For the first time in two years, we here in the Deep South awoke to a blanket of snow on the ground. This was a fast moving storm that came through, dumping 1.5 inches of snow at our house between 0200 and 0500 this morning. Before 0200 it was cold, but completely dry. We went out and played some early on and had a great time. Photos are posted in my photo gallery. We’ll go out again later, I’m sure. It’s quite beautiful if a bit hard because it was a very wet snow which then re-froze. Snowballs made from this snow to the cheek actually hurt!

This morning I was using my Win2k system hosted by VirtualPC, connected up to the office <acronym title="Virtual

How cool is this? I’m sitting at my departure gate at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and they have high speed WiFi deployed all over the place. You plug in your wireless card, connect to the local WayPort network and, to quote Emeril, BAM! You’re connected. The first time you try to browse to a website, you get hijacked to the WayPort site and are presented with the option of buying a connection. I was prepared to be told $15/hour or something else outlandish, but it’s only $6.95/day, which isn’t that bad. Especially when you’ve got over two hours to wait for your flight. And they don’t seem to have any restrictions on what you can do. I’m logged into AIM, MSN Messenger, Y! Messenger and IRC, I’ve used ssh to get to one of my machines, and I’ve checked and sent email, all with no problems. Very nice!

I’ve run into Matsumoto-san several times so far this weekend, but each time only managed a sheepish ‘Hi,’ or something equally lame. The frustrating thing is that I’ve been practicing my Japanese for weeks in preparation for meeting him yet every time I came within speaking distance, I chickened out.

Well, finally tonight I worked up my courage, and as Matsumoto-san and I were walking alongside each other in the corridor, I leaned over and said:

Kon ban wa, Matsumoto-san. ‘Joey Gibson’ to moushimasu.

Matsumoto-san laughed heartily and responded with

Jouzu desu!

or something along those lines. He speaks very fast. Anyway I, now feeling a bit more confident, followed up with

Nihongo ga sukoshi hanashimasu, demo mada jouzu ja’arimasen.

To which he said

Iie, juubun jouzu desu.

Which made me very happy.

Arigatou gozaimasu, Matsumoto-san.

It’s 17:37 on Saturday and I’m sitting with some new friends at a little coffee shop called Flight Path, which is about 2 miles from the conference hotel. The reason we are here is because it has free wifi! I’m extremely tired and was going to take a short nap, but the lure of the network was too great, and I gave in. Alas, my rest will have to wait.

I’ve been suffering at 24.0 kbps for the past two days so this is a welcome change. We’ve got to head back for dinner in a few minutes and then a big presentation by Matz (the creator of Ruby). It should be fun.

Ed. Note: I flew from Atlanta, GA to Austin, TX this morning and I would have written this in-flight, but the guy in front of me reclined his seat and since there is only 4.23 inches of space between one row of seats and another on most commercial airliners (unless you pay the amazingly high price for First Class) I was unable to use my laptop. Thus I composed this missive in my head and am now commiting it in writing at my hotel. Here’s what I would have written:

SWEET MOTHER OF ABRAHAM! That was the roughest take-off I’ve ever experienced. There was a serious front coming into Atlanta this morning and we had very high winds. Driving to the airport my car was buffetted all over the road, and then the airplane was buffetted as we tried to take off. My compliments to the pilot for not crashing. Did I mention that the winds were amazingly high? Then we get to Austin, TX two hours later and have an equally rough landing. At least we did land, which is good. You always want take-offs and landings to occur in pairs…

One funny thing happened before we even took off. The pilot comes over the intercom telling us about the flight that will begin any second. He ends with “… and we’ll get you to San Antonio as fast as we can.” Of course we’re not going to San Antonio, we’re going to Austin. Puzzled looks are being passed around the cabin when the pilot comes back on and says “One correction. We will be going to Austin, not San Antonio. I was there a few times yesterday and it stuck in my head. Sorry for the confusion.” That was good for a laugh.

Unlike at the Atlanta airport where getting from the plane to the baggage carousels is essentially a 5k walk, at the Austin airport it was about a 50 yard walk from the jetway to the baggage carousels. And it was all above ground! In well lit corridors, with no need of moving sidewalks.

So I go to the Enterprise rent-a-car stand and confirm my reservation for a full-size car. I then proceed up to the area where you get your car, and after a five minute wait they ask me if I’d like to take a brand new, never before rented, Ford F-150 quad cab truck as a free upgrade for having to wait. Hmmm, let’s see. I can keep waiting for a Grand Am, or I can take the big manly truck. Hmmm… OK! So here I am in Texas, driving a big-ass Texas sized truck. Ooo yeah.

