Lunch with Dick and Barbara

After 18+ months I finally got together with Dick and Barbara for lunch. I have been somewhat remiss in getting back in touch since our time in the UK.

[For those of you not in the know: Dick was Rod in the USA and Rod was Dick in Europe, when EO Inc. and EO Europe were at their lofty heights back in the early 90s. Somewhere back then, I showed up in California and Dick took me from work to the train station to pick up Barbara and then we went to dinner in Palo Alto. The rest, as they say, is for memoirs but I must admit to some annoyance that none of this was mentioned in Jerry Kaplans book “Start Up”. ]
Any comment on this Dick?

Anyway, Dick and Barbara are heading to the UK for a few weeks and hope to visit my parents in between their hectic tour schedule. “One of the sets of parents that we try to annually visit.”, as Dick put it. I felt quite proud.

Turns out Dena, Zander and I will also be in the UK at the same time so it looks like we will all hook up. Afternoon tea in the Orchard Tearoom in Granchester near Cambridge anyone?

Kill or Cure

Loathed though I am to go on about my ailments, I thought this might amuse: As the week wore on the virus really took it out of me. As some of you will recall, it is now a medical fact that I get colds and the like worse than Mr. Average due to an overactive immune system and going to an allergist who put it on record. Facing that fact has allowed me to indulge in all manner of medications prescribed by the allergist to reduce the results of my aggressive immune system.

So, on Tues as my cough began to keep me awake big time, I opened one eye (the other being gummed shut by conjunctivitis/“Pink Eye”), reached for the high-tech cough syrup and poured myself the prescribed 2 teaspoonfuls from the nice little dosing cup they give away free with every bottle of medicine these days. The result was amazing: within 10 minutes my nose was clear and I ceased coughing. But there was more to come: 15 more minutes passed and I noticed that I could feel the cough syrup making its way though my digestive system with progressively more discomfort. I lay in bed fevered with “a Dicky Gut”, but not coughing at all, for a couple of hours as it passed through.

The next night around 12:00pm I was again faced with the decision of: cough all night or go for the cure. “Probably a fluke due to jetlag” I thought as I refilled the dosing cup and swallowed hard. It wasn’t! The same discomfort occurred with clockwork precision.

By Thurs evening, feeling not a whole lot better post cold-wise, I was tempted by “the cure” again. This time I figured if I took “the cure” early, around 8:00pm. I could go through the discomfort awake and actually sleep the rest of the night. At this point Dena, who while not directly experiencing the discomfort, had certainly experienced it secondhand, intervened and suggested I call her brother. I gave Gray the list of active ingredients and he quickly told me which one could be causing the problem. He suggested I find a cough mixture without said ingredient and all could be well. Dena went straight off the pharmacist and got me a new bottle of “the cure” sans said ingredient.

As I poured out 2 teaspoonfuls in the nice little dosing cup that the new “cure” came with, I was quite surprised at how small 2 teaspoonfuls looked in that new cup compared to the previous one. An optical illusion perhaps? Further investigation showed the previous dosing cup measured up to 2 Tablespoonfuls! Oops!

Forth Programming Jobs in Silicon Valley

http://www.forth.org/svfig/jobs.html

 

Says it all.

The last leg...Virus: 4 Rod: 3

I am sitting in the lounge of Virgin Atlantic Heathrow savoring the fact that this is the very last part of my 5 week travel marathon. I also have 3 bottles of shower gel so my final mission is accomplished.

By getting to the check-in early, I got myself an aisle seat on the exit row on the top deck, so things should be pretty smooth from here on in. Unfortunately the virus I got in Anaheim is having it's final go at me. So far I have managed to get where I want to be and do what I want to do despite it. However it had one last trick up it's sleeve- I now have conjunctivitis and a somewhat annoying sore throat. Bummer! I am sure this plane trips going to really make me feel real good.

Getting here was a little more entertaining than expected: Alexander wanted his peddle car. This car has been parked in my parents garage since 2002 when they bought it for him. He drives (peddles) it whenever he visits them. However, before I left he was insistent that I bring it back with me. This thing is not small so I knew getting it to the airport was going to prove a challenge. As it turned out, I had forgotten that there were no trains from Kettering to London on a Sunday before 7:38am making it impossible for me to get to the airport in time by train. Luckily my parents knew a local taxi firm and I got down the road in record time.

I must admit to feeling nostalgic for our stay in Cambridge last summer. This trip was filled with memories of our time with friends and family. My excellent evenings spent with Andy, Sarah, Andrew and Matt made me long to do it all again. The one good thing is that we are going to do a mini visit this summer. We will be arriving on August 9th and departing on August 25th which I hope will give us plenty of time to hang out with friends and family.

