No Content, No Fuss: Category usa

Sushi, Seattle and Seahawks

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:21:00 +0100

So I'm hanging at the XenSource Redmond office for a few days, and munching on delicious sushi at Flo, and it turns out that the dude behind us was none other than Matt Hasselbeck! It seems like only two years ago that I was cheering on the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Bus as they owned the Seahawks.

Unfortunately, I only realised my brief brush with celebrity on our way out of the restaurant, which also probably saved me from saying something stupid to him. As if! But anyway, the, err, moral of this post is that you must check out Flo Sushi if you're in Seattle and eat the spider roll, it's awesome.

Continent Hopping

avsm — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:55:09 +0100

I'm back in Los Angeles, just in time for the one week in Southern California when it rains. Ah well ... at least it's warm! Had a good flight over on Air New Zealand's business class cabin, which had fantastic service much better than British Airways' Club World. Meanwhile, here is a short selection of photographs taken over the last few days.

Evening supper at Selwyn Formal Hall

Hanging with Nick and Jasper on High Street Kensington

3000 miles later in Costco, Anand poses with a Bowflex

Enough travelling already

avsm — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:20:36 +0100

Sitting in the New York JFK United lounge (which incidentally, has free wifi). Spent a great week in Princeton with Sandy Fraser at Fraser Research - full coverage available in Dave "blogthief" Scott's blog.

Ordered a Cyclades TS-800 to act as serial console server for the Flirble and Recoil machine clusters. Hopefully this should cure the woes with remote management of x86 servers (why, oh why, can't they have something as cool as Sun LOM?)

Living it up "Top Gun" style

avsm — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 14:34:36 +0100

Just returned from an excellent trip to Los Angeles, where I checked out Anand and Jyothsna's brand new house in Camarillo. I picked a good weekend to show up, as the Kush Games company picnic was on that weekend, resulting in a great few hours of beach volleyball being played. Ahh, maybe California isn't so bad after all...

And on returning to Cambridge, I discover that the latest in-thing from the local crazy Canadian is improving grip strength by doing extreme pullups with some ridged climbing holds slung over a fire escape. Check out the exciting pictures of Alex Ho and myself in action below! There is hot competition between Kieran Mansley and myself, mainly because my hard-earnt benchpress-specialised pecs only get in the way for pullups!

Anand shoots it low, I take it high!

3000 miles later, hanging out in Cambridge

Alex hangs with zen-like calm

Decent Wifi in Heathrow at last

avsm — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 12:23:04 +0100

Sitting in Heathrow Terminal 3 waiting to board a flight to Los Angeles... it's nice to see that the airport finally has low-cost WiFi access (at least in Terminal 3). It would be have been great to have this when I was flying pretty much every day with NetApp; it must be a great way to milk money out of thousands of business travellers sitting around with nothing else to do for hours!

And Princeton comes to a close...

avsm — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 19:55:00 +0100

Ah well, just finished cleaning up my desk at Fraser Research - it's been a lot of fun here! From rafting on the Delaware to supping fine Brazilian cuisine in New York, and of course most excellent drinks from Small World Coffee. But it'll be nice to get back to Cambridge for the regular Sunday afternoon ostrich burgers as well :-)

Everybody's kernel hacking

avsm — Fri, 11 Jul 2003 00:17:00 +0100

Had a great time in Las Vegas at SAM 03. The conference wasn't up to much apart from a few interesting papers in our session (one on behaviour-based authentication from some guys at Reading was funny and innovative). We did however hire a car and have a really fun day wandering around the desert checking out the natives.
Back in Princeton, the work's pretty hectic. Been stuck deep in the innards of the FreeBSD kernel for the last few days, ripping out bits of code to test out our cunning new networking idea. We got it to work (late) last night, so now it's the spit and polish phase; the most painful ...
On the OpenBSD front, I finally committed the gcc static bounds checker patch I've been playing with for a few months. It found hundreds of really obviously bad bounds to functions such as strlcpy(3) and sscanf(3) in the source and ports trees. The local compiler gurus (Scotty and Sharpy) have suggested various ways to improve it such as interval analysis, so I might hack on that if a burst of free time holds me to ransom any time soon.
PS: T3 was fun!

Seb gets married at long last

avsm — Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:57:00 +0100

I went back to the UK for the weekend to attend Seb's reception ... a fun time was to be had by all - Nick took a bunch of wicked photographs which he'll upload soon (hint hint). I'm back in Princeton now, but going off to Las Vegas tommorrow to attend The 2003 International Conference on Security and Management along with Rich Sharp.
Update: Actually in Vegas now, and posting from a random net cafe here ... the conference sucks, but we're having a great time checking out the "sights"; just rented a car to drive out to the desert and check out some gorgeous sand!

Reporting from the armpit of America

avsm — Sat, 07 Jun 2003 19:14:00 +0100

I'm finally in Princeton, after a crazy rush to get a visa (an adventure all in itself), and then the equally crazy rush to get out of my room in Robinson. Still settling in here, but work at Fraser Research is proving to be a lot of fun. I even found a Capoeira class just down the road (they were practising on the street when Scottie and I wandered past). Gonna try it on Monday ... !
Pumping beats: Prologue (Hybrid) from the album "ayu-mi-x" by Hamasaki Ayumi