bfields's blog

After meetings yesterday I walked home again, this time by way of Paris Plage, the river-side summer festival which includes (most amusingly) temporary "beaches" with imported sand. Attractions included: a guy doing a cute boy-meets-girl story to music, using wooden dolls with string-attached removable heads that made them look like souped-up kendamas; a gypsy-like band with double bass, violin, and a few guitars; a jazz trio; and several percussion groups. They were all good.

My favorite was just a guy with a piano hosting a sing-along for a group tightly packed around him. When I got there they were doing a lovely song that I didn't know. Based on a google search on the lyrics, it appears to be "Emmenez-moi", by Charles Aznavour. It was funny to hear them launch into YMCA after that. No one knew the words outside the title, so they "na-na-na"'d along for most of it.

I also walked past the free boules grounds, a couple temporary cafés, and and some other nifty stuff.

There was a movie screen set up at the end. I watched the end of the movie, Le Signe de Lion. It was an interesting movie, especially since much of it took place on the banks of the Seine, during "les vacances", hence at the same place and time of year as we were watching it.

I'd planned a liesurely walk back to the hotel to meet Brian Sunday night. But I killed a lot of time with email and such after registering for the ietf meeting, so as I walked back I increasingly realized I was going to have to walk quite fast to make it back to the hotel on time.

A sensible person would have taken the metro at that point. But in the end I made it back to the hotel only 10 minutes behind schedule. When I got to the hotel I found they'd already gone, but they'd left the name of the restaurant with the receptionist.

Gaspard de la nuit, right around the corner from the hotel, was small and crowded. When I got there they teased me for being late, and for walking so much. But the food hadn't actually arrived yet.

Brian treated us to an 8-course meal that took hours and was very good. There was also wine with every course, which I probably should have started turning down at some point--when I finally got back to my room, I collapsed only to wake up a couple hours later and not be able to sleep most of the rest of the night--I wasn't sick, I just couldn't sleep.

So I eventually got up late Monday morning, took the metro to the Champs Élysée and picked up a nice sandwich on the way to the Palais de Congress.

I checked my email and noticed a message from Trond, sent last night, telling me that Brian and friends were waiting for me to show up for dinner. Though I did feel a bit bad for showing up late, I was suprised they were concerned about 10 minutes.

It wasn't till later, when I noticed people coming back from lunch an hour earlier than I expected, that I realized my problem--I'd adjusted my watch five hours forward when I arrived at Heathrow, but I'd forgotten to do it again when I arrived in Paris. I hadn't even realized they were in different time zones.

Oh well. Trond, Andy, Marc and I had a useful meeting Monday afternoon, and then a bunch of us had dinner together again at night. I turned down the wine this time.

The NFSv4 working group meeting this afternoon went pretty well, and there were some useful conversations afterwards.

I'm staying in room number 605. I could take the elevator, but the hotel has such cool stairs.

Last night I had dinner at a nearby Chinese place and then picked up a few comics at the friendly local comic book store.

Back at the hotel, I read a little then fell asleep, exhausted. I ended up waking up in the middle of the night and reading another hour or so before I could get back to sleep, but I felt reasonably well rested by the morning.

This morning I got a pain au chocolat at a nearby bakery then made the long walk up the Rivoli and the Champs Élysée to the Palais du Congress, where I registered for the IETF meeting and hooked up to the network.

The street across the Louvre was wall-to-wall tourist traps. I saw a clump of wild-haired japanese teenagers there exclaiming "kawaiiii!" over each others' purchases.

The sheer quantity of people walking up and down the Champs Élysée is impressive. The sheer quantity of everything is impressive, actually.

I didn't really manage to sleep at all on my 6:30pm to 6:30am flight to Heathrow, or on the subsequent flight to Paris, so by the time I got to the hotel, around 2pm, I was feeling more than a little strung out.

It's kind of amazing the degree to which Paris looks exactly like Paris....

Today I did a half-day at work, had a sandwich at Amers, then attempted a few errands, mostly failures. In particular I bought some new shoes, but when I got them home decided they didn't really fit right. Oh well.

Yesterday's flight home almost had to be diverted due to weather around Detroit, but in the end we landed in Detroit an hour late.

I got to work in time for donut hour this morning, and spent most of the day trying to catch up on email and investigate various small problems.

I leave for Paris day after tommorow and haven't quite figured out what needs to be done before then....

I walked across the Pont Alexandra to Gatineau. Everybody had told me to go to the Museum of Civilization, but I figured I'd walk around a bit first. Sara and I always make a point of stopping at local public libraries, so when I passed one on the Rue Laurier, I went in. Though the government building it was housed in was impressive, the library itself was quite small. But they had a surprisingly good collection of French comics, so I sat a while and a read a Lapinot ("Pichenettes") and a Monsieur Jean ("Femmes et enfants d'abord", which I thought was great).

I walked as far as Gatineau Park and realized I was getting pretty tired and it was time to be getting back. In the end a lot of the walk wasn't that interesting, and the sun was merciless. So I probably should have planned a little better.

Oh well. I ended the day with a pleasant dinner at the Byward Market and a bit more reading.

I checked out of the B&B after having a nice coversation over breakfast, with the owner and a Québécois lady and her nieces. Her recommendation for Paris was to go on top of everything: the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Tour Montparnasse, etc. And she said to look at the Louvre basement and the musée Cluny. He recommended the Printemps cafeteria, and said a Québécois accent, which he thought they found cute, was an advantage. Oh well.

From the B&B I went to the Lava Java and had a drink and checked email while I waited for my laundry.

Then I checked into the hostel and dropped off a few things, then went to the local juggling club meeting. It turned out to be a ways outside town. The bus there broke down so there was a delay waiting for another. It dropped me off near a huge shopping mall and a big freeway interchange. After navigating the resulting spaghetti, and losing another 20 or 30 minutes to a missed turn, I finally found the right park with a half hour of the meeting left. At least I got to do some club passing, and some of the local jugglers, friendly as ever, treated me to pizza at their house across the street.

I got a lift back to downtown, where I sat in Chapters and read a comic or two before going to bed.

Bryce wanted to discuss some stuff we hadn't gotten to in the BOF, so he, Tony, Chuck, Trond, Olaf, and I met at 10am to talk over NFSv4 testing. It was a fairly useful discussion.

The keynote was reasonably funny, but nothing terribly new.

Afterwards Trond and another Netapp guy and I went to a nice restaurant alongside the canal and had a very pleasant dinner.

I'd been looking forward to the final party at the Black Thorn, but by the time I got there I was pretty tired. It was very noisy and crowded. So I left to go sleep after a couple hours.

Whoever thought a 10am to 10pm schedule, with half hour breaks for lunch and dinner, was a good idea? By the end of the day I was pretty exhausted. I perked up when I saw a couple people juggling, though, and juggled with them while Trond and Chuck accosted Olaf after his game talk and whisked him off to some local establishment. I caught up with them later, but didn't have the energy to stay long.

One part of the program that did interest me was the AIO BOF. Possibly just because I didn't really know anything about it before. It would be interesting, in any case, to find ways to use it in nfsd.