Roland’s Blog

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be traveling to Cambridge next month.  I haven’t been to the UK in nearly 10 years, and so I’m in the market for an electrical adapter, since even after powertop’s best efforts, I still need to charge my laptop occasionally.  So I’m looking for something I can use between a North American plug and a UK receptacle.  Ideally the adapter would be neither impossible tight nor prone to coming out, and wouldn’t fall apart until after my trip.  I don’t need any gold-plated active phase skew compensation or anything like that, though.

Any suggestions?  Thanks….

This past Thursday was Bike to Work Day here in Silicon Valley, and while biking to work I thought about why I really like living in the Bay Area while other people seem to hate it. See, I pretty much never drive to work: I work from home three days a week and on the days where I actually go to the office, I ride my bike or light rail.

One of the main complaints I hear about the Bay Area is the traffic, and I can’t disagree really. But the simple solution is just to avoid driving. As I said, I bike to work, and I live downtown where I can walk to almost everywhere else I want to go. When I do get in my car it’s usually to go to the beach or Tahoe or the redwoods or something like that, and living near that stuff is the whole point of being in the Bay Area.

The other usual complaint about the Bay Area is that it’s too expensive, and I guess I can’t argue with that. But pay is higher here too, and the advantage of having a 1300-square-foot house is that I don’t have to worry about finding enough stuff to fill my rooms.

Anyway, if you don’t like the Bay Area, please don’t move here (or move away if you’re already here). We have enough people without you haters and your negative attitude….

I’m back from a little more than two weeks of relaxing vacation. I didn’t check my work email once, so if you sent me an email @cisco.com, please understand if it takes me a few days to reply:

$ from|wc -l
5645
$ ls -lh /var/mail/rdreier
-rw------- 1 rdreier floppy 61M 2007-01-04 07:38 /var/mail/rdreier

davej’s recent post reminded me of a story from The Game. The Game, BTW, is a very amusing book about learning to pick up women – if you haven’t read it, I recommend it (even if you’re not single).

Anyway, there’s a scene in the book where Style, our hero who happens to have a shaved head, is at a club, and he has a phenomenally easy time meeting women. Everything is working for him, and he’s feeling great about himself, until just as he leaves, the hostess says, “Aren’t you Moby?”

But I don’t think anyone is going to mix up davej and Moby.

After a smooth trip and suprisingly faster-than-scheduled trip, I’m safely in Ottawa, ready for the Kernel Summit and OLS. If you see me, say hello (of course I would expect you to do that even if you don’t read my blog).

By the way, the network in my hotel seems to have a broken DNS server that doesn’t respond to AAAA requests. This makes Firefox take forever to do anything, because it tries an IPv6 lookup that has to time out before it finds a site’s regular IPv4 address. However, I discovered the network.dns.disableIPv6 configuration option – setting this to true cured my browsing problems.