Last night, I flew back from Israel, leaving from Tel Aviv at 1am, and arriving in JFK at 6:30am, and by 10:30am I was back home. Woo hoo! Now I just need to exercise, shower, and then repack so I can drive down to Cape Code. Diocesan Council is having an off-site meeting/retreat tonight and Saturday. With any luck, I won’t even need to drink a lot of Coffee to keep myself awake; I seem to have gotten enough sleep on the plane, and after being in Israel for only three days, it appears I didn’t have enough time to completely time shift.

So I’m in Tel Aviv, to give a presentation for IBM Israel. Richard Stallman was also supposed to show up, but he left a one line message saying he couldn’t make it for some reason (although he would show up in Haifa the following day). This has the conference organizers in a bit of a frenzy. Unfortunately I won’t have much opportunity to do any sight-seeing. Due to corporate security restrictions, I’m not allowed to do any sight-seeing, and technically I’m not supposed to go to any restaurants other than the hotel one.

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.

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.

I spent the morning trying to get work done — or at least trying to; I wasn’t half as productive as I wanted to be. Sigh… Part of it is that that I don’t have my own space, so I’m just less efficient. Also, only having a dialup connection to the net doesn’t help. It’s also though that I’m getting easily distracted, for some reason. The Garmin Streetpilot III arrived today, via Federal Express.

The past week I was in Minneapolis attending the IETF meeting. Although network access was plentiful there, I was so busy I didn’t have any time to update my journal. It was a good meeting, though. A lot of good stuff got done. The two teams who had been proposing competing “son-of-IKE” proposals have agreed to work together toward a combined proposal. I announced the results of the nominating committee, which means my job as nomcom chair is pretty much done (thank goodness!

I’ve been off the air for a while (no Internet connectivity), and it seems that an eternity of stuff has happened in the mean time. Last week, on Saturday (on March 9th), I was woken up at 8am when my father called me. My parents were little over a week into a three week vacation in Australia, and I certainly wasn’t expecting a call from him then. In a completely emotion-less voice, he tells me to take a piece of paper, and to start writing down information.

I gave my Linux kernel tutorial at NordU yesterday, and unfortunately the jet lag choose yesterday as the day to hit hard. With a vengence. I managed to give the class without many major screwups, but it definitely wasn’t my best effort. I had a few people complimenting me afterwards, which felt strange because I knew the talk wasn’t as coherent and as organized as I would have liked. Afterwards, I went to have dinner with an old friend (one of the FTP maintainers of ftp.