Beer Boat Bed

Arrived in sunny England mid afternoon and headed up to Cambridge. Quite why I ended up there when I need to be in Maidenhead today I think must have something to do with quantum theory.
Had a very pleasant evening sitting in Andy and Sarah's back garden eating a Vindaloo, drinking beer and talking b*ll*cks as usual. Cambridge was full, so I rented Zinfandel for the night and slept on the river- my only disturbance being a fisherman falling into the river about midnight. Actually it was more the sound of his mates dragging him out that caused the disturbance.

Tesco's Tour 2005

I am running out of the Lynx shower gel that I like so I guess it is time to go to Tesco's and replenish it.

 

Will be arriving in the UK on Tues June 21st late afternoon. I am coming from LA which is a first. It will be interesting to see what it does to the jet lag.

 

Mon: Goto UK

Tues: Dinner Andy and Sarah

Weds: Dinner Andrew and Gill

Thurs: Dinner Matt

Fri: Dinner Parents

Sat: Dinner/Beers with Clive

Sun: Go Home and take a shower.

Now appearing in Austin

I don't like flying when I have a cold. Invariably the descent blocks my ears and I end up partially deaf for days after. Today was no exception :-(

Austin is famous for its bats. They live under a bridge over a river in the downtown, en route to or from Mexico. I hung out with some other visiting ARM folk for dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel that overlooked said river and sure enough as darkness fell the sky was filled with thousands of bats. This can be a little disconcerting if you happen to be eating outside, but luckily almost all of them seemed to favor the other bank.

I just thought I would blog that my dinner colleagues were all hardware people and (perhaps therefore) blogging philisteins. Ha! Thou art blogged!

The best laid plans 2

It was all going to be so simple.
Show ends Thurs afternoon- Dena picks me up. We take a leisurely drive back home and arrive sometime Fri.
However...
I was asked to go to a meeting in Texas on Thurs.
Denas brother and family wanted to meet us at Bob and Martys house on Fri.
And a truck load of bananas overturned between Carlsbad and Anaheim separating Dena and Alexander from me for several hours.

At this point Dena would just like to point out for the record that she really really doesn't like LA traffic.

We got home in time for dinner.

Steak Out

They say: Feed a cold starve a fever- I decided I had a cold that needed feeding with steak!

My computer has a virus and so do I. Not the best thing to get during a tradeshow.

The best laid plans (1)

The best laid plans Part 1.
It was all going to be so straightforward. Having set the demo up at the show the night before my morning as follows:
7:00am Get up and print off Q&A and demo scripts
8:00am Train booth staff on demo
9:00am Show opens and I go back to my room to prepare for my presentation
10:15am Audio Visual and Mic check
10:30am Give presentation.
11:00am Chill out and have breakfast.
It all started to slide when I tried calling members of the booth staff who I wanted to train. No one was answering. By 8:55am I had called the hotels to find that the booth staff were not there. Finally one of them contacted me and told me he was at the airport but that was ok since he wasn’t doing anything on the booth until 12:00pm.

A quick investigation revealed that there were two booth schedules. The official one and the one which some engineering guy had written himself and sent round to his partners in crime. Unimpressed with this I asked the boss man if I should work the booth or prep for my presentation. He recommended the latter so I did that and left the engineering manager to fight it out with the booth captain- I could guess who was going to win. Chortle!

The man in the elevator

I decided to walk from the railroad station to the hotel. That was a mistake. LA on foot looks worse than LA from the safe confines of a steel box on wheels. During my 1 hour hike, I encountered 2 other people walking.

 

I checked-in and headed for my room. As I entered the elevator I recognized one of the occupants. "Didn't I meet you in an elevator in Korea just before Christmas?" I asked.

"Yes, please stop following me." he replied.

Riding the rails to Anaheim

Today, I am setting up a tradeshow in Anaheim. I left Dena and Alexander in Carlsbad and am taking the Amtrak to Anaheim. It's a great journey, right along the coast and the seats have power sockets for laptops. Right now we are being races by a speedboat!

Visiting Alex, Steve and Ian

420 miles later we arrived in Carlsbad and had dinner with Alex, Steve and Ian. Dena drove the whole way- which gave me time to take in the surrounding. I was really surprised the I-5 was only at two lane road (dual carriageway)  until it gets to Bakersfield. I had heard so much about it I imagined it to have at least 3 lanes, but it does not. LA was the usual crawl.

 

The Graduate!

 

Alexander�s final comments was �Mummy/Mommy my first show!� Hmm...I wonder. 

Then the whole class sang songs
 

Finally Alexander graduated amid tumultuous applause!
 

Then the ceremony got under way
 

Today Alexander �graduated� from Green Hills pre-school. At first there was some waiting.
 

Who am I?

I sometimes wonder what people think I do at ARM. I met some guy at a
recent trade show who told me that the word on the street was that I was
a God at ARM and could pretty much do what I wanted. Weird!
One way to find out who people think I am is to type: "Rod Crawford" ARM
in to Google. I did this and discovered I had a clone: Rod Crawford,
Curator of Arachnids at the Burke Museum. (He looks just like me).