So why am I in Austin? For the Third International Ruby Conference, of course! It starts tomorrow, but I came in a day early so I wouldn’t miss any of the early sessions on Friday morning. This is going to be fun and I will be blogging about interesting things that happen as the conference progresses.

Not that I’ll be blogging quickly. The conference hotel has no high speed Internet access, and I’m sitting here on a 24.0 bpskbps dial up connection. Blech!

First of all, I’d like to give a big F@#K YOU to the cretins who smashed our Jack-o-Lantern Friday night. We spent quite a bit of time Thursday night carving this thing and then to have some worthless little punk destroy it really stinks. Next year I’ll be sitting on the porch handing out candy while holding a baseball bat… This is why I generally hate Halloween.

On the bright side, Thomas had a great time Trick-Or-Treating. He went as the Red Power Ranger, Tammy was a pumpkin and I was a Viking. Did you know that big, furry guantlets really make your forearms sweat? Anyway, we walked around our neighborhood for a while, with Thomas filling his Power-Ranger-Head goody bag with tons of candy. We then drove over to our friends’ house where Thomas helped them pass out candy to kids coming over. I think he enjoyed giving out the candy as much as he did getting it.

So yesterday, after seeing the excellent film Brother Bear, Tom and I are out in the front yard throwing a little balsa wood glider and having a great time, when it happened. Thomas sat down in the grass and a few seconds later complained that the grass was itchy. He jumped up and ran to the front porch and started howling. I ran towards him and as I got closer I could see that his legs were covered in black ants! I dropped to my knees and started wiping the ants off of him. Once he was ant-free we went inside and started pulling his clothes off to make sure there were none inside; fortunately there weren’t any. He’s screaming his head off at this point, so we head upstairs and put him in a warm bath with some Aveeno to try to soothe his skin. After a while in the tub, with me (outside the tub) playing Pok

This weekend was the annual Stone Mountain Highland Games and I was there both days. Yesterday Thomas went with me and we had a grand time. We watched lots of pipe band performances and heavy athletics competitions. Thomas was so moved watching large men throwing telephone poles for the Caber Toss that he wanted to partake in the children’s games. He got to heave a large rock, toss a mini-caber, and heave a heavy weight on a chain. He loved it!

Around 3:30 pm he decided he wanted to take the cable car to the top of the rock, but the parking lot around the lift was so full that they had cut off access. I said we’d try again another day, to which Thomas replied that he’d like to walk to the top. I said ‘ok’ and we headed for the trailhead. The trail is something less than a mile each direction, mostly up, of course, on the way up. I didn’t think he would make it, but he did!!! We made it up in a little over an hour. Of course we had lots of little rest stops along the way, both up and down, but we made it. We hung out at the top and watched the cable cars go up and down for a while and then headed back down. When we reached the bottom he looked up at me and said “Let’s go up again!!” We didn’t.

I went back out alone today so I could visit the shops and spend more time listening to the pipe bands. I ended up buying two new whistles, a Feadog brass D and an Oak in C. I have two other D whistles, but they each have their own quirks and problems. The C whistle I have, a Clark has never really sounded great and is way too breathy. These two new whistles sound really nice. But what sounded the best was the Sweetheart D, which is a wooden whistle. O my. This thing has one of the most clean, crisp, sublime tones I’ve ever heard. The $145 price tag prohibited me from getting it today, but perhaps I’ll snag it for Christmas…

Today my son, Thomas, turned five years old!!! I can’t believe it. He’s getting so big. And so incredibly cool. For his birthday, among other things, we got him (and me) two pre-constructed decks of

I went bowling today with my wife & son and my folks. I love bowling, but I don’t actually get to do it that often. I love bowling, but I hate the bowling alleys because they are generally so full of cigarette smoke that I can’t breathe while there, and I come out smelling like a damned ashtray. But today we were there during a no-smoking period, which was nice.

Anyway, we had a good time, but I’ve been noticing over the last several times that I’ve bowled, that parents don’t seem to be teaching their children any lane courtesy. You know the “if someone is already poised to bowl on an adjoining lane, you must wait” type of courtesy. Or the “don’t hang around the foul line dancing around like a loon while your ball hurtles down the alley” type of courtesy. These youngsters today don’t know anything about that. They grab a ball and run up to the foul line with little regard for those on either side of them. It’s really annoying. Maybe I’m expecting too much, but when I was a kid and went bowling a lot, I was taught to be courteous of the bowlers on the adjoining lanes. Maybe bowling alleys need to make new bowlers take a course before they can take to the lanes the first time. 🙂