I’ve recently been reading about powered parachutes (also known as PPC’s), and they are very, very tempting! I’ll want to get demo flight first, of course, but I can see myself dangerously close to dropping $15,000 to get myself one of these babies. A PPC is basically a three-wheeled go-cart with a large fan attached on the back, and a parachute, which acts as the wing/airfoil for the aircraft — hence the name, “powered parachute”.

After a long and intense week in Austin (where we doing planning and prioritizing for about 200 folks for the next 100 days until the 2.5 Linux kernel feature freeze), I’m spending a couple of days in Chicago visiting my dad. (Ever since Mom died, I’ve been trying to spend more time visiting Dad; her death has reminded me how little time I might be able to have with my parents, so I should treasure them while they’re here.

Yesterday evening, I was paging through my TiVo’s “Now Playing List” when I found that my faithful Tivo (who was well aware of my preference for shoows like Buffy, Farscape, Hogan’s Heroes, Star Trek, etc.) had somehow decided that I might like Jenny Jones, which appears to be a daylight talk show. Oh, the shame — must find the thumbs down button on my remote fast! Anyway, the particular Jenny Jones show which the TiVo had recorded had the description, “Beautiful and intelligent women say they are unable to get dates.

I used the following excerpt for a spiritual reflection I led for a vestry meeting. It comes from a book by William John Fitzgerald, entitled Blessings for the Fast Paced and Cyberspaced. I really liked it, so I decided to include it here. above the mountain it rises and my heart dances. Now the light comes, the light that makes me one with all life. Like the tinamou I am, who sings in the dawn, who is humble with love, Who walks in the circle of the greater love and the greater power.

Hmm… I’m definitely in worse shape after not doing regular exercise while I was on the road. I’m finding myself losing my breath and getting winded after doing DDR songs which wouldn’t have bothered me at all a month ago. Some of it might be because I’m wearing sneakers now (instead of doing it barefeat) in the hopes that cushioning will help spare my knees from aching and in the long term, getting destroyed.

… and we just lost power in Medford, MA. This will be the third time in four days that we’ve had a power outage. I thought this was only supposed to happen in California. 😛

(No, it’s not rolling blackouts. Just lots of antiquated equipment which is dying thanks to the increased summertime load, apparently.)

So I’ve been traveling since June 6th, and so I haven’t had as much time to update my LJ log. (It seems that I’ve had network access, or time, but not both.) So here’s a quick summary of my vacation in June before the Kernel Summit/OLS…. Sunday, June 16th: I checked out of my hotel in Monterey, and start driving up to San Jose. I took the scenic route, up route 1, and then swing by Santa Cruz.

So I’ve been in Monterey all week for the Usenix conference, but it’s still been a productive week. On Monday, I taught a Linux kernel tutorials class. I thought my friend Stephen Tweedie was going to be there so we could tag-team teach the class, but it turned out that I had to teach it by myself. So that worked out OK, although I was pretty exhausted. On Tuesday, I spent all day with my ipsec working group co-chair to organize things for the Yokohama IETF meeting.

So here I am in Monterrey, having breakfast at the DoubleTree Hotel, and I order hot tea. A few minutes later, the waitress comes by and takes away my coffee mug, and replaces with a completely identical mug, a tea kettle, and selection of tea bugs. I was confused about the mug replacement, until I picked up the mug and found that it was hot. Ah, nice touch. They gave me pre-warmed mug, so I figured, in order that the water wouldn’t be cooled down when it was poured into the mug, so the tea could properly steep at just under boiling, as it should be.

Things have been fairly busy, so I haven’t had time to update my Live Journal more frequently. I’d like to get better about that. In the meantime, I’ll play catchup with the some of the more important things that have happened in the past week or two. The weekend before last, I traveled out to Chicago to attend my mom’s memorial service. It was held in St. Lawrence Church in Libertyville, IL.