months I’ve been reading Marsh’s books in order of
publication. In our last outing, the excellent Vintage
Murder, we found Inspector Alleyn on vacation in New Zealand. The
current book finds him on shipboard on his way home to England, where he
makes the acquaintance of rising artist Agatha Troy, his future wife.
There first meeting is somewhat fraught, and though Alleyn agrees to sit
for a portrait before the voyage is done, he comes away from it persuaded
that Troy dislikes him.

At journey’s end, Alleyn toddles off to spend a couple of weeks with his
old mother before returning to Scotland Yard, while Troy returns to her
home, where a number of artists are paying to study with her. They do
not encounter each other again until one of the students is murdered, and
Alleyn is called in to investigate.

What follows is both an interesting mystery and a most unconventional
romance. Professionalism dictates that Alleyn must treat Troy no
differently than any of the other suspects, and this, while clear to both
of them, adds a certain regrettable constraint to their interactions.
In addition, neither of them really understands each other at first.
Alleyn is naturally reserved, both personally and professionally, while
Troy, angry with herself for how she behaved at their first meeting, is
by turns cold, prickly, and defensive.

Ultimately, of course, Alleyn can no longer deny his feelings, and tells
Troy how he feels…but there are no wedding bells at the end of this
book, and no mad, passionate embrace. A person has just been murdered;
it has been a week of horror and pain; it’s no time for falling joyously
in love. And yet the passion is there, just below the surface, and at
the end Alleyn is given, if not encouragement, then hope for the future.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment: although writing genre fiction, Marsh
seems determined to avoid all but the most necessary bits of formula.
Very, very nice.

I’m writing these words from an Internet Cafe at Detroit Metro airport. It’s almost 1 PM, Eastern Daylight Time, and I’m supposed to be home. Actually, I was supposed to be home about twelve hours ago. Thus begins the saga.

Friday night we had thunderstorms. Serious thunderstorms. Detroit Metro was closed, and I heard one of the TSA security people say that eight flights were cancelled. There are two completely separate terminals, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the total was higher than that. Fast forward to Saturday afternoon, when I arrived at the airport in preparation for a 5 PM flight. There were still masses of people in the check-in lines for American Airlines and other carriers; the America West line was mercifully (ha!) empty. As I was travelling America West, I got through easily.

At 4:30, they were supposed to start boarding. They didn’t.

At 5:10, they announced that there would be a delay.

At 5:30, they told us that the plane’s lavatories were out, and that there would be a lengthy delay; our connecting flights would be rebooked automatically.

At 6:00, they told us they’d have more news at 6:30.

Between 7:30 and 8:00 (!) they finally told us that the flight was cancelled. As I had checked baggage I was out of luck; I had to hang around.

At 8:00 or a little after, they announced that they’d be finding us hotels for the night. I got in line.

Around 10:30 or 10:45 (!) I finally got to the head of line, rebooked my flight, and got a hotel voucher. I went downstairs, got my suitcase, and called the hotel for a shuttle.

At 11:30PM I stepped into my room at the airport Quality Inn. Thank the Good Lord! It was, surprisingly, a nicer room than I’d spent the past week in. I ordered a pizza (I’d not really eaten since lunchtime), called Jane, ate the pizza, read for a few minutes, went to sleep. I got the best night’s sleep I’d had all week.

And now I’m waiting for a 5:30 PM flight on North West airlines from Detroit to Los Angeles, arriving at 7:12 PM (PDT) at LAX, instead of at Burbank, where I’d originally been scheduled to arrive.

James and Anne will be celebrating their 4th and 2nd birthdays with their friends this afternoon. I will not be there.

Damn it.

I’ve just posted Chapter 22 and Chapter 23 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! over at Once Told Tales. At last, we begin to explore the fabled land of Zymurgia!

Yesterday was the first day of the conference proper, and while parts of it were interesting, some of the presentations were less than stellar. We had a keynote speaker by the president of BitMover, who told us at great length that it’s painful to create really beautiful (i.e., MS Windows-like) GUIs in Tcl/Tk. Which is true, and there are apparently plans already afoot to do something about it, and it wasn’t necessary that the topic dominate the rest of the day. But the company was good, and of course that’s the real point of going to a conference like this–getting to chat with all kinds of people. And Tcl people are generally very nice people.

This morning has been more interesting. My favorite presentation so far was by a guy from a satellite radio company. There are apparently dozens of satellite radio receivers on the market and they need to test all of them. And they test all of them by putting them in a car (or, in one case, a BMW motorcycle) and driving for eight hours a day. They’ve circumnavigated the United States twice, they say. Testing the audio signal requires a fair amount of computer hardware, and they are using Tcl to glue everything together.

And of course I did my presentation as well. I won’t talk about it here, as the topic is really only of interest to Tcl coders, but it went well, and people seemed to like it.

More papers will be presented this afternoon, followed by a roundtable discussion on the future of Tcl, and then, later on, something called the “Wine BOF”. A BOF is a “Birds Of a Feather” session, in which people with shared interests get together and argue about them; the Wine BOF seems to involve tasting fine wines and arguing about anything in the world. (I’ll have more about that later.)

I’ve just posted the August issue of Ex Libris Reviews. Have fun!

It’s about ten o’clock, and we’re just back from dinner. About twenty of us went to the Cottage Inn, which is the local place for deep dish Sicilian pizza (along with many, many other things). It was great, although they don’t seem to understand the notion of a “personal pizza”. The smallest hand-tossed pizza was 12″, and the deep dish pizza comes in two sizes: half-tray and full-tray. I ordered a half-tray pizza, and it was approximately three times as much as I needed. I figure some of the rest of it is breakfast for tomorrow, which will make a nice change from Frosted Flakes. (They serve breakfast here, but it doesn’t amount to much.)

