Experiments in Woolgathering

I had a meeting in NYC today, and since hotels are so wicked expensive I just did a day trip. Of course that meant I had to get up before 4 am to get ready and catch a 5:45am flight.

The nice thing about flights this early is that they’re usually very light and you can catch the sunrise from thirty thousand feet.

Sunrise this trip was spectacular. We were flying between two layers of clouds, and occasionally through a few clouds that were wandering around inbetween the layers. As dawn began we passed through a particularly dense set of clouds. Through my window I could see an horizontal smudge of orange, and as we passed out of the cloud the smudge brightened and widened. Once through the smudge became a sort of window framed by the cloud layers above and below and some other clouds to the left and right. It deepened into red on its edges and as sunrise neared the inner edges tended more and more toward yellow.

The inner clear area was almost green because of the mixing of yellow with the blue of the sky. Through the lower layer of cloud you could glimpse the disk of the sun which was a reddish orange. We started descending and the lost site of the sun, but regained our view of the actual horizon. Now we got to see the sun rise over an unobstructed horizon. As it crested the horizon the area near it was etched in bright yellow. The etching spread visibly and then finally the stab of light came as the edge of the sun came into vew.

It was a thing of rare beauty; the timing of the plane’s route and the cloud cover was really amazing now that I think about it more. It’s probably something I’ll never see again, though I’ll certainly remember it!

Another in a string of work trips starts tomorrow. Normally I wouldn’t bother with a post just about one. This trip is a bit different though – I’m going to the UK.

Aside from a trip to Hawaii when I was in grad school this is my first trip outside of North America. It’s also my first international trip I needed a passport for – one isn’t needed to get into Canada or Mexico, both of which I’ve visited.

More exciting than the trip to the UK is my side trip to Iceland, with which, as most who know me know, I’m mildly obsessed. Plus, while there I’ll get to visit my friend Ester who seems to have the whole weekend planned out as near as I can tell. ;)

I leave tomorrow evening for Newark, NJ. From there I catch a British Airways flight to London Heathrow. I take a shuttle to Standwick Airport, hang out for a couple hours and then take an Iceland Express flight to Reykjavík, well, Keflavík technically. Then I pass out for a while, wake up, spend the weekend in Iceland, and then head back to London Monday morning.

A week in London, not sure what I’ll do the weekend I’m there, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. :)

I’m home from New York/New Jersey – even though we met in Manhattan, they had us stay in Newport, NJ because the hotels are about $100 cheaper a night, and it’s only takes 15 minutes by train and foot to get to the offices which are just across the river. (more…)

How true the aphorism that is the title of this entry has been lately – and is true this weekend as well.

We’re doing a major redesign and consolidation of content from all the legacy web sites we absorbed as part of the merger over the next couple months. The planning and readying for this has been going on in one for or another for the last couple months. (We’re talking about a 1+ GB site with hundreds of pages.) Now we (coworker Charan and the various content managers) are finally implementing it.

Of course the content for one of the two managers we are doing first wasn’t ready on time (not his fault, he’s really just the conduit), and now, he, Charan and I are working some long ours to get things done for Monday. And, of course, Murphy and his damnable law are most apt to come into play in times like this – the development server went mostly belly up this morning, and I spent a few hours futzing with it before punting and standing up a new server (nothing to fully functional server, including the regenerated Subversion repositories, in 7 hours counting the time I spent burning the CentOS 4.0 ISOs to cd for the OS install).

So, tomorrow we can finish chasing down dead links and move the new site into production – the first part of which we would have done today, had the server not died. Also tomorrow, I need to do some work for one of Rachel’s clients.

Like I said, not enough hours in the day.

I’ve been thinking about the parallels in two things lately: ::role-playing game:: systems and ::programming language::s.

In both areas there have been efforts to make universal or generic solutions. The write-once, run-anywhere mantra of Java and the similar message of .NET (which are really only the most successful of many attempts at software portability). In games we have systems like ::GURPS::, ::D20::, Unisystem, TriStat, and so on.

The problem is, and this is recognized to some extent in both camps, though moreso in programming I think (more on this in a bit though) is that when we take part in or participate in these activities, we do so (or should at least) with a particular end in mind. I.e. the goal is not ‘just to write code’ or ‘just to have fun’.

The former is self-evident I should think; we want our code to do something, even if it’s something trivially simple.

In the latter case, I don’t think as many people recognize this. However, if it weren’t true, why is there such a profusion of RPGs and RPG systems? I suggest that it’s because people want to RP in a particular way in a particular setting. I also think that few RPers really recognize this and this contributes a great deal to the ‘failure’ of games. On top of the fact that few RPers are aware of how they want to play, there’s no guarantee that all players in a given group even want the same type of play (consciously or otherwise).

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I’ve been having some sort of oscillating epiphany experience while I’m at this “computer security training:http://www.sans.org/cdieast04/ this week.

On the first day, I was sitting there thinking ‘is this really worthwhile stuff?’ Not just meaning computer and network security, but spending so much of my time on a careering in the IT field at all. Shouldn’t I be doing something more meaningful, something that really helps people?

The, on the second day, I am thinking, ‘okay, a lot of people are dependent on this industry, doing my part to help protect my employer’s network as well as the Internet is helping them.’

The third and fourth days were more exciting, or at least renewed my excitement in what I do for a living – particulary the fourth day, were we got into secure communications, cryptography and steganography.

Days 5 and 6 were Windows and Unix/Linux security respectively – they were interesting, but in the first case I’m not a windows admin (except at home, and a good bit of the stuff we went over was really only practical for large installations), and in the second case, a lot of it was review. Plus, by the 6th day we were all pretty fried.

We got out of Day 6 about 2 hours early. So, I got my butt to the airport in time to catch a 2+ hour earlier flight home, for only $25 extra. $25 for shortening my slouching around the airport time by two hours seemed like a no brainer to me!

So, I dunno. I know I don’t want to do this forever, and starting on another path is a bit daunting. I suppose it will happen when it happens…