At First Light

I occasionally see this guy during my commute. He always has the same distinctive headgear. I wonder if he is a RHEL guy or if he fancies Fedora? Or perhaps he is just a man who likes a little sartorial flair. You decide.

20 years ago today I received an urgent phone call to my hotel room in Sapporo Japan. It was from a young college student I knew as Son Chin, and she was very distraught. "They're killing everyone! Just killing them!" she shrieked. "Killing who?" I asked. I then listened as she explained that her friends back in Beijing were being slaughtered by the government for their participation in democracy protests at Tiananmen Square.

My son asked for a new laptop to his birthday. I had a better idea: renovate his mother's castoff Acer 5100 widescreen from underperforming Windoze machine into a screaming hip Ubuntu system.

I downloaded the latest Ubuntu .iso file and was able to figure out how to build an install disk. Then I switched the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM and had the system up and running 30 minutes later.

The machine was snappy, very stable, and the desktop environment was very intuitive. All kinds if useful software came pre-installed, including OpenOffice and Firefox.

Last night I completed my first trip from Boston to San Francisco on the fledgling Virgin America Airlines. Overall, service was decent and the price was insanely great. I would do it again. But there were a few hitches.

My flight should have taken 6.5 hours. It took 8.5.

Congratulations to my former colleagues at Acquia for releasing the 2009 roadmap. It's great to see all the stuff we spent so much time planning actually get on the rails to delivery.

I spent some time yesterday morning taking photographs of Boston. It was a cold day out on the town, but I came back with some decent shots. The full gallery is here. Enjoy.