tired in las vegas

i'm currently sitting on the floor in the las vegas international airport (the only power outlet i could find is nowhere near chairs and there are no chairs that i can move). my flight back home is delayed by an hour and half (so far). due to weather conditions in various places in north america, flight schedules have been totally messed up all day.

at least they have free wifi in the airport here =) i have checked my email, said 'hi' to some people on irc and figure i may as well blog quickly though it may be somewhat rambly and incoherent due to my state of tiredness.

last night j5 took me on the green line of boston's subway down to government square (or something like that) where dashboard confessional was playing a free show. it rained, which fit the emo music quite well. after getting pretty soaked in the warm drizzle we wandered a couple blocks to this tiny little irish pub. and i mean tiny. the 15 or so people in it made it feel jam packed. there was a sign behind the bar that said the capacity was 8000 persons. ha. ha.

apparently the very old bar (it has the most wonderfully worn burlwood bar) is being torn down to make way for posh condos. i find the trend of destroying our recent history in north america to be very disconcerting. we have lost touch with what things have value and which don't.

anyways, i started chatting with the 23 year old woman next to me at the bar who works for a property management company and who is going back to ireland, possibly to live. i discreetly exited the conversation and went to the jukebox to chat up random locals to give j5 a window of opportunity with our new friend. didn't quite work out but it was worth a try and i think they had a really good visit. who knows, maybe they'll meet up on some quiet boston afternoon and the saga will continue ....

once i got back to the hotel maddog invited me to join him and another usenix board member for some drinks and we talked about the community around linux and the "passing of the torch" from the traditional unix world to the new free and open source community. so i didn't get to sleep until quite late. and then i was up at 07:00 so i could shower, pack and make it to breakfast with ian murdock, j5 and maddog.

then we went to the 2nd day of the lsb event which was essentially a further and more free-form set of discussions expanding on the first day's topics. there was talk about working on making c++ abi compat a reality, the very cool conformance testing that linuxtesting.org is doing, providing a standard mechanism for software installation (think "install shield" that works, at least nominally, with your package database) and more ... i'll write up a proper summary when i'm not drop dead tired, but for now if you're interested you can get a decent overview here including several of the presentation slides.

a voice just announced that my flight is 15 more minutes late now. and a couple minutes ago when they were putting the "yeah, he's got his passport and it matches his ticket" stamp on my boarding pass they thought that i wasn't on the flight (computer glitch apparently). flying sucks.