Cut Copy. The Levellers. The Subways. Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Vampire Weekend. Ben Folds. The Duke Spirit. Edwyn Collins. John Cale. Franz Ferdinand. Kings Of Leon. Fanfarlo. Cruel Folk. Mik Artistik’s Ego Trip. British Sea Power. The Raconteurs. The Last Shadow Puppets. Amy Winehouse. Buddy Guy. The Proclaimers. Mary Bourke. Attila The Stockbroker. Dynamo’s Rhythm Aces. John Mayer. Scouting For Girls. Mark Ronson. Goldfrapp. Leonard Cohen. The National.
D x.
The law of unintended consequences often comes shopping with me.
This weekend finds me back in Glasgow to visit my parents, and I’ve spent much of the afternoon clearing out a desk that I’d used since 1996. Filled with memories, old tickets and trinkets, my first football match, my first gig, my first trip to London on my own, my trip to Cambridge for interview. Filled with old school work and school reports (Computing – “I am pleased with my grades, and I like computers.” R.E. – “I am pleased with my progress in the short course, and look forward to its completion.”), and the surprising insight that I apparently had a “particular ability at Volleyball.” Filled with greetings cards from old friends, people I barely remember, and people I’d rather forget.
The other day, I was getting off a plane from Istanbul back to Stansted, and retrieving my Duty-Free carry-on, when a fellow passenger accosted me:
“I think that’s my bag,” he said.
“I’m fairly sure it’s not.”
“Does it have Turkish Delight in it?”
“Well, yes….”
Growing up in Glasgow, I was exposed to more than my fair share of internecine rivalries: when I was more serious about blogging, I planned a grand series of posts cataloguing every single one of them. Easy, I thought, there’s the other football team, the other side of the river, the suburbs, the other city, and don’t even get me started on the English.
I can’t sleep, and I’ve got NAFTA on my mind. I won’t claim that the two are correlated, but when did that ever stop someone writing a blog post?
Indulge me for a moment. For some reason, the powers that be at SIGOPS like to hold SOSP at remote locations, which in recent years have included Bretton Woods, Banff, and Brighton. So I’ve not been the only one to point out that this year’s location, Skamania Lodge in southern Washington state, bears something of a resemblance to the infamous Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. A little Wikipedia surfing last night led me to discover that the basis for the Overlook is Timberline Lodge, just across the river in Oregon. Imagine my surprise as I watched the local news in our own hotel (which owes more than a little to Hitchcock), and the weather forecaster cut to a shot of the Timberline Lodge, where apparently the snow has just started falling for the season. Ah well, at least they’ve got a security camera up there these days.
I’ll skip doing a review of the banquet last night, so it’s on with the papers!
Since day 0 was driving up (through some outstanding scenery) from Portland to Skamania Lodge, I’ll come back to it when the photos are developed. Therefore, on with a little experiment: the live blog! (The page will grow downwards as more presentations are added.)
N.B. If you’re reading this through Facebook or are not a die-hard Computer Scientist, you might want to ignore it!
So, if you’ve seen me in person some time in the past week, I’ll probably have gushed to you about the fact that I’m incredibly lucky to be going to SOSP 2007, at Skamania Lodge, Stevenson, WA. I’ve been up for 22 hours now, and my luck is giving way to psychosis.
Up at 4:30am, I left my (new-but-that’s-another-story) house at 6, caught the 6:30 bus from Cambridge to Gatwick (and was dismayed at the lack hostess, jolly or otherwise, on the National Express), then left Gatwick at 12:45 on an American Airlines flight to Raleigh/Durham, NC. Those with a keen, or even extremely vague, sense of geography will see immediately the flaw in my plan!
The transatlantic leg was fine, nothing special, and I got a good amount of work done on the plane. Arriving at the backwoods “Raleigh/Durham International Airport” was something of a come down. I’m no stranger to queues at immigration (although the hall was so small that they had to let us off the plane in stages), or having to recheck my luggage having cleared customs, but I was dismayed to find that, after doing this, all 300 tired and cranky passengers off the fully-loaded 777 were forced through a full laptops-out, shoes-off security checkpoint, even if they were leaving the airport! A little artefact of those halcyon pre-9/11 days when airport security was such that the entire townsfolk would congregate in the departure lounge for a barn dance….
Two hours there, and a bag of Fritos later, I was on another flight, this time to Dallas Fort Worth. A narcoleptic episode beginning just before take-off left me quite disoriented, but now I’m at DFW, tapping out an unnecessarily sardonic blog post, just trying to stay awake and not miss my four-hour flight to Portland. If you’re reading this, Henry, the AAdvantage miles just weren’t worth it.