Roland Joffe’ 1984 movie The Killing Fields tells the story of Dith Pran and an american journalist who tries to help him. It’s one of my all time ‘favourites’. Though I use that word with caution because it’s such a moving movie of a terrible episode in humanities history. The movie, and it’s particularly haunting soundtrack by Mike Oldfield has always stuck with me.
Sadly Haing S Ngor the actor who portrayed Dith Pran died in 1996 apparently the result of a homicide.
In one of those small world moments - James is a former colleague of mine from Digital Australia. Though at the time we were working together he was living considerably closer to Sydney.
The mesh networking in OLPC XO is one of the features that I think sets it apart from some of the other ‘cheap’ notebooks that have become common recently. We bought an OLPC XO for Sylvie at Christmas in part because we felt it as a good donation to a worthy cause and also so she could have a computer of her own to interact with. The Mesh networking is not something we’ve tried since I don’t have a second machine or any of the other requisite hardware (and we have pretty ubiquitous WIFI at home too).
I’m in Silicon Valley this week getting acquainted with the rest of my team at the VMware offices in Palo Alto.I went out for dinner tonight with two old friends from Mountain View and ran into Dave Johnson - a former colleague from Be ! Dave and I were evangelists together 10 years ago at Be. Dave gave up the tech lifestyle a few years ago and is now involved in various pieces of political activism at the Commonweal Institute, mostly working on campaigns and the like, most recently for Bill Richardson’s presidential bid. Dave also has his own blog Seeing The Forest.
The family has been taking a ski vacation up at Smugglers Notch Vermont this week. The kids have been in ski school pretty much the entire week (a day off one day for a ‘break’) and have improved immensely !
I decided though that it wasn’t fair that the children were the only ones enjoying something so new and fun (and painful, and cold so I took a telemark lesson this afternoon.
Telemark uses a ski that’s generally very similar to a regular Alpine/Downhill ski, where it’s different however is that the binding is more like a cross country ski in that the heel is not fixed down but free to lift off the ski (sometimes Telemark is also called Free Heel Skiing).
I was a little apprehensive, I’ve not had a lesson for about 20 years (I’ve been alpine skiing for about 27 years). I wasn’t really that excited about lots of faceplants into cold snow. But it was a small investment (with a discount badge I have here at Smuggs it was 20 dollars for the lesson and 20 dollars for the rental skis and boots).
However I was pleasantly surprised, it wasn’t as difficult as I expected. It’s certainly not the same as Alpine downhill skiing, but almost all of the skills I’ve acquired over the years in balancing and understanding (feeling) where my weight is on the ski paid off. I took a few tumbles (3 or 4 I think), but only one decent faceplant. I’m also not too sore - if you’ve ever watched someone telemark skiing it’s an amazingly fluid but surprisingly active motion of rising and lowering and bending your knees as you turn. If they’re good it’s quite beautiful - I’m pleased with my progress but I think it’ll be some time before I’m that good ! I’m a little stiff, but my knees are actually fine, most of the soreness (and it’s mild) is in my quads, nothing worse than a very strenuous day of skiing with a lot of holding a tuck position.
Tomorrow I’ll telemark again (so as to try and capitalize on my lesson), and also so that I’m skiing with the children about as well as they ski !
Sylvie’s been complaining of a ‘wobbly front tooth’ for a few months but it’s really not been that loose. However in the past 4-5 days it’s gotten visibly looser. I had expected that yesterdays sledding in the snow would have had enough trauma to knock it out. Which if it had happened would have been very traumatic for every one since we would have need to hunt through the snow to find it for the Tooth Fairy.
However it actually came out very calmly in school today - and of course she was very excited to tell me and show me when I got home. Right now she’s concerned that the Tooth Fairy won’t find it in the gold jewelry box beside her bed - so she wrote a note (to make sure the fairy didn’t need to wake me up and ask me where it was) and attached it to the box.
