That funny time of the year is fast approaching again. On 20th October, I have to get out of the US again for immigration reasons.
I went to Ottawa last time, but this time, I’m returning home to Amsterdam for four weeks. I can’t say I feel enthusiastic about going, since I don’t want to leave my girlfriend and it’s extremely busy at work right now, but it will be nice to see my cats again and catch up with Jo, my ex.
Well, I’ve been back in San Francisco for a couple of days now, after a very relaxing week in Maine. The flight out there was anything but relaxing, though. Bloody United. I had to revise my entire itinerary and arrived several hours late.
Sarah’s folks have a really cosy little summerhouse in Port Clyde, a tiny fishing village with a picturesque bay and lots of lobster pots. It was great to meet them and discover that we got along really well. I’d been so curious what her parents would turn out to be like.
Other spots visited in the course of the week were Camden, Booth Bay, Mount Batty, Damariscotta and Belfast. A week is far too short for a holiday. As a European, I’m used to disappearing for at least two consecutive weeks, sometimes as many as four.
Back in the city, I went out for crepes with pompeiisneaks this evening. Unfortunately, when we left the restaurant, we were horrified to discover that his mountain bike had been stolen. Poor Phil. He’d had it only two weeks.
In Maine, people don’t even lock their front door. Yes, there’s certainly a price to pay for living in the city.
00:25, less than 4 hours until I have to get up to catch a plane to Portland, Maine. I’ve never been to New England before.
It’s time to meet the in-laws, or at least the potential in-laws of some future scenario unthinkable even a year ago. This should prove very interesting. I wonder what they’ll make of the bloke who pursued their daughter half way across the globe.
I’m looking forward to getting away from the office for a week and leaving all the networking issues of the last ten days behind. It’s been quite a year and it’s not over yet. I could probably use a break away from it all. Everyone needs to recharge every now and again.
I discovered today that the router in San Jose isn’t doing proxy ARP for our corporate LAN. This is causing weird time-out issues. Hopefully, Rob, our networking guy, will get that fixed tomorrow while I’m in the air. I’ll be glad when we’ve got rid of all the Cisco equipment, as it’s been nothing but an unnecessary complication thus far.
Anyway, I should finish packing, shave and get a couple of hours’ sleep before the alarm goes off.
This time tomorrow, I’ll be with Sarah and her family in Maine. No computers to be seen anywhere. Bliss.
Working on Sunday: the undisputable tell-tale sign of a sad bastard. I’m missing my girlfriend.
So, while the sun shines outside, I’m sat here troubleshooting IPSec problems on the local network.
Dave D. is here, too, and has brought in his shiny new iPaq, which he’s about to flash with Linux. Can’t wait to see that in action.
Much has happened in the last month.
Sarah moved to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, temporarily moving in with me while she searched for an apartment. She also started work as a product manager for salesforce.com, an ASP start-up. TurboLinux and Red Hat are clients. Maybe Linuxcare will be one day.
Sarah was lucky enough to quickly secure an apartment in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco and will move into it the second week of September. It’s nice, but very expensive. This city has crazy rents. Thank heavens for corporate housing.
I went to the Linux World Expo in San Jose last week. Paul Russell’s IP Packet Mangling in the 2.4 Kernel tutorial was cool, but apart from that, it wasn’t much to write home about.
I took a closer look at Linux on an S/390 on IBM’s stand and played a little with a large cluster on SGI’s stand, but not much else caught my jaded interest.
Sarah flew to Maine this evening to join her parents at their summer house. I fly out there next Wednesday to join them, which will constitute ye olde proverbial parental meeting. That should prove interesting. It’s sink-or-swim time.
Work is progressing well. The NetApps arrived for our network storage, so our infrastructure migration can now proceed apace.
I had to set up some hideous networking this week. Triple IP masquerading over IPSec, including port forwarding and asymmetric routing. Don’t ask. This was very painful, resulting in the discovery of a bug in Cisco’s IOS and ultimately necessitating the utilisation of a pure Linux solution. Who needs Cisco anyway?
Bought Sasha & John Digweed’s Communicate and the latest in the Global Underground series, Dave Seaman’s Cape Town CD set at Virgin after seeing Sarah off this evening.
Anyway, time for bed. It’s breakfast at Max’s tomorrow, before heading up the Marin Headlands on bike with Matt & Phil, fellow admins. Should be a really fun day and take my mind off missing Sarah.
I really should try to post a diary entry more frequently than once a month, but there’s so much to do and so little time. I should update my home page more often, too. I should write more free software, prepare slides for some internal trainings at Linuxcare, put together a Web site for Sarah’s father that I’ve been promising for months, publish the cool bash completion stuff I’ve been doing, etc. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.
