Weeknotes 124

This week I’ve been from London to Seattle to Portland, then from Portland to Seattle back to London. I’m tired and the volume is turned down on everything in my brain as it awaits my mortal soul.

I didn’t miss my flight after all. In fact I still had to kill several hours at the airport so I clearly need to take a more daring risk next time.

The COVID tests were only given an extremely cursory examination. I’m sure I could’ve shown any vaguely official-looking document and been waved through. Oh well, at least I knew I wasn’t going to make anyone ill on the plane or at the conference.

It was a good trip. There isn’t usually much relevant content for me at RailsConf — and so I’ve never been before — but this one was well worth the long journey to see my teammates give talks in person, particularly Maple’s on YARV and Betty & Ashley’s on gem security. They all smashed it and made me feel extremely proud to work with them.

The non-coworker highlight was Andy’s The Mrs Triggs Problem, an audacious follow-up to my seminal… [checks notes]… an excellent polemic about the mistreatment of marginalised people throughout the history of computing.

I did of course eat some amazing vegan food, the best of which was at Blossoming Lotus and Jam on Hawthorne. Thank you Portland.

And so again a whirlwind of travel, jet lag, coffee, and precious time spent with friends who live far away. These adventures are fun but I feel more confused than ever about my life being split between London and Canada.

Case in point: somehow I managed to be out of the country at exactly the right time to miss the BERG reunion. 😞

I’m used to British Airways and Virgin Atlantic so I enjoyed seeing how Delta crew communicate a little differently. All of their announcements refer to turbulence as “rough air” which is a nice choice of words (themselves “complicated airflow”), although during final approach they also say “we’ll be on the ground shortly” and I found that a bit too vague for comfort.

Riding Portland’s light rail gave me the queasy timequake feeling of riding Caltrain from station to unknown station in 1999, past anonymous strip malls and parking lots and all-night convenience stores, completely free and completely lost. Hillsdale, this is Hillsdale.

Oh, speaking of Andy, now I have to start writing my Brighton Ruby talk.