Last night I left Seattle to fly down to San Francisco for a week of high bandwidth time at OSAF. Since it was the end of Thanksgiving, I left the house one ferry early to allow for the possiblity of car traffic in and out of SeaTac. Said traffic never materialized and I was quite early for the flight. Then the flight was delayed due to weather in San Francisco. I had a leisurely dinner of airport food (if such can be called a dinner), and parked by an outlet at the gate, where I proceeded to setup my ssh config file to do the port forwarding necessary to get to my home IMAP server. It was a little tricky -- I've always done this through SecureCRT on Windows, but now that I have real SSH, I wanted to do it correctly. I also thought about jumping onto the Wayport wireless LAN, but at $6.95 for 2.5 hrs it wasn't worth it, plus I had enough computer stuff and books to keep me busy.

The overhead light for my seat was broken, which meant that the only activity available to me was to work on the Powerbook ;-). I spent the flight doing "light" activities - reading offline mail,which Thunderbird is only sort of handling -- there were messages that should have been downloaded but weren't. I also tried to catch up on RSS via NetNewWire. I must be doing something wrong because NNW seems a little bit sluggish. I'm using combined view, and I didn't have that much data (it was the weekend). And I'm on the 1.25GHz powerbook. Still things seemed a bit sluggish to me. I also had problems with it sorting the entries in combined view. It seemed like settings were getting lost. I need to trade some mail with Brent Simmons after I get a little more experience (probably after this trip is over).

On the San Francisco end, my suitcase was in the last round of bags (FILO), and there was a long line at the taxi stand. In fact, it was so long that they actually ran out of taxis for a few minutes. But eventually I made it to the Mariott Courtyard Downtown, which is like 1 block from the OSAF offices. And they have free high speed internet. So if I wanted to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, I could actually do it.

Fortunately, I won't have to do that. People are excited about having me on site, and I'm excited to be here. I'm spending a lot of time in face to face meetings with people, working to get things solidified for the 0.3 release. We've formed a working group for the repository folks (there was already a design/ui working group, and an apps working group is also starting). Today Mitch also wanted me to sit in on the design group meeting so that I could get a connection/feel for some of the issues that they are wrestling with. This is important because a lot of what gets reflected in the Chandler UI is likely to be query results. I'm glad to be putting faces to names/IRC handles and to get more of a sense of who my co-workers are. That's going to help a lot after I head back up north.

This is the entry I would have posted on Sunday had my flight arrived in SFO on time.

Yesterday (Saturday) we took a day long shopping trip to Seattle, and capped the day off by meeting some friends who were in town for Thanksgiving. One thing that you have to know is that I hate shopping. The itinerary included the University Village Apple Store (I'd alrady been to the Bellvue Square store), The Gap (also in UVillage), the Tom Bihn store in down town Seattle, and the new Fry's in Renton.

I didn't by anything in the Apple store, but the kids had a great time playing Curious George learns the alphabet on the eMacs. I'm not a big fan of computer software for kids, even so called educational software, but its hard to resist when your kids are so excited about it.

The real letdown of the trip was the visit to the Gap. I hate clothes shopping. Part of this is because the American clothing industry things that I don't exist. I'm right in the gap between men's and boy's sizes, and I'm thin as a stick to boot. Finding anything that approaches resonable cloting is a royal chore. In the past, the Gap has been a good place for me, because they make pants (28x28) and shirts (XS) in my size. This time, I was in search of some jeans, because some of mine are starting to get ratty, or at least that's what Julie says. When I got to the jeans rack, I was greated by a sign that says certain sizes (namely mine) are only available online. I didn't like that at all, but the associate assured me that they'd be the same price on-line as in the store ($19.95 or so). When I got home and checked Gap online, they were $39.50, which I suppose is the normal price for the jeans, but completely outrageous to my thinking. So if you are a small in between the cracks sized guys, and you have good tips for clothing retailers (or sites) let me know.

At Fry's I did what I normally do at Fry's: I went aisle cruising to see what was there. The advantage of Fry's is not the prices, although deals can be had if you are picky. I always liked the selection and the ability to wander around and see what was up. We did buy a cheap (and on sale) A/V receiver to replace the Hafler power and pre-amp combination that recently died, having served faithfully since 1986. The new one, an Onkyo TX-NR501, was well rated by Consumer Reports, and sounds noticeably better. The Hafler setup was quite good at the time, so I'm impressed that I can hear the improvement 17 years later.