Holger’s weblog

What else happened in the US…

June 23rd, 2006

I just realized that I haven’t updated my blog since I wrote about Larry Wall at the ICCM. Well, that wasn’t the only reason I was there. But I certainly enjoyed that conference – Taylor University is a great location and the organizers of the conference really put a lot of effort into this, it’s a great way to meet tech people from lots of missions and find out about things they do, success stories and failures.

Anyway, right after the ICCM, we as OMers had our very own meeting, also at Taylor. Our international IT committee (IITC) met to discuss strategy and make decisions on a number of issues. While I am not a member of the committee, I have attended at least part of the last couple of meetings (which take place every 6 months) as an “expert” on our Linux development and some other things. It really can be fun sometimes… and really boring as well. I guess we had a relatively good mix this time and some good decisions were made that will influence the way our Linux development will go in the next months and years.

We got away from the IITC meeting a day early to drive back to my colleague Matt’s home in Gettysburg, PA (we, that’s Matt, our project manager Andrea, and me). We had the grand tour of the Gettysburg battlefields on Saturday afternoon, after catching up on some sleep in the morning (let me tell you, sharing a room with a heavy snorer for a week is not ideal). There are a few pictures of that in the gallery (or will be, soon), but if you don’t get all the explanations with them, it’s probably just a bunch of fields to you. Sunday we went to Matt’s church, which was great – he was finally able to prove to his pastors that we really do exist and he didn’t just make us up . Afterwards we went to Hershey’s chocolate world, which was quite interesting, before going back and having a nice Chinese dinner in Gettysburg.

Monday was all work again… we had to discuss our next system administrator training, which we plan to do in a different way this time. First time I ever thought that mindmap programs really are a good choice for certain tasks. In the afternoon we also had a look at the API for our new Linux management application, which is what we are currently working on. We’ll have to make a few changes now because we are moving away from the console based approach to a web interface (a result of the IITC decision to let us do it whichever way we want it). In the evening we had the chance to see Matt’s wife in a softball game… I think I’ll never understand what Americans find so exciting about baseball and softball, but I guess they have that problem with Europeans and football… err, I mean soccer. Nice Italian food that night in a restaurant near Harrisburg.

Tuesday was more of the same and by early afternoon I was about ready to go home. Which had to wait until Wednesday, though. Matt drove me to Dulles airport and I was there for my United flight 3 hours before departure. Now, is it just me or would it make sense to open more than 1/3 of the checkin desks when there is a two hour queue waiting to check in? Instead of then telling passengers who have waited like cattle for two hours that they are rather late and “really need to hurry” to get to the flight that has almost started boarding? So I wasn’t too excited about United’s service… which I wasn’t in general, but I guess flying Emirates earlier this year has pretty much spoilt any other airline for me anyway. So Thursday morning I was back in Germany and the rest of the time until a couple hours ago is a bit of a blur to me. I guess jetlag does that… but it seems to be getting better now. Monday will be back to my normal work schedule… not a bad thing, really. It’s nice to meet in person every now and then, but it’s equally nice to be back in my little home office.

Technorati : Gettysburg, ICCM, Linux, OM, Taylor University, meetings

Entry Filed under: News