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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.

I started the day with Greg K-H's USB driver workshop, where he stepped us through developing a device driver for a simple USB thermometer. The thermometers were donated by the company that made them, so I still have mine--what can I find to do with it?

The Mexican place where Trond treated Chuck and I to dinner was pretty good, but the service was a little slow, and we barely made it to the 7pm NFSv4 BOF on time. Most of the BOF ended up being taken up by complaints about krb5 being too hard to set up. Boring.

None of the talks were that exciting to me today. Martin Bligh talked about surviving out of memory situations--NFS and iSCSI, for example, both may need to allocate memory in order to handle writes, so if the reason we're writing is in order to free memory, we can easily deadlock. It seems to a hard problem that no one's really worked on enough yet, but I suppose it's at least good to know that people are aware of it....

This is the third year I've attended OLS. Every time they've had an opening night reception. They always attempt to have a couple of speakers, too. But this is in a big evenly lit room containing a bunch of people who haven't seen each other recently, with plenty of drinks and snacks. The result--people snacking and talking throughout the speeches--is completely predictable. Will the organizers ever learn anything from this?

Afterwards Trond, Olaf and I met Beepy at a nearby bar. The only other people there were the bartender and her mom and dad. They all had Russian accents, and there was a bunch of Russian memorabilia on the walls that I didn't look at closely. Beepy showed us some of his photographs after the mom helped him hook up to the wireless network.

Tuesday morning I did my laundry and packed, then caught the airport shuttle at noon. By 4 I was in Ottawa.
I took the bus downtown, registered for the meeting, had a quick dinner, then stopped by my bed and breakfast (the "Auberge King Edward") to meet the owner and pick up keys.

I wandered around the nearby university campus a bit, then picked up a couple comic books and went to the opening night party for a while.

I managed a personal record for light packing:

• Just three days' worth of clothes, including what I'm wearing--I'll just have to do some laundry. The "Lava Java" laundromat/coffee house a couple blocks from the B&B looks like a good place to hang out.
• No shaver--I'm buying disposables and learning how to use them. I've actually only used an electric shaver before, so that's kind of an adventure.
• No rain gear--if it starts raining, I get wet. I may have to do some shopping while I'm here--my only rain jacket has actually stopped repelling water.
• Only disposable reading material--I brought a few old New Yorkers to catch up on during my flight, then threw them out at the Ottawa airport.

So I get to just use my regular backpack, and it's not even much more full than usual. If I can do the same for my Paris trip, I'll be happy.

Sunday I alternated debugging, watching Truffaut's "Vivement Dimanche", and vacuuming.

At the end of the day, the carpet was cleaner, I'd fixed a bug or two, and actually seen the movie most of the way through twice. The DVD jacket describes the movie as a Hitchcock tribute, but I've disliked most of the Hitchcock I've seen. His movies all seem misanthropic to me. "Vivement Dimanche"/"Confidentially Yours" is more humane--the characters are sort of absurd, but in a way that's funny and human instead of creepy and cold.

Today I tied up some loose ends at work, ran an errand or two, and came home to get stuff together for tommorow's trip to Ottawa. Sara got home from Maryland around 7.

Saturday morning brought dramatic weather that took out the power for a couple hours. (sample thunder claps for your amusement).

It was still raining at 2, but without Sara at home I was starved for company and determined to go for juggling. After missing the bus downtown, I walked, and wound up getting more wet from the perspiration than the rain--it was hot!

The rain had kept everyone else away, so I juggled on my own for the while, and managed some fairly good Alberts, including a run of four in a row. Ajit showed up eventually, and afterwards we had a pretty good lunch at sushi.come. We then met Wendy at Borders and went back to my place for dinner and monopoly.

I hadn't played monopoly in years. I'd remembered it as kind of a long game, but I assume that was because I'd just been a slow player as a kid. But now I'm reminded that it really is just inherently a long game--if no one gets a monopoly, it settles down into a long slow game of attrition.

I stopped by the library after work Thursday and got some movies, including Purple Rain, which I started Thursday. It's a strange movie--no surprise--but I enjoyed it. With a lot of the people playing themselves, the acting is awkward at times, but sometimes it's actually pretty good. The music is mostly identical to that on the soundtrack album, which doesn't sound particularly "live" to me, so it's odd to see them on stage pretending to play it. The performances are kind of fabulous in their own way, though.

Friday at work I just wasn't managing to understand the things I really need to understand, and I found myself getting kind of angry at myself.

So I gave up around 6 and hung out in the library a while. There was a band playing in the basement, but something about the room just made them seem loud and screechy. I listened for probably less than a minute and then left and came home to watch the second half of Purple Rain over dinner.