Trip Planning, Meetups, and writing fun

My current flight itinerary for December (updated as it changes):

UA9230 LHR (2005/12/15 11:05) -> MUC (2005/12/15 13:50)
UA8871 MUC (2005/12/15 15:15) -> JFK (2005/12/15 18:25)
UA21 JFK (2005/12/19 08:00) -> SFO (2005/12/19 11:21)
UA886 SFO (2005/12/19 12:11) -> LAX (2005/12/19 13:30)
UA304 LAX (2005/12/20 13:45) -> SFO (2005/12/20 15:06)
UA830 SFO (2005/12/24 10:55) -> ORD (2005/12/24 17:10)
UA7690 ORD (2005/12/24 17:45) -> YUL (2005/12/24 20:54)
AC706 YYZ (2005/12/29 10:15) -> LGA (2005/12/29 11:40)
UA8840 JFK (2005/12/29 16:05) -> FRA (2005/12/30 05:30)
UA8809 FRA (2005/12/30 07:25) -> LHR (2005/12/30 08:05)

Train itinerary (updated as it changes):

VIA33 Montreal (2005/12/26 10:00) -> Ottawa (2005/12/26 11:39)
VIA43 Ottawa (2005/12/28 08:40) -> Toronto (2005/12/28 13:00)

I went to The Orange Tree in Richmond yesterday afternoon to see Three in the back, two in the head, an interesting small theatre production concerning the events surrounding the cold war and the Star Wars project. I went with one of the London meetup groups I have joined. It’s a cool way of hanging out with Canadians and other North Americans as well as various other interesting people. Hopefully, we’ll organise a trip to Snowdon for January. Actually the social thing is fun – I’m hanging out with the local climbing group a bit more now too. I went along on Thursday evening and tried solving a few problems the guys were making up, but I need to go to the gym more often if I’m going to hope to keep up with Dan and Stefan.

Figure: North America trip, December 2005.

I’m going to be hooking up with Bill for a few days in December, so I’ve got to book some more flights within the US. In an ideal world where I sort out my full itinerary soon, then I’ll fly via Los Angeles so I can hook up with Daniel while he’s simultaneously on vacation – and can then potentially swing by Anaheim for some coffee. I’m booked to fly into NYC on Dec 15 and then must go and see Washington D.C. (the Smithsonian in particular) before Christmas. I’m also expecting to take a train to Boston (in the US trains seem to run mostly in the mornings between these places so I have a choice of crashing in a hotel or taking the late coach back – depends on the price) and will then fly over to San Francisco for a few days. I’ll then take a train from NYC to Montreal and hang out with Eric, before going on to Ottawa. I haven’t decided yet whether I can really fit in going to Halifax this time, but I’d like to.

IBM sent me an OpenPower 710 to play around with. It’s nice and heavy and filled with 64-bit goodness. I’ll use it to test things for the book and to play around with the hardware virtualisation support under Linux. Now that I’ve got some decent POWER5 kit I can actually hack on the ppc64 tree a little. My floppy patch from before turned out to need a fix which exposed some other problems in the floppy driver I need to look at – in fact there’s a whole bunch of stuff I should help to fix.

The Wall Street Journal called me up last week as a source for an article on Ottawa. I had more than a few nice things to say about the place and why everyone should go visit.

Jon.

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