Old Friends Reappear

Yesterday I was just saying to Dena that I hadn’t spoken to Dick since before we went to the UK. Today I got a call from him.  He tells me there is a Yiddish word for this kind of occurrence.

Doing Lunch Wherever

I bumped into Richard in Sunnyvale today. He was en route from Alabama to Orange County. We decided to have some Thai food in the Railway Tavern in Shelford near Cambridge in a couple of weeks. As he headed for the airport, the boss man turned up from Cambridge and we decided to have dinner on Sunday down by LA. It’s kind of fun to do lunch or dinner wherever you happen to be in the world.

Halfway though the evening Jenny realized that she had forgotten her veil so we offered to go back to her house (not the one with the Snake in it) and get it. Alexander was not keen on the idea at all, there being cake and profiteroles to be had. In a stroke of parental genius I explained to Alexander that a veil was similar to the attire bee keepers wear on their heads and how it kept bugs out. Since Jenny and Joe were going on honeymoon to Europe where there were lots of bugs right after the reception, she really, really needed the veil for protection. After a few seconds thought he was convinced and proceeded to accompany us to Jenny's house, get the veil off the bathroom door and present it to Jenny back at the reception. 

The reception was as lot of fun- Don't they look Fantastic! As soon the bridal couple arrived, Alexander made a point of telling Jenny that she had a snake in her house. 

After the ceremony it was time to head downtown to the wine bar for the reception. We headed off from the church quickly and I noticed that a couple of trucks were following us down the main highway. I think that they figured we must know the best way to the reception. On we drove, and as we headed out of town I noticed the last truck peel off and give up on following us just before we turned into Wal-Mart to buy some new batteries for the camera! 

Joe and Jenny's wedding was a most excellent affair. It took place in a Catholic Church across the road from Jenny's house (not the one with the Snake in it). The ceremony was based on Peruvian Shamanism and called upon the 6 spirits (North, South, East, West, Sky and Earth) to bless the couple. It was way cool and not Catholic in anyway! 

This is the house that Jenny built! I recall driving Jenny up to somewhere in Novato for a wedding and talking about exactly how she was going to go about building this house in the desert on the day Lady Di forgot her seatbelt. And here it is- Fantastic! It is made out of straw and a modern day kind of adobe (as I recall) and sits in the little town of Mimbres about 10 miles from Silver City.

When we went inside we heard a rusling noise [to be clear: not someone talking about Linux]. I turned to see the tail of a fairly large snake disappearing in to some glass fiber insulation. Alexander was not amused and vowed to tell Jenny that her house was inhabited by snakes as soon as he could.  

Koyaanisqatsi! 

I found out from Chef's wife what ails Silver City, and it is this: The town should really be called Copper City. Its main industry is open cast copper mining. When the value of copper goes up- happy times in town, but when it goes down- oh boy!
The derelict factory in the center of town that had every single window smashed in was part of the mining company. The people had raged against the machine that had brought them prosperity and then took it away so abruptly. 

After that we danced the night away! 

We had a most excellent Indian Buffet Rehearsal Dinner at the local country club. The first Indian meal the Chef (who turned out to be from Germany) had ever cooked. 

The Rehearsal Dinner had a "Groovy" theme- and here are Joe and Jenny looking appropriately Groovy Baby! 

The view from their homes was wonderful too. 

Dena was blown away too. 

Even Alexander found this place kind of magical. I was totally enthralled by it. 

The weird thing is that they only stayed here to 20 years and then moved on. Nobody knows why. 

In 1270 A.D. the Mogollon (pronounced Moggie-On) Indians took over the caves and built these dwellings. 

It was a pleasant one mile hike up to the caves and back. Halfway to the caves I met a bloke who was using a camera with film in it! He didn�t want to take too many shots and was cussing because we had just come round a bend that offered a splendid view. So I offered to take some pictures for him and email them to him. He didn't have pen, so I whipped out my PDA, put in his email address and wrote him a test email. He was a little surprised by this. 

These are the Gila (pronounced Hila) Cliff Dwellings where for 10 thousand years nomadic American Indians camped. I have wanted to see this place for over 15 fifteen years, and had no idea it would turn up on this trip. 

This is the Gila River about 44 miles North East of Silver City on some very Scottish Roads. The barber reckoned it would take us the best part of 90+ minutes to get there which it did. However, late for the Rehearsal Dinner cocktail reception I got us back to the hotel in an hour using both sides of the road as required. Dena was an excellent co-pilot. 

I figured the best way to get the lie of the land was to head downtown the barbers and get a haircut. The town seemed to be an eclectic mix of Hispanic workers, New Age people and bikers. There were more Harley Davidson�s per square mile here than there were Porsche�s in Los Gatos, all driven by old bearded guys without helmets. I figured this was where department store Santa�s go to vacation.