The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

The first night I was in town, I stopped by the National Comedy Theatre in San Diego to see a couple of shows. They, like CWX, are a former ComedySportz group who split off during the great political unrest a few years ago, and joined (started?) a looser group of affiliated clubs, the NCT. The NCT is the “Articles of Confederation” to the CSZ’s “Constitution”.

The shows were fun. Their theatre space is awesome – it’s an old small theatre, with a tall ceiling and catwalk and everything. Their seating capacity is similar to CWX’s, though the layout is much better. Their show is very similar to ours, with the big exception that they let the audience pick most of the games that they play, which is a rarity in Raleigh.

I, of course, was most interested in the voice setup. Compared to us, they don’t use the voice at all. Their Mr. Voice doesn’t do much in the show aside from the intro – no sound effects, very little music, very little comentary. It was weird for me to watch, since when I voice, I’m very involved in the show. Interesting to see how different clubs do things. There was talk that I could voice the second show that night, but that kinda fell through. Probably for the best, though – if I’d voiced in my normal style, I probably would have really thrown them off.

NCT-SD seems to have a good group of people, and I enjoyed hanging out with them for the night!

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I heard from Holly today that she’s now in posession of my new G4 iBook. Wheee! Had I been able to get it before my trip, I would have fit right in. Apple laptops are all over the place here at LISA. I’d estimate probably 1/3 of the laptops are Macs, far above the company’s overall 4% market share in the desktop computer world.

In 2000, you couldn’t have paid Unix sysadmins to carry around Macs – OS 9 was a joke as far as operating systems were concerned. Now, though, they’re the hot item. Apple’s efforts to meld Unix with a great GUI and solid applications is paying off, at least at the Alpha Geek level.

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I had a decent time at the Birds of a Feather meetings last night (or, as Holly called them, the “Flock of Seagulls” meetings). The first one was a PGP keysigning, attended by a whopping three people, me included. The other two were a guy from Boston and a security admin for Shell (the oil company) in the UK. British accents are funny.

So after about 15 minutes of that, I stepped next door to the BSD BoF. Nothing really interesting there, except this rotund woman who wouldn’t shut her pie-hole about Richard Stallman and how the GPL was evil. Save the holy wars for usenet, chubs, I’ve got better things to do with my time.

Next on the agenda was the Postmasters BoF. I’m not sure what the guy from Berkley who arranged it had in mind, but it turned into a discussion about anti-spam techniques. Highlights were the guy who runs the mail for Qualcomm, and the guy who runs rfc-ignorant.org.

Finally, it was over to the MacOS X BoF. Some decent discussion there about new features in Panther and other similar stuff.

The last LISA conference I went to was in 2000 in New Orleans. At that time, I’d been in ComedySportz about a year, so I wasn’t quite as comfortable around groups of strangers as I am now. So I think I’m getting a lot more out of the conference this year, since I’ll actually start up a conversation with people I’m sitting around, which makes things more fun.

Today was a slow day for me, since the tutorials are over now. Got up, had breakfast, took a nap again, and came into the main conference area to geek around for a bit. The vendor showcase started at noon, so I went around to the booths and got free stuff. The showcase is a lot smaller than in 2000, probably because of the dot-com crash. But I ended up with a few more T-shirts, pens, and other gadgets in my bag, and dropped some business cards to win free prizes. The odds of that happening? Slim to none.

And yes, one booth even had the obligitory “booth babes” – girls from the local Hooters in full orange-hotpants regalia passing out shirts at their booth.

For recreation, I took a trolley ride into Old Town San Diego to look around. Today was the first day since the fires started that the air was fairly clean, with the breeze coming out of the west and blowing the smoke away from downtown. Most of the interesting stuff in Old Town was closed due to the fire, though. So I wandered around for a half-hour and came back. My impression of Old Town is that it’s a lot like Colonial Williamsburg, only smaller, tackier, and less interesting.

Tonight, I get to see if my Tutorials-only badge will let me into the vendor reception (Mmmm…Mexican food), then it’s off to another few BoFs. Tomorrow morning, I get up, call Delta to make sure my plane is leaving on time, then start the nine-hour (including layovers and time zone changes) flight back to Raleigh. I miss my wife and baby.

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Today looked like it would start well – some stars were visible last night, and when I got up this morning, the sun was shining pretty well – it was warm, you couldn’t look directly at it, it was all good. As it’s climbed higher in the sky, though, I guess it’s gotten into more smoke, because it’s pretty dark out there now. Ah, false hope.

My Solaris class today has been pretty good so far. A very nice girl from Earthlink in Seattle is sitting next to me, and she brought candy, and is sharing it with our whole row. It’s weird candy, too, but pretty good.

The BoF sessions start tonight, and there are a couple I’m going to try to hit. The GPG keysigning, and the MacOS X one.

