Airport managers seem to agree that wireless Internet access is too expensive to provide as a public service similar to wastebaskets, toilets, and drinking fountains in the US. Here at Schiphol the offer is 30 minutes for 6 euros. It would cost me more to connect for the duration of this layover than for a month of DSL through the ISP at home. I decided not to buy the right to download all my work email.
This trip has been tiring, one week in the Bay Area, then another week in Austin. As all trips over to the US this one was an occasion to catch up face to face with many folks I usually only contact through email and phone calls. Yet this trip was different, too. Some of the colleagues with whom I spent the first five months of this year in Austin have been laid off, including David with whom I swapped cars and houses. Also, until November 15 I more or less have two jobs.
Sun management made the decision a couple of weeks ago to consolidate Directory engineering in Grenoble, France. I have worked with the team there since 2001. The influx of additional responsibilities being a big challenge that we need to meet, I told the newly appointed Director of Engineering, Alban, and his management team that I was ready to help them however I could. Alban and his team suggested I shift from the Identity pubs manager role I had taken only a few short months ago this summer to lead the Integration Engineering team for Directory Services.
It will be hard to fill the shoes of the leaders who went before us, but we have to succeed. The old “standing on the shoulders of giants” idea is true in this case. Sun has great Directory software these days, from our extensive Directory Server Enterprise Edition offer to the nascent community we support for OpenDS. We are poised in particular with data distribution in DSEE and OpenDS to give customers an edge in LDAP write performance that was not available a few years ago. (Directories were built mainly to serve lots of reads. Today we can sustain lots of writes, too, at the same time we provide high availability. That makes LDAP into a neat, hierarchical/object database.)
That does not mean we can kick back and live off existing success. So I have been doing both jobs as best I can while traveling. Get up early and work until late, when caffeine can no longer keep me smart enough to get things done right, or visit with people I need to see. I slowed on the weekend, doing only 4-6 hours each day last weekend. Not enough stamina to work intelligently if I do not get some rest.
My hope was to get back home early enough today, Sunday, to recover for next week. Air France workers are striking, however. The Houston-Paris flight yesterday turned out to be cancelled by the time I arrived from Austin. Spent 3 1/2 hours getting another route and baggage straightened out in Houston. The alternate route adds about 7 hours to the trip.
Managed to sleep several hours on the flight to Amsterdam. Need to go see my doctor to renew the fluoxetine prescription. This stretch would be impossible while battling depression.
Three flights so far, a fourth to go. Austin to Houston, Houston to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Frankfurt, now Frankfurt to Lyon coming up. This wing of the Frankfurt airport smells like stale tobacco smoke. This despite two tiny smoking areas. Trouble is, each area is literally jammed with smokers puffing away. The ventilation system must be undersized compared to the demand.
Watching the news in German. It has been a long time. My German is good enough still to understand, but holding a conversation would be out of the question.
Someone here has a peer-to-peer network set up called “Free public wifi.” The wild west.
Figments of a lack of imagination