I’m still trying various options for getting to my new job - recently I’ve been driving (which frankly sucks) but once I get back from vacation in a couple of weeks I’ll switch to taking the train (VMware covers the cost of the train or a monthly parking pass).
Of course if I do feel like driving I could perhaps consider something like this :
Remember Jeremy Clarkson is 6 feet 5 inches tall - he’s unable to sit in his favourite car (the original 60’s Ford GT40) with the doors closed because his head sticks out the top of the roof and the gullwing doors won’t close over the top !
Harbin is a city in the far north east of China (Heilongjiang province), it’s actually further north than Vladivostok. I visited Harbin twice in 1996 when working in Hong Kong. My first visit was in April just as the city came out of deep freeze, but my second was in December (just a couple of days before Christmas) when the mercury was really dropping. If I recall correctly it was 10 to 15 degrees below zero farenheit (-23 to -26 degrees celsius), actually not too bad for Harbin winter temperatures and luckily not windy (it’s so flat around there that 30 - 40 mph winds are not uncommon and they really drop the effective temperature).
Unfortunately I wasn’t there at the right time for the Ice Lantern Party (probably a good thing - even 11 years ago it was popular enough to sell out all the tourist/business hotels in the city), and the snow and ice world didn’t start until more recently.
I’d like to try and go back sometime - I’m sure the city has seen some remarkable changes over the last decade (horse drawn carts were still very common when I was there, even though I was installing a multi-million dollar computer system for the local phone company). Harbin also has some fascinating architecture thanks to it’s Russian influences (most people in the street would try and speak Russian to me - it was more common to see a white Russian than a white European).
For some reason the poor weather this year seems to like to happen on Mondays ! I think this is the third or fourth Monday that we’ve had either snow or really bad icing !
Today’s Nor’easter is dumping several inches of snow in the Boston area - you can see some of my pictures here. It’s also of course a snow day for the children ! Even better Michele left last night for a trip to Europe (she ran out early to get ahead of the storm - she was supposed to leave tonight), so I get to clear the drive on my own whilst making sure the children don’t get too hurt sledding down the front garden.
The snow from the past storms had mostly melted - but there definitely still a few piles both on the edge of our drive and the rest of the neighbourhood. It’s supposed to stay coldish this week, and there’s another storm forecast for the end of the week - whether it’s rain or snow remains to be seen 8-).
Avid has been a great 21 months - but VMware gives me an opportunity to do something a little different. It’s both exciting and a little ’scary’ at the same time. I’m still going to be writing software but no longer will it be products for creative people in audio, video or 3D - which was what I’ve been doing for the last decade.
The position at VMware gives me an opportunity to work on some technically very challenging issues and improve some skills (it’s not easy for me to say much at this point about precisely what I’ll be doing). It’ll also be interesting because I’m not moving back to California (VMware’s head office is in Palo Alto), Michele & I and the children like it too much here to move again ! VMware has a pretty large office in Cambridge right across the street from MIT, in fact it’s literally across the street from Michele’s office at MIT. Although there are over 100 employees in the Cambridge location (and vacancies for more to join the rest of my team and my manager are in the Palo Alto office which will be something new for me too. There’ll be some trips back and forth as part of my work - so people in the Bay Area I’ve not seen for some time (particularly in the valley and south bay) might get some visits !
I’ll try and blog some more about what it’s like starting a new job in the coming weeks.
We had a snowstorm yesterday afternoon. It started snowing around 1:00pm, by the time I got home at 2:30 we had 2-3 inches. Since I haven’t yet invested in a snow blower I went out again at 4:30 and cleared about another 3-4 inches of snow. It finally stopped around 9:30 last night. Measuring the snow on the patio table this morning it looks like we had 11 1/2 inches of snow in the 8 1/2 hours. Today’s a nice sunny day (cold this morning - but supposed to warm up).
Saturday night/Sunday morning is supposed to be another fairly large storm, and probably not so pleasant with a mix of snow -> ice -> rain and probably high winds too. Unlikely to be anywhere near so photogenic.
so I took a 