My iBook was on the truck to arrive in Petersburg today, instead of tomorrow. Of course, there was no note on the door or anyone waiting for it today, so they’ll just take it back and try again tomorrow. Hopefully Mom will get it Wednesday night, and bring it to Kenbridge for Holly on Thursday.

Today is my last “active” day at LISA – tomorrow, the only thing on my plate is the vendor showcase, so I’ll probably spend some time exploring after that’s done. Then, Thursday morning, it’s back to the airport for the trip home. That’s assuming, of course, that the delays aren’t enough to screw up my connecting flights.

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The fires are somewhat close to my hotel – probably 6-8 miles away. It’s harder to breathe today than it was yesterday. Hope the winds hold off.

I have no idea why geeks have this overwhelming urge to spend time arguing to try to prove the point that the instructor just made.

Instructor: The sky is blue.
Geek: But I know that if the wavelength of light is at a certain level, then it will make the sky blue.
Me: You’re not clever. STFU so we can get through these slides today.

The Perl class is interesting so far. My instructor looks like RIch Eisen from ESPN.

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So, while I’m out in San Diego, I figure I’ll take advantage of the great coincidence that Monday Night Football is in town the same week I am. Sweet, I think.

Unfortunately, the forest fires in California have spread to San Diego, so the NFL has moved the game to Tempe, Arizona. If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.

Speaking of the fires, it was so smoky today that you could look directly at the sun and actually see the sunspots on its surface. That was freaky. The ashfall has slowed quite a bit, but it’s still very smoky and ashy around here. I went into the “Gaslamp” downtown area for dinner (sushi), and now my throat is pretty dry and scratchy.

The tutorials today were pretty boring, all things considered. The first one, about log analysis, was poorly paced – we spent the first 3/4 of the class talking about definitions and concepts, and we ran out of time when we got to the good stuff about actually, y’know, DOING things with that knowledge. I come to these tutorials for the practical, hands-on stuff, which was sorely lacking.

My second tutorial was supposed to be advanced Perl tricks, but after looking at the classbook, I realized that it was way over my head. So I switched to a Veritas Volume Manager class instead, since we use that at work. That class was better in terms of information, but there was one moron in the class who would ask a question after every . . . freaking . . . slide. As a result, the instructor had to rush through the last half of the presentation, so we didn’t get much there. Bah.

Tomorrow, I’ve swapped the Performance Tuning class I’d originally signed up for in favor of two other Perl classes that should be more up my alley. I guess I need to find something to do tomorrow night now, too.

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Headline of the year, as seen in the N&O on Saturday. The story was talking about the federal raids against Wal-Mart for using illegal immigrants as cleaners, and how other businesses were worried about their immigration status. The headline was:

Wal-Mart Raids Jar Employers

All I could think about were Wal-Mart greeters, dressed up like ninja commandos, rapelling down the walls of the “Ball” mason jar company. Maybe I’m just weird.

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When I was in the Atlanta airport yesterday, I saw on the news that there were big forest fires in Southern California. It sounded then like they were north of Los Angeles, which would be about three hours or so away from me. But I woke up this morning to a light rain of ash, and ash covering all exposed surfaces. Creepy. The sun is up, but it’s blood-red and not giving off a lot of light.

I miss my baby. I put the wallet-sized picture of her I have out at dinner and looked at it while I ate.

I made it to San Diego without many problems, although we were late leaving Atlanta. Everyone was on the packed flight, we were in line to take off, when they pulled us back to the gate. Turns out that one of the airplane seats, which if you said that they reclined 1/4″ you’d be generous, wouldn’t stay upright. So they had to get a mechanic to come onboard and tighten the seat before we could take off.

The time change is messing with me. I went to NCT San Diego, an improv group that used to be ComedySportz, last night and stayed out until midnight. Then I came back and set my clock back before bed, which meant that when the clock said 11:00pm, my body thought it was 3:00am. Yikes. Which meant, of course, that my eyes popped open this morning at 4:30am PST (8:30am body time). This will take some getting used to. It’s weird to think that the NFL games will be starting at 10am, while I’m in class.

I’ve got two classes today – “Enterprise Log Analysis” and “Perl Tricks from the Wizards.” Should be fun, though I’m expecting to get more from the latter than the former. Since I’m only here for the tutorials, instead of the full conference, I’m not invited to the social event. Boo on that. I may have to go walk around downtown San Diego tonight to pass the time.

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Greetings from Atlanta! I figured $5 for some internet access wasn’t too bad, so I’m checking in from the road.

Small world – I’m in RDU airport waiting for my flight, and I hear someone call my name. Turns out it’s the Hawthornes, my next-door neighbors when I was growing up in Kenbridge. They were on their way to Atlanta to see their son, and were two rows behind me. That was spooky.

I miss Holly and Hayley already.

Next stop – San Diego!

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Daddy want.

Update: I bought it. I did. I’m so weak. I got it in my mom’s name, though, since she’s a teacher and that saved me around $150.

It should arrive by early November.

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