I will say three things in favor of this hotel, though. When I asked for another pillow, they had it to my room in five minutes; when I woke up with a headache (which was not the pillow’s fault, so far as I can tell) and went to the front desk to ask where I could get some Tylenol, they gave me some; and all of the staff have invariably been both cheerful and friendly. This makes up for some of the maintenance problems, like the lamp that doesn’t work and the clock radio whose volume control is stuck on Way Too Loud. According to Clif Flynt, the previous owners ran the place into the ground, and the new owners are trying to bring it back.

It’s still a genuinely weird place, though. Apparently it used to be a rather non-descript L-shaped motel with outside doors on the first and second floors–the kind of place where you park just outside your room. They’ve since enclosed it; the space on the inner angle of the L is now the atrium, and the outdoor pool is now the indoor pool. On top of that, they replaced the front wall of each room with a plate glass window, just the thing for transmitting sound into the room. And since there is no sheer curtain, only a black-out curtain, most people leave the curtains drawn all the time anyway.

As for the conference, it’s going nicely. I went to two tutorials today, one on Starkits (which I use to deliver my Notebook application) and one on a nifty database called Metakit, both given excellently well by Steve Landers, a Tcler who hails from Perth, Australia. I already knew a little about both topics, and the tutorials filled in the gaps nicely.

Tomorrow the technical sessions begin, and on Friday morning I present my paper.

Good news–they finally got the network squared away so that it’s working satisfactorily. It’s slow, but no slower than my dial-up at home. So things are looking up.

I had another pleasant evening with Ian last night, though we didn’t stay out nearly as late. He admonished me for referring to him as a gentleman and a scholar, and I humbly apologize. He’s really a cheap gunsel with a line of patter so gaudy it ought to be on sale at K-Mart who somehow manages to do a good imitation a gentleman and a scholar. Don’t tell anybody.

I’m here in Ann Arbor at the 10th Tcl/Tk Conference, held at the Best
Western Executive Plaza on Jackson Road, which is, by coincidence, just
across the street from the nicest hotel in town. Or so Ian Hamet tells me. Ian and I had a
fine time yesterday evening; not only did he buy me a nice Italian
dinner, he gave me an inscribed copy of Nevil Shute’s book “Pied Piper”
for my birthday. (Inscribed by Ian, that is, not by Nevil Shute.)
There was much discussion of books and movies on into the night. He’s a
gentleman and a scholar, and I hope to buy him a drink this evening.

I’m sitting in the atrium of the hotel as I write. We’ve cobbled
together a rather hit-or-miss wireless network; when the conference
organizers lined up this hotel, there were plans to install high-speed
internet through out. The hotel’s top management subsequently decided
that no such thing was necessary, and so we’re making do with a net connection
that’s too bizarre for words. Consequently, blogging and (especially)
e-mail might be much lighter than I’d hoped over this week.

Later…

They’ve come up with a different bizarre network solution which I’ll try
tomorrow; with luck it will work better.

Today was the first day of the Tcl/Tk conference, and as usual consisted
of “tutorials”, that is, half-day classes on topics of interest. I
attended two: “Enough Expect to be Dangerous”, and “Advanced Tcl”.
The former, taught by Ken Jones, was quite good. Expect is a tool that
you can use to automate terminal dialogues, and it’s much more
interesting than it sounds. For example, I’ll be able to use it to download
data to my website automatically–very, very cool.

The second tutorial was taught by Clif Flynt, the conference organizer,
and was also good, except that it wasn’t as advanced as I had hoped. Or
I’m more advanced than I’d realized, which I’m beginning to think might
actually be the case. At least, Clif was very pleased when he managed to
come up with a small fact I wasn’t already aware of: variables
initialized in a namespace at file scope are in fact standard global
variables rather than namespace variables unless previously declared
using the variable command. I had not known that. As my friend Pat
Olguin says, I can go from Zero to Geek in five seconds.

After the second tutorial, a large group of us walked down the road to a
shopping center, where we found sustenance at a Tex-Mex place called Rio
Bravo. It’s a chain here in Michigan, and one I’d never heard of before.
As we approached, though, I saw the slogan “Fresh Mex” painted on the
wall by the door, and a certain suspicion arose in my mind. Yup–it’s
just Chevy’s with a different name–and somewhat less heat. I ended up
sitting with Michael Cleverly and Steve Landers, two folks I’d met at the
last conference, and a good time was had by all.

Tomorrow there are two more tutorials, one on MetaKit database
programming and one on the Starkit application packaging solution, which
are also more interesting than they sound. I’m particularly looking
forward to the Metakit class; the principle Tcl interface to MetaKit
these days is called “oomk” for “object-oriented MetaKit”–and it’s
written using my own Snit
object framework. I’m agog–these guys have taken Snit places I’d never
imagined.

Anyway, that’s enough for tonight.

…begins with a blog post announcing that it’s about to happen.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’m getting on a plane to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I’ll be attending the 10th Tcl/Tk Conference with a large quantity of similarly minded Tcl nerds. I expect to be online regularly throughout the conference, as there will be a wireless net set up in the conference center (way cool), so don’t look for any major interruption of service.

There may well not be any posts tomorrow, however, as I’ll be travelling most of the day, and in the evening I’ll be meeting a certain Banana Oil salesman for festivities as yet to be determined.

Oh, and the big news, just for you folks who’ve read this far…tomorrow is my 40th birthday. Yes, as of tomorrow I will officially be out of